A French Laundry Reservation
Yesterday, I did my taxes and figured out my refund… and this morning, I booked a table at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry for Chad’s birthday in June. Thank you, Turbo Tax! It would have been a shame to live so close to the restaurant and never have the chance to check it out.
I’d read some pretty intense helpful hints to snag a reservation, which should be made 2 months in advance of the day desired, so I enlisted Chad’s help to start re-dialing and re-dialing them at about 9:58am, with contingency plans for the wait list and times available. We signed onto AIM to communicate progress. It turns out that by 10:05am, we both got through to the automated menu and were on hold. Chad dropped off when a person answered my call, and I went on to make the reservation. They offered plenty of times available for that Friday night, and that was that.
So, in two months, I will be taking an embarrassing number of photos of their 9 course tasting menu… and probably a few of Chad being embarrassed. Stay tuned. 
Edit: My grand plan to get a reservation was to try over a course of 3 days and take anything btw Friday dinner to Sunday lunch, but with Saturday dinner as our top choice. Chad tried for Saturday dinner this morning, from 10:00 until 10:40, and only got a busy signal…. So, we were very on lucky to have gotten through on Sunday. Who knows, maybe less people remember to reserve on Sundays….
April 10th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Cool! Congrats on getting in.
It may be worthwhile to look into those tiny table-top tripods for getting good flash-less pictures in low light.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look into that. I think it’s better and less distracting than digging around for my camera every single time a dish comes out, too.
April 11th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Hope you take lots and lots of pictures, I’m sure all the staff are numb to everyone being photo-crazy when they eat there. I know I sure will be!
April 12th, 2006 at 6:13 am
Congrats! A friend of mine and I once spent a day trying to get a reservation at The French Laundry — with no success.[sigh] So we decided to take the “sour grapes” approach.
(actually, we ended up at my favorite Sonoma restaurant, The Girl and the Fig.)
April 14th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Gerald - Yeah, and from what I hear, the staff is supposed to be super-friendly, so I’m going to snap away. Are you aiming to work there?
kevin - I’m still a bit amazed by our luck. I had contingency plans of putting ourselves on wait lists for every weekend until we finally got a table! But, since they charge $100/person for a cancelled reservation within three days of the reserved date, I don’t imagine they get too many cancellations.
And The Girl and the Fig is high on my list of places to try. I’m going to try to get there for lunch next weekend.
May 13th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
[...] Cyrus - Healdsburg Quite a few reviews that I’ve read compare Cyrus favorably with The French Laundry, so given my imminent visit to the French Laundry, I though I’d go check out this Cyrus upstart. [...]