Philo’s Sally Schmitt, Trend-Setting Restaurateur, Dies at 90

Sally Schmitt, who with her husband, Don, opened the French Laundry, the now famous restaurant in the Napa Valley of California, in 1978, and in doing so helped solidify the valley as a food-and-wine destination and start a culinary movement built on seasonal local ingredients, died on Saturday at her home in Philo, Calif. She was 90.

Her family announced her death, which came just weeks before publication of her memoir and cookbook, “Six California Kitchens: A Collection of Recipes, Stories, and Cooking Lessons From a Pioneer of California Cuisine.”

Today the French Laundry, in Yountville, Calif., is renowned as the flagship establishment of the chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller and turns up routinely on lists of the best restaurants in the country and the world. But as Mr. Keller, who bought the restaurant from the Schmitts in 1994, is always quick to point out, the Schmitts, and especially Sally Schmitt’s cooking, started it all.

“Kind and generous, forthright, and unpretentious,” he wrote in the foreword to her forthcoming book. “A culinary pioneer but also a throwback, preparing dishes that evoked the most delicious versions of your favorite childhood meals. That is the Sally we all came to know.”

The Schmitts arrived in Yountville, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, in 1967 to manage a shopping arcade, and soon Sally had taken over a hamburger-and-sandwich place there. Four years later she opened the more ambitious Chutney Kitchen, which served lunch and, once a month by reservation only, dinner. Soon the dinners were twice a month, and she added theme dinners and more.

The couple had noticed a local stone building that had once been a French steam laundry (as well as a bar and a boardinghouse), and when it came up for sale they bought it.

“The building was so crude, so clearly humble,” Ms. Schmitt told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “There was not one good piece of hardware or woodwork or molding to keep. There wasn’t — there isn’t — a single straight line in the whole building.”

The restaurant they opened there in February 1978 also had its own personality. With Mr. Schmitt curating an extensive wine menu, Ms. Schmitt planned and prepared the meals, one menu each night, built around what was in season locally and in supply. Guests had their table for the evening; they were welcome to linger for three or four hours if they chose.

The area was already known for wine, but the French Laundry and a few other restaurants helped make it a foodie destination as well. By 1980 Ms. Schmitt was noticing a change.

“We now get people up here from San Francisco for dinner,” she told The Napa Valley Register that year, “where the reverse has generally been true.”

Ms. Schmitt was not a culinary-school diva; she often said that her influences were her mother, an aunt and a home economics teacher she had in high school.

“Some things can’t be improved upon, because they’re so basic and so real,” she told The Chronicle. “I resist the trendy stuff. Sometimes even if I like something, I won’t do it until it cools off somewhat.”

With her emphasis on locally sourced ingredients, Ms. Schmitt is viewed as a pioneer in what was eventually known as California cuisine, but she didn’t think of herself in those terms. “French country cooking is what I lean to,” she said in the 1993 interview, “the braised meats, simple things, lots of vegetables, homey desserts rather than pastry-cart desserts.”

Her kitchens tended toward low-tech.

“I’ve always tried to keep it simple,” she wrote in the new book, “which is why I’ve never felt the need to use a food processor or microwave. Instead, I’ve had good sharp knives, pots and pans, a big chopping block, a wooden spoon and a whisk. I’ve always loved to work with my hands. It’s what cooking is all about.”

Her cuisine, she said, wasn’t about taking a philosophical stand.

“I didn’t have a mission,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2020. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything to the world about simple, fresh, local food. It was just the way I cooked. I didn’t really have a statement to make. I just put food on the table.”

Sarah Elizabeth Kelsoe (who was always known as Sally) was born on Feb. 28, 1932, in Roseville, Calif., near Sacramento. Her father, Henry, worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and her mother, Helen, was a homemaker and schoolteacher.

She grew up in the Sacramento Valley, where her family had enough land to grow vegetables and keep a cow; as a child she churned butter and learned canning. And kitchen techniques.

“As soon as I was ready, my mother put a paring knife in my hand, and I peeled potatoes,” she wrote. “And when she thought I was ready for a larger knife, I was cutting vegetables by her side.”

She studied home economics at the University of California, Davis, though she transferred to the university’s Berkeley campus for her final year, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1952.

She married Donald Schmitt in 1953. Her first cooking, she said, was done for their family, which eventually grew to five children.

“Even though I loved cooking, I never thought about going into the food world,” she wrote of that time. “There were no women chefs in those days. Plus, cooks were looked down upon in those days; there was no such thing as a celebrity chef.”

After the Schmitts sold the French Laundry, they joined their daughter Karen Bates and her husband, Tim, at the Apple Farm in Philo, where Sally Schmitt would teach cooking classes.

Ms. Schmitt’s husband died in 2017. She is survived by two sons, Johnny and Eric; three daughters, Kathy Hoffman, Ms. Bates and Terry Schmitt; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

A number of those descendants logged time working at the French Laundry, and some went on to their own culinary careers, including her grandson Perry Hoffman, now a chef at the Boonville Hotel and Restaurant in Northern California. In a telephone interview, he recalled doing various chores from a young age in his grandmother’s kitchen — roasting peppers, peeling onions and more.

“We didn’t really know how special it was until much later,” he said. “She was just so good at everything she did. It was so simple but so complex.”

(nytimes.com)

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Remembering Sally Schmitt

by Brooks Schmitt

In the orchestral movements of my life, my Grandma Sally was the oboe, the reedy and powerful note to which everyone around me tuned their instruments. Though proud, and almost unflappably sure of the right way of doing things, she was incredibly humble for such a public figure. It always surprised me growing up as I discovered the profound effect that she had on so many people’s lives outside of our family. Over the years I became increasingly aware of a larger family who had heard the song that my grandmother played and joined along in the chorus, composed their own variations and etudes, sonatas and symphonies.

Perhaps music isn’t the right metaphor to remember my grandmother, given that the Schmitt family is most profoundly not a musically gifted family. Though we all appreciate and love music, almost none of us can sing, and only one or two of us can even play an instrument. When I think of my Grandma Sally, perhaps rather obviously, I think of the wonderful smells that surrounded her. Vanilla bean pods snapping between her fingers, notes of star anise drifting from a boiling copper vat of apricot chutney, duck legs sizzling in the oven, toasted peppercorns cracking in a mortar and pestle, the smell of her lotion and her shampoo, and the faint aroma of jasmine around her neck.

These smells were so intoxicating that her kitchen was always a gravity well, and every day that she was in the kitchen there was this vague feeling that her kitchen was the center of the universe. It always felt strange to see my grandmother in the outside world, where she couldn’t control the balance of light, the temperature, the allocation of tasks. I would watch her eyes dart around and her mouth hang slightly open in the way that it always did when she was assessing a room and about to give orders, and then see her close her eyes and accept that this was not her domain. That even though she knew exactly where those chairs should go, and that the curtains blocking the morning light should be thrown open and were “just awful” as she would say, that this was not her world, her orchestra pit, her little gravity well in an unvarnished little pocket of Northern California.

And maybe that was why she spent so much time in her kitchens. In a world where women do most of the cooking but male chefs get most of the accolades, my grandmother steadily and assuredly transformed every kitchen she inhabited into a living breathing work of art. In her kitchen, I never once saw anyone tell my grandmother what to do. She was a beloved and trusted queen, a culinary Alexander the Great riding bareback at the front of her army, for there were always more worlds to conquer and more apples left to peel in her powerful fingers. Her opinions were unwavering, and everyone fell into line, and most of us have continued to do things the way she told us to for the rest of our lives because, usually, she was right. The world is more beautiful and more fragrant due to all of the wonderful every day tricks that she taught us and that all of us continue to do.

Over the course of my life, I watched my Grandmother slow down, and dismount from her horse. She did it gracefully, albeit reluctantly, and there were times when I would see her basking on her chair in the sun on her porch when I almost believed that leisure came naturally to her. But I knew that wasn’t the case. If her body had allowed it, my grandmother would have continued to cook and garden and reshape the world until long past each of her grandchildren had folded up their aprons and retired.

I see her now in the New York Times, and I can’t help but think of my Grandpa Don, a famously fastidious reader of newspapers, and how proud he was of her. I picture him in his chair, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, smiling faintly as he reads the story of their lives printed in ink and sipping his morning coffee. My grandmother drops a large spoonful of duck fat into an iron pan and cooks their morning eggs, perfectly runny, and waits for him to finish the article to ask him what he thinks. And I know that they were so proud of each other, and that our entire family and extended family of friends, chefs, and guests at the table felt so proud to have had them in our lives, and I find myself so grateful for the life that Sally Schmitt lived.