Famous French Laundry fails to impress against England's stars

Two words are likely to spring to gastronauts' lips when they think about Napa Valley: French Laundry. It was the most frequent question anyone asked when they heard I was going to this part of the world. Would we eat there?

Thanks to the enthusiasm of others in our party and a dedicated trio working multi-media to snag a reservation, we hit the dining big time on the penultimate evening of our wine country visit. A special experience? Absolutely. Value for money? That's a question that very much depends upon your starting perspective.

I refer you back to the caveat with which I started these Northern Californian gastronomic entries. I can only review through the filter of my own experience. When it comes to restaurants, I live in one of the most fine-dining-obsessed countries in the world (if you still think Britain has bad food, you are decades out of date), and I've been been blessed to eat at three of England's four three-Michelin-star restaurants. Given that the French Laundry was the single most expensive restaurant I've ever dined at ... yes, even with variations in the pound, it's more expensive than anything in London ... it was always going to be tough to impress me enough to believe I was getting value for my money.

What you do get, unquestionably, is flawless cuisine, cooked to perfection, presented as tasteful works of art by elegantly deft and highly informed servers. You get a place that's more obsessed by local sourcing than anywhere I've ever been. They send you home with a glossy 48-page booklet that profiles all the purveyors of their raw ingredients. It is a hymn book to the church of American cuisine.

As you wait for your meal, you can wander through the large and fantastically maintained gardens that provide herbs and vegetables. The building itself is out of a design magazine. Historic, but restored like new, covered with rambling white roses. You're welcomed into a tasteful little courtyard with the historic old laundry on one side and the modern kitchen on the other. Gaze through the window at the team of chefs working their magic, or look through another to see the servers striding down the connecting hall carrying their plates of treasure.

Like many of the top restaurants these days, the only choice is the chef's menu, with a vegetarian alternative. That's your $310 starting point (which, fortunately, includes service.) While some popular dishes repeat from one night to another, the restaurant's claim to fame is a constantly changing menu that always reflects what's best that day, and never repeats any single ingredient across its eight courses. The sommelier was unusually flexible. You set a price for a wine flight (they suggest $250), then direct them on your tastes. Our all-Californian request was not a problem. But I sensed you could have gone round the world, or all white, etc. This definitely puts them in a unique category; it's usual for the sommelier to sit down with the menu and assemble one list that works best.

My stand-out dish of the night was a pork jowl that set a new benchmark for the term "melt in the mouth". Evidently they slow cook it for 24 hours. A cucumber, hearts of palm and fennel salad with an avocado puree was a paean to presentation. Beyond the quality of ingredients, the tastes were straightforward ... it was the visual transformation of salad to art that impressed. Their trademark "carrots and peas" was a beautiful crab mousse in a pea pancake with carrot puree; another striking plate visually.

So what was my problem?

First, there are the menu add ons. In most of my experience, once you decide to blow the budget on the chef's menu, you're done. At The French Laundry, the $310 is just the entry menu. Most courses have an alternative, with a supplemental price. $60 for the caviar instead of the oyster. $30 for foie gras rather than salad. (Really? Foie gras is basic table stakes for a European chef's menu.) $125 for truffle mac 'n' cheese rather than that pork jowl, and $100 for wagyu beef rather than lamb. If you went for all the upgrades, your meal would now cost $625. Frankly, I resent the fact that, after making the painful financial commitment to eat there, I then felt I'd been baited-and-switched, the menu suggesting that my initial investment wasn't enough to get the good stuff. (My only upgrade was the caviar.)

I didn't care for the atmosphere, which I thought was excessively formal. The rooms are featureless, all attention on the heavy white linens. There's a dress code, unsurprisingly, with the servers leading the way in their coats and ties. It all feels very old fashioned. So does London's Le Gavroche, but that dining experience is almost a knowing send-up of old fashioned restaurants, enlivened by Michel Roux Jr. popping out of the kitchen to work the room. No Thomas Keller doing the same here. Instead, it all seemed to induce a kind of soporific reverence on the diners. People spoke in hushed tones, if at all. The clink of cutlery outweighed the sounds of humanity. The occasion demanded to be taken seriously; it was not about having fun.

I hated the way dessert ... often my favourite part of the meal ... was presented. After seven lovingly

staged courses, the sweets are dumped on the table all at once. None of the foreplay of pre-desert followed by the climactic main event and the lingering cuddle of the petit fours with coffee. Instead, the servers piled a banquet of treats on the table in a great rush, sending a clear message that we should hurry up and and get that monumental bill. Everything was delicious, but nothing was given a chance to shine.

Most of all, I was surprised by not being surprised. Nothing made me think "my God, the man's a genius ... who would have thought of putting that with this!" (Munich's one-starred Tohru Nakamura runs great circles around Keller on this front.) Aside from that one morsel of pork jowl, there was nothing that stood out as the best example of something ever. No presentation that made me gawp with amazement. No wine pairing so magical that the combination changed and elevated the constituent parts.

If I'd had no background information, and someone else paid the bill, I would have thought The French Laundry was an excellent ... though too full of itself ... one-star to fit comfortably beside places like L'Ortolan or Murano. London's two-star The Ledbury beats its three-starred American cousin decisively. When you put the three-stars against each other, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay impressed more and cost less.  The Fat Duck is far more inventive in every way, and while its prices are roughly the same, there are no surcharges to drive up the final bill and make you feel inferior.

Upon reflection, one British parallel did emerge. I had almost exactly the same experience at the three-starred Waterside Inn. A lovely evening while I was experiencing it, but the more I thought about the bill afterwards, the more resentful I felt about what I got for the money. The big difference? I could run up to Bray today and get Alain Roux's Menu Exceptionnel for £160 ($212), a third less than than the starting point of its Yountville counterpart.

Ultimately, however, those two nights of culinary disappointment were linked by something bigger. Friendship. Thus it's worth ending this entry with the same words I used to close the Waterside Inn story nine years ago:

"And that, I suppose, is why this evening will go down in memory as worth the expenditure. Not because of the meal, but because of the company. I looked around that circle of dear faces at evening's end; everyone relaxed, mellow, suffused with contentment. These are amongst the very few people who know me best, who are there in good times and in bad, who celebrate the victories, support you in disasters and know you well enough to point out and help correct your shortcomings when you're heading down the wrong path. This is actually what life is all about. To me, the biggest victory of my life will not be counting up what's in my bank account as I near death, but toting up the relationships I've had at this level. Having dear friends is the finest reason to celebrate in the world. And while you can usually do that in the local pub, I suppose sometimes it's worth breaking the bank to do it in a place that's as special as the relationships you're commemorating."