I got to the garden just before seven. The sky was still grey and the air was cool and damp. Behind me the chickens were already clucking through their morning rounds. The French Laundry’s three-and-a-half acre garden stretched out ahead of me in long, perfect rows.
I was there to stage for the day.
The building is easy to miss. A two-story stone cottage, set back from the road with no signage. It was built around 1900 by a Scottish stonemason. It opened as a saloon, but by the 1920s it was a French steam laundry run by a man named John Lande. The laundry eventually closed, and in 1978 the town’s mayor Don Schmitt and his wife Sally bought the property and turned it into a restaurant. They ran it for seventeen years, until the early 90s when they were ready to move on.
Around the same time, an unemployed chef from Los Angeles was driving through the Napa Valley looking for a space. Thomas Keller had made a name for himself at Rakel in New York and Checkers in LA, but both were behind him now. When he walked into the courtyard of the old stone building, he knew this was the spot. He has said that it felt like the place he’d been heading toward his whole career. In 1994, he bought it.
What he has built in the three decades since is remarkable: maintaining three Michelin stars, a campus of restaurants fed by the garden, and a standard of hospitality that is the same as when he started. Thomas Keller is a definite optimist. The definite optimist has a concrete vision and builds toward it. Keller knew what he was looking for when he came to the Napa Valley.
The manager of the garden gave me a container and pointed me toward a bed of tiny, burgundy, clover-shaped microgreens. She explained that the restaurant would need exactly 150 of the same size, same color, and same shape with no flaws. I crouched down and started pinching them one by one between my thumb and index finger. At first, they all looked the same. But after ten minutes I was learning to see the one that’s a shade too pale, or the slight curl at the edge of a leaf.
The extremely tedious first hour was already exhausting, and there were three more beds to go.
What started as a half-formed impulse — a fascination I had since I was young, became a few cold emails, became this moment. I wanted to see what excellence looked from the inside of a place where that standard had been maintained for thirty years.
March is one of the busiest months. Planting and harvesting overlap, and the garden has to feed not just The French Laundry but Bouchon, Ad Hoc, and the other restaurants Thomas Keller runs in Yountville. The garden manager, who I spent the day with, knew about almost everything. Why things grew the way they did, why one variety was here and another was there. She had this understanding that was only possible from years of showing up to this same little piece of Earth and observing through the seasons.
In everything we did, she emphasized: anything we can do to make it easier for the chefs, we must do. The garden team serves the kitchen, and the kitchen serves the guest, and every tiny act of care in the chain compounds.
In the afternoon, the whole team stopped and walked across the street to the restaurant for family lunch. The French Laundry’s chefs (the same people preparing that evening’s $400 nine-course tasting menu) had cooked a full meal for the entire staff, as they do every day.
In the kitchen, hanging on the wall, I noticed a sign that said: Sense of Urgency. It struck me as a contradiction in a place like this… a three Michelin star restaurant where a single meal can last three hours and every element on the plate looks like it was placed with tweezers. You’d expect the ethos to be slowness, patience, and one thing at a time but what I’d seen all morning was the opposite - focused and disciplined speed. Nobody was rushing, but no one wasting time. When Keller was a young cook, he worked with urgency so he could finish his station and have fifteen minutes to learn from what the person beside him was doing.
There is a good story from early in Thomas’s career when he was asked to butcher rabbits for the first time. His first solo attempt was a disaster. The rabbit screamed and broke its leg in the struggle, but because of how terrible this experience was, he vowed to never squander them. He would use everything he had as a chef to make sure, when cooked, they were beautiful.
The lesson was that by being physically close to the process and understanding the story behind it, you have more respect for the ingredients. It’s why the garden is directly across the street. Proximity to the origin of a thing is what produces care.
What I believe separates him from most people who are good at what they do is his distinction of desire over passion. Passion is something we overemphasize, he says. It ebbs and flows. What matters more is constant and unwavering desire. To quote:
“If you have a constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.” — Thomas Keller
For the longest time, I’ve been fascinated by the restaurants that hold three Michelin stars. What it takes to maintain that standard without interruption, year after year. Passion is what may have led me to the garden and to get through the first hour, but desire is what keeps the team there every single day.
Desire is the force behind every great business. At TBPN, the thing John and Jordi repeated was: how can we be one percent better today? It’s simple, and widely said, but rarely done because of the raw discipline it requires. The first ever episode of the show looks nothing like today, but the distance between them was covered in small, daily steps. As a team, we could feel when the show was great. We also knew what needed to change, and it would happen the next day.
What I’ve learned is that it takes an almost obsessive desire to build something that lasts. And what that desire produces, when it compounds over thirty years, is something that can only be described as magic. Like a great piece of music, or the way a room is designed, or a work of art - it is something you can feel.
There’s a Japanese concept called tezukuri. It means the trace of the hand, or the difference between something that was made and something that was manufactured. Brunello Cucinelli once similarly said he wanted his product “to convey the culture, life, lifestyle, dignity of work.”
Tezukuri shows up in every touchpoint with a brand.
But care at this level is a daily act.
The default state of everything is decline; for restaurants, companies, relationships and the universe. What we experience as magic is someone’s refusal to accept entropy. John Collison put a similar idea well in an old tweet:
For most of human history, there was no distinction between technology and art. The people who built cathedrals were engineers and artists at once, and it would have seemed strange to separate the two. That separation is a recent invention, and I think it has cost us something.
When technology is treated as pure utility, the market is ruthless. Convenience wins and nobody cares how the thing gets done as long as it gets done. Products built this way can be enormous, but they are rarely loved.
The enduring products are built with desire.
Patrick and John Collison are, to me, some of the most compelling founders of this generation in how they’ve built Stripe. It feels like an expression of themselves and they may as well have been poets and painters if the internet wasn’t the medium of their era.
They grew up in Dromineer, a village in Ireland with a population of about seventy. They started Stripe in 2010, as teenagers, with a thesis that accepting payments online should be as simple as adding a few lines of code. Stripe is now worth $159B and processed $1.9T of payments last year, but that’s just a piece of John and Patrick’s story.
I visited their San Francisco office earlier last month. In the lobby, sat a few mint condition Fortune magazines from the 1930s on the coffee table. Patrick has said that readers should be far more biased toward older books than they typically are. The magazines felt like an extension of that instinct, the same curatorial sensibility that runs through Stripe Press, their in-house publishing imprint. Stripe Press publishes only hardcovers under strict design constraints that vary from book to book. It exists because the Collisons believe ideas about progress and technology deserve beautiful, physical form. Earlier last year, they launched a podcast fittingly called A Cheeky Pint, recorded in an Ireland-inspired pub they built inside the office. Of these many side quests, there is no diversion from simplicity.
These aren’t side projects though. Calling them so would imply they received less care. These are driven by the same desire that built Stripe itself, the same way Keller’s garden and bistro and bakery are driven by the same instinct that built The French Laundry. Everything they touch is with intentionality. The underlying commitment runs deeper than any single entity. John and Patrick built one thing extraordinarily well, and everything else they’ve touched carries that same standard.
Patrick believes that people gravitate toward beautiful things because beauty signals that the maker cares, and caring about the surface details you can observe is a reliable indicator of caring about the deeper infrastructure you cannot.
Adam Neumann, on Rick Rubin’s podcast: “The success [of WeWork] was accumulation of every single thing that I did leading to that. It’s the childhood. It’s the challenges... It’s the kibbutz. It’s my friend who teaches me about America and about culture and about movies and about all these beautiful things that inspire me.”
The same for John and Jordi at TBPN. Jordi has said that it felt like they started working on TBPN a decade ago. I would agree that this was clear the first day I met them, that everything they had done separately before was pointing to this show.
The point I am getting at is that one’s life’s work is built through a series of many small things. The best founders I’ve met are students of the world. They consume old books, obscure music, art, food, history, architecture. All of the things that make life rich. They appreciate beauty. And it is through a lifetime of paying attention to it that they calibrate an internal sense for what excellence looks like.
This brings me back to something Will Manidis, the flâneur and essayist, wrote recently. He said that taste, as it should be understood, is not about sitting “at the end of the chain of creation, evaluating what has already been generated” but it is about being at the beginning, participating in the creation itself. The best founders absorb it, for years, and then it comes out in what they build.
We live in a culture that treats everything as an optimization problem. Increasingly what we see online is machine-generated. Things that are just good enough have become the default. The texture of the handmade and the considered is becoming rarer. The issue, I think, is that care takes time and time is the thing we’ve stopped being willing to give.
But tomorrow morning at seven, the French Laundry team will be back picking the same microgreens, harvesting the same crops, washing the same concrete. And through these small tedious things, someone sitting at a table that evening will look down at their plate and see a single, perfect clover, and it will bring a smile to their face.
They may never see the garden, or the team, or the years of desire and repetition that made that moment possible. But they will feel it.
Ultimately, you cannot fake a garden. You cannot charm a seed into growing faster and you cannot talk your way out of a late frost. The soil does not care who you are, what your vision is, or how much passion you have. It only responds to the work you are willing to put into it, day after day after day.
Thanks to Adam and Dylan for reading drafts of this.