Claim to fame: Sally Schmitt co-founded The French Laundry with husband Don Schmitt in Yountville, near Napa, in 1978. At first, it was just another venture in a long career of food-related ventures for the Schmitts. “This was the dream,” Don told the Napa Valley Register upon the restaurant’s opening that February. “Our kids told us we’d retire to smaller and better things.”
In time, the restaurant became so much more, helping to pioneer Northern California’s farm-to-table movement. And Sally Schmitt played no small part in it, a regular presence at her restaurant according to a piece written by chef Cindy Pawlcyn.
“What she did, what she achieved made her important to me and so many others,” Pawlcyn wrote, according to Schmitt’s obituary in the Napa Valley Register when she died at 90 in 2022. “She did the impossible ahead of her time and on her own terms.”
California connection: Schmitt was born in Roseville in 1932 to parents Robert and Helen Kelsoe, who’d gone to high school there and married in 1928.
Schmitt’s Wikipedia page says she grew up on a farm; her maternal grandfather was a grain farmer named William Francis Conroy, who died in 1922. Schmitt’s father, meanwhile, was associated for 50 years with one of the major businesses in the Roseville area, the Pacific Fruit Express, according to his obituary in the Roseville Press-Tribune in 1978.
After childhood, Schmitt attended UC Davis and UC Berkeley, earning a degree from the latter. She married Don one year after graduation.
Dining and Cooking