Soul Kitchen

He emerged from the CIA program as a "real" chef and a more focused writer.

"What I realized after completing the program was how many food writers had no basis for what they were writing about. They didn't really know the basics of cooking, and so they were missing out on all the great stories."

Before long, Ruhlman was delivering the great stories in national publications such as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food Arts, and piecing together a plan of attack for a second book about chefs and cooking that would ultimately become his best-known work to date.

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By the summer of 1997, Ruhlman's creative juices were flowing, but his finances were still a mess. As he waited for The Making of a Chef to come out and tried to interest a publisher in a new proposal, the newly minted chef supported his family by taking a job as a line cook in the kitchen of Sans Souci, a top-rated Mediterranean restaurant in downtown's Renaissance Cleveland Hotel. "Those days were just nerve-racking," Ruhlman says. "I was very depressed about how hard [writing] was and how little money I was getting for it, and how I was going to make this writing thing work."

At the same time as he was toiling in the hotel kitchen, Ruhlman decided to introduce himself to Susie Heller, a well-connected culinarian who owned a restaurant and catering business in Chagrin Falls called Stix. He was stunned to discover that Heller was immersed in a mouthwatering project of her own.

"We talked a little about what I was up to and where I was headed," he later wrote, "and she said these words, words that had that soprano lilt of hers . . . but that sounded in my ears like a kettledrum: 'I'm doing a book with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, and we're looking for a writer.'"

What they had envisioned was an opus that would be as much about Keller's extraordinary artistry as it was about recipes, one that expressed his philosophy as much as it captured his cooking style, and they were searching for an accomplished author to pen it. Ruhlman couldn't believe his timing.

"I don't think I actually stood on the seat and waved my arms, but I do recall that to my surprise, my hand had risen involuntarily into the air," he later wrote. "'Hello, call on me! Here I am! Exactly what you're looking for!'"

By December 1997, The Making of a Chef hit bookshelves, Penguin Books bought Ruhlman's latest proposal (for an insider's look at the pursuit of culinary perfection, which would become The Soul of a Chef), and The French Laundry Cookbook got the go-ahead from Heller and Keller. Ruhlman set off for Napa Valley, where he spent three intensive weeks living in Keller's home, shadowing him in the restaurant, and attempting to capture the nuances of the man's inimitable genius. "Providence had intervened and carried me aloft clear across the continent," he wrote of the experience. "This was it. I was here. I'd penetrated to the very core of the profession."

Published in 1999, The French Laundry Cookbook -- huge, artful, and beautifully photographed -- went on to win national kudos as one of the most dazzling and insightful celebrity-chef cookbooks ever. It sold more than 300,000 copies, "an extraordinary number for a $50 coffee-table cookbook with impossible recipes," Ruhlman says. And as word of its importance spread, so did Ruhlman's reputation.

"It was truly amazing. It hadn't been more than four or five months since I finished writing The Making of a Chef, and suddenly, I'm going out to write about the best restaurant in the country. It was just a gift from God -- divine intervention, as far as I'm concerned."

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With the success of The French Laundry Cookbook -- and his indelible connection to Keller -- Ruhlman was becoming a commodity among celebrity chefs. When Tony Bourdain -- executive chef at N.Y.C.'s Brasserie Les Halles, television personality, and tattletale author of Kitchen Confidential -- needed help with a project, the iconoclastic culinarian looked to Cleveland.

"Bourdain had reviewed [The] Soul of a Chef for The New York Times and liked it," Ruhlman recalls, "so I wrote him an e-mail, and then he wrote me back, and then, when he wanted to get his show [2000's A Cook's Tour] into the French Laundry, he gave me a call.

"He said, 'If you help me get in there, I'll fly you out to California and we can have dinner.' So that's how it happened, and we became friends."

Ruhlman's relationship with Bourdain continues to be a source of amusement and amazement. "He's a goddamn freak of nature," Ruhlman says, shaking his head and laughing. "He's so entertaining." Just last fall, the author joined Bourdain on a Las Vegas episode of the chef's new Travel Channel show, No Reservations. Together, they ducked into a dive bar to guzzle "ass juice" with the locals, engaged in a fearsome paintball battle for Cleveland's honor, and almost incidentally evaluated the fare at several high-profile Vegas restaurants.