Thomas Keller: In the beginning, when Don and Sally Schmitt had the restaurant, there was one menu. It was in the era of Chez Panisse, you know. The French Laundry was open almost at the same time that Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse. So it was one menu every day. It changed, whatever the seasons brought, whatever the vegetables were. It was a four-course menu that changed every day. So when I was doing my research and asking people in the Valley what they thought about The French Laundry, they all loved it. It had been here for a long time. It had become part of the fabric of restaurants in Napa Valley, and certainly of Yountville. And one thing they said, “It’s not open enough.” They were only open four days. “And there’s no choices on the menu, so it’s a problem for us.” So I thought, “Well, when I open The French Laundry, we’ll extend hours of operation and we’ll offer choices in each category. We’ll offer a four-course menu and a five-course menu.” So we started out with a menu that had up to seven or eight choices in each category. So we were producing — if it was five, we were producing 40 items, 40, 45 items a day. And that became part of our — and it changed, not every day. We changed every day. Not everything changed every day, but the menu changed every day. It was part of our culture, part of our philosophy, part of the philosophy that we had embraced from Don and Sally Schmitt. As time went on and we became more and more popular, we realized that we wanted to add a tasting menu. So we added a vegetable menu, which was seven courses, and we added a tasting menu, which was nine courses. So now we increased our production from 40 items to 60 items. It was a daunting task for us every day to produce this menu. And as time went on we realized that we started selling more and more tasting menus. And so in conversations with the dining room, the course of a person’s experience there was they would come in and they would ask — they finally got into The French Laundry, it was a great — it was a wonderful moment for them. They didn’t want to make the wrong choice, so they would ask the captain, “So, what should I eat tonight?” “Well, we have this and we have this.” And so 80 percent of the guests were choosing the tasting menu. So it just became a natural evolution for us to do away with the five-course menu because 80 percent of our guests were choosing the nine courses, and 20 percent were choosing the 40 others. So for us we just started to focus on the tasting menu, and it became the two tasting menus, the vegetable and the menus with the proteins.