The eatery is a perennial winner in the yearly Restaurant Magazine listing of the Top 50 Restaurants of the Planet. He’s the sole American chef to have been given coincident three star Michelin evaluations for two distinct eateries.
Following the success of The French Laundry, Thomas and his brother, Joseph Keller (now owner/chef of Josef’s in Las Vegas), started Bouchon in 1998. Found down the road In The French Laundry, it serves reasonably priced French bistro cuisine, with Bouchon Bakery opening next door a number of years afterwards (in 2006 Keller started a division of the bakery in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan). Keller has joked before the motivation for Bouchon’s launch was to give him somewhere to eat after work in The French Laundry. On January 26, 2004, Keller started his restaurant Bouchon in Vegas. On February 16, 2004, Keller’s much hoped-for Per Se restaurant opened in the Time Warner Center complex in Nyc beneath the helm of Keller’s Chef de Cuisine, Jonathan Benno. Per Se, that has been designed from scratch and custom built within the entire building process, was an instant success on the Nyc restaurant scene, with bookings booked months ahead of time and publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times giving rave reviews. The most recent eatery, “ad hoc”, opened in September 2006 in Yountville using a distinct fixed price comfort food dinner served family style nightly. Initially designed to be a short-term job while Keller planned his lifelong vision eatery for the place, serving burgers and wine, he chose to make ad hoc long-term and find a fresh place for the burger eatery because of the overwhelming popularity.