The Famous Chef Who Made The Namesake Dish In Ratatouille So Iconic
It's the climactic scene of the animated movie "Ratatouille" and one likely quite familiar to restaurant owners and chefs around the world: A restaurant critic named Anton Ego asks the new chef at Gusteau's, Alfredo Linguini, to make him something off the menu. Remy, the rat-turned-chef who is the film's protagonist and the one secretly guiding Linguini to culinary success, decides to make the movie's eponymous dish. The critic and others in the film are dubious, with a fellow chef calling it a "peasant dish." So how did the animators at Pixar come up with a version of the dish that would not only impress "Ratatouille's" fictional critic, but the movie's audience as well? They turned to Thomas Keller, the only restaurateur in the United States with two restaurants on Michelin's list of three-star restaurants, The French Laundry in California and Per Se in New York City.
Keller worked with the 2007 film's production crew as a culinary consultant. The celebrity chef invited the film's San Francisco-area crew to visit The French Laundry, where he gave the crew cooking lessons, allowed them to observe the kitchen, and recommended French restaurants for them to visit in Paris (via the Associated Press). He even voiced a character in the film, a restaurant patron.
Thomas Keller crafted an elevated version of a classic
The Academy Award-winning film's producer, Brad Lewis, challenged Thomas Keller to come up with an elegant version of ratatouille, the late-summer dish combining tomatoes, eggplant, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, garlic and herbs, often served as an appetizer. Chef Marc Murphy recommends ratatouille as an essential for learning French cooking, but mostly because cutting up all those vegetables helps teach knife skills. To turn the peasant dish into something that would literally send the critic's eyes popping, Keller adapted a version of a dish created by Parisian chef Michel Guerard, confit byaldi, for which the vegetables are sliced paper thin. Keller stacked the vegetables into a sculptural sensation with two different sauces. Unsurprisingly, the dish was a hit both on and off-screen.
The technicolor dish may not have been the only way Keller was represented on screen. Chef Zakary Pelaccio, a former member of The French Laundry's kitchen staff, told Grub Street that Remy, the rat voiced by comedian Patton Owalt, had much of Keller's work ethic. "The way Remy slices the ingredients, the way each is considered and handled as if it matters as much as the dish as a whole — that's Keller."
Unfortunately, you're unlikely to see either Keller or Remy's knife skills up close. But you can get close to that unique experience at Le Petit Chef. At more than 85 locations around the world, the restaurant projects images of a tiny French-accented animated chef onto every plate using 3D projection technology. The one thing they don't have on the menu? Ratatouille.