French Laundry opens garden gates for immersive culinary tours
The French Laundry is preparing for the second season of its annual Culinary Garden Tours, beginning this month. These small group, guided experiences offer guests a closer look at the relationship between the garden and Chef Thomas Keller’s Yountville restaurants. Running through September, the tours provide an opportunity to observe the seasonal changes in the garden, which inform The French Laundry’s daily menus.
Each 75-minute tour begins with a welcome at the garden gate. Designed as an immersive sensory experience, guests can pick strawberries or oxalis and learn about its history. Visitors will see the carefully kept beds, where estate gardener James Costello and farm manager Teresa Kao’s team focus on cultivating a diverse range of crops in smaller amounts. This “little bit of a lot” approach ensures a continually changing selection of ingredients for the kitchen.
During the spring, the garden acts as a pantry, providing sugar snap and snow peas, young carrots and turnips, Swiss chard and early spring brassicas. Guests may also notice asparagus during its short season. Chef de Cuisine Ara Jo and the culinary team work with the gardening team to select ingredients for the menu—sometimes using experimental or lesser-known varieties—to respond to what’s growing at its best.
Beyond the vegetable beds, the 2026 tour experience has been updated to include new sensory plantings and a look at the restaurants’ beverage programs. Guests will walk through corridors of mint, lemon verbena and rosemary, and discover botanicals like rue, which are grown for cocktail programs in Chef Keller’s Yountville properties. The tour also includes visits to the hoop house for microgreens, the chicken coop and the garden’s European honeybee hives.
Each tour ends with a walk through the woodland garden and a culinary tasting of a seasonal garden sorbet made by Pastry Chef Jamie Houghton. Guests will also receive a small parting gift from the team. Reservations for the Culinary Garden Tours are $100 per person and can be booked through The French Laundry’s Tock reservation platform.
The French Laundry Culinary Garden is located at 6639 Washington St., Yountville, across the street from the French Laundry restaurant.
