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KNIVES AT DAWN
AMERICA’S QUEST FOR
CULINARY GLORY AT THE LEGENDARY
BOCUSE D’OR COMPETITION
Andrew Friedman
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Free Press
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Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Friedman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friedman, Andrew, 1967–
Knives at dawn : America’s quest for culinary glory at the legendary
Bocuse d’Or competition / Andrew Friedman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cookery—Competitions—Florida—Orlando. 2. Cookery—
Competitions—France—Lyon. 3. Bocuse d’Or, USA (Competition)
(2008: Orlando, Fla.) 4. Bocuse d’Or (Competition) (2009: Lyon,
France) 5. Cooks—United States. I. Bocuse d’Or, USA (Competition)
(2008: Orlando, Fla.) II. Bocuse d’Or (Competition)
(2009: Lyon, France) III. Title.
TX652.F72 2009
641.5—dc22 2009035271
ISBN 978-1-4391-5307-9
ISBN 978-1-4391-5684-1 (ebook)
for David Black
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
“Oui, Chef!”
CHAPTER 2
Knives at Dawn
CHAPTER 3
Three Months in Yountville
CHAPTER 4
Training Season
CHAPTER 5
All the Little Screws
CHAPTER 6
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie
EPILOGUE
NOTES AND REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
ONE OF THE HARSH REALITIES OF EVERY CHEF’S LIFE IS THAT, AT the end of each day, he will be judged.
In many respects this is unfair, because the food in most restaurants, even the most eye-popping, palate-dazzling, wallet-busting cuisine, is more complex than all but the most knowledgeable diners can realize or appreciate. Just about anything served in high-caliber establishments is the product of hours—if not days—of effort, the culmination of the strivings of at least a handful of people, and up to dozens: fish, meats, and produce selected in consultation with farmers, fishermen, and artisans; long-simmered stocks, peeled and shaped vegetables, and minced herbs generated by the unsung morning crew; sauces, condiments, purees, and garnishes fashioned by the cooks themselves in the hours before lunch or dinner
Members of a kitchen brigade bring years of hard-won knowledge to bear every time they strap on an apron. But there’s no telling what might happen in those dizzying, adrenaline-fueled afternoons and evenings when the components of a dish are fired (cooked or reheated), seasoned, and brought together. Much has to go right for success; much less need go awry to qualify as failure. It’s like that old saw about the Central Intelligence Agency: their daily triumphs are unknown; only their miscues draw criticism. Chefs and their colleagues spend every moment of their working lives swinging from one precarious task to the next: a surfeit of salt and a sauce will diminish rather than enhance all that it touches; a minute too little in the sizzle of a sauté pan and a breast of chicken will be worse than imperfect—it will be a health hazard.
And yet, to those who keep chefs in business, none of that matters. From neighborhood eateries to Michelin-ordained destinations, the moment of truth is brutally simple: the final product is presented, a few ounces framed within the confines of a plate or bowl. Fork or spoon is lifted. Food meets palate. Judgment is rendered.
IN LIGHT OF THIS inescapable truth, one might wonder why a chef would throw his toque into the ring of the Bocuse d’Or, the most prestigious cooking competition in the world, and invite the ultimate moment of judgment. In preparation for this literal trial by fire, which has been staged in Lyon, France, every other year since its founding in 1987, candidates devote months and sometimes years to rehearsing an elaborate culinary routine in order to meet the contest’s Everest-like challenge: transform a set of assigned proteins (chef-speak for fish and meats), plus whatever supporting ingredients the chefs like, into intricate, impeccably cooked compositions in five and a half grueling hours. Just before time is up, they arrange their creations on two enormous platters—one showcasing their fish and shellfish handiwork, the other their mastery of meat. An international panel of judges scores the visual presentations, then the chefs plate the food and the jury digs in for the most important evaluation: taste. There are no elimination rounds, no time to ease into the rigors of competition: the candidates get one shot to cook and present their creations, and the judges who determine their fate have roughly five minutes to taste and consider it. In the Bocuse d’Or’s current form, twenty-four teams (each comprising a chef and a commis, or assistant) compete; the only thing they know for certain when they begin is that three of them will emerge with precious medals, while the others will slink home empty-handed.
Despite those odds, the Bocuse d’Or draws professionals, many from top kitchens who already toil in pressure-cooker environments, subsist on precious little sleep, and subject themselves to dozens, even hundreds, of verdicts every working day. Any number of clichés may explain the appeal of the Bocuse d’Or: Chefs love a challenge! Chefs are competitive! Chefs are masochists! All are appealing, but none fits the entire field. Just as people get into cooking for different reasons, there’s no single motive for pursuing this culinary Holy Grail.
Candidates are philosophically unified, however, when they come out on the other side. “I learned a lot about myself” is perhaps the most common sentence uttered by those who have vied for the Bocuse d’Or when asked to evaluate their experience. This doesn’t surprise Roland Henin, who coached Team USA at the 2009 edition. “Competition doesn’t form character,” Henin is fond of saying. “Competition reveals character.”
An American team has competed at every Bocuse d’Or, but the United States has not yet reached the elusive podium where gold, silver, and bronze medalists are bathed in a light storm of glitter and flashbulbs. In 2008, a triumvirate of culinary figures—Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jérôme Bocuse—raised unprecedented support and awareness for the American enterprise. This is their story, and the story of the team that competed for the United States at the 2009 Bocuse d’Or: what they did, how they did it, and what they learned.
TIMOTHY HOLLINGSWORTH, CHEF DE cuisine at Thomas Keller’s landmark restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, calls the highest state of kitchen being The Dance. It’s a phrase he learned f
rom Keller himself, described in the restaurant’s employee manual as “the way each of us interacts with the other … crucial in the flow of a great kitchen.”
The Dance, as Hollingsworth interprets it, can take many forms: there’s the synchronicity of a kitchen brigade firing on all cylinders, the cooks complementing—if not actually completing—each other’s tasks: picking up food, plating food, sometimes even cooking food for the person next to them; it can, and should, look like a naturally occurring phenomenon, but is achieved only with great and sustained effort.
There’s also an individual Dance, in which a cook experiences the exhilaration of peak performance, operating on pure instinct, all of his senses integrated seemingly without the middleman of a brain: preparations are stirred, sniffed, adjusted, tossed, approved, plated, and then forgotten as he undertakes the next order. Hollingsworth likens this iteration of The Dance to the quintessential image of a football running back, the ball clutched tightly to his chest, charging past linesmen, spinning and weaving his way around or through an onslaught of defenders. In movies, that moment is often depicted in slow motion—the way it may feel to the athlete, and the only way for an outsider to fully appreciate its intricacies—but time is actually moving faster, as the running back makes a series of nanosecond decisions and infinitesimal adjustments.
Hollingsworth regularly attains The Dance at The French Laundry. But on January 28, 2009, at the Bocuse d’Or, the most pressure-filled day of his young life, Hollingsworth wasn’t dancing. He moved with assurance, grace even, but any co-worker would recognize that he wasn’t swaying, or ever so slightly swaggering, as he moved from one side of the kitchen to the other, the way he did when he was in the zone. He wasn’t quite lost in his work, wasn’t flowing naturally from one movement to the next. Instead, he seemed to be thinking about the long list of tasks before him, whether alternating avocado and diced-shrimp shingles atop a rectangle of puff pastry or overlaying a sheet of poached cod mousse with pureed scallop roe.
Hollingsworth was cooking in a box—a three by six-meter kitchen, one of a dozen such culinary cubicles erected in a row, like laboratory pods, for the Bocuse d’Or. He and his commis (assistant), Adina Guest, a fellow employee from The French Laundry, were cooking in front of several hundred frenzied spectators and the noise was deafening, the crowd separated into cheering sections for each of the twelve nations competing on this day; the one he couldn’t shut out was the melodic chant of the Spanish contingent—“Olé. Olé. Olé. Olé.”—which he misheard as a taunt meant just for him: “No Way. No Way. No Way. No Way.”
Hollingsworth had managed to contend well enough with all of this until four hours into the five-hour-and-thirty-five-minute marathon. That was about the time that he realized he was in the midst of what he would, by day’s end, describe as the “hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
His fish platter—which would display his cod centerpiece and three elaborately composed garnishes—was due in the window in just a few minutes, whereupon it would be whisked away and paraded before, then tasted by, a dozen judges from around the world; then he’d have thirty-five minutes to get his other platter ready for the twelve chefs charged with appraising the meat dishes.
“Are the custards ready?” he asked Guest.
“No, Chef.”
On the other side of the window, the team’s coach, Roland Henin—in his mid-sixties, a veteran culinary competitor and coach, and mentor of Hollingsworth’s chef, Thomas Keller—looked on, hoping for the best, but keenly aware that the team, which had been looking pretty good up until then, was teetering on the brink between triumph and, if not disaster, at least disappointment.
Hollingsworth stopped for a moment to administer an internal pep talk. The phrase that came to mind had great meaning for him. It was the one he used when he found himself in the weeds at The French Laundry, the one that had spurred him to success on any number of previous occasions. But he didn’t think about the past. He didn’t think about anything, really. He just said to himself, instinctively, “Okay, Tim, let’s go.”
1
“Oui, Chef!”
It is better to begin in the evening than not at all.
—ENGLISH PROVERB
THOMAS KELLER JOKED THAT, BECAUSE HIS FRENCH WAS RUSTY, when the legendary chef Paul Bocuse rang him up at Per Se restaurant in New York City in March 2008, and asked him to become president of Bocuse d’Or USA, he didn’t quite understand. “Was he inviting me to Lyon to work in his restaurant?” Keller deadpanned. “Was he inviting me to dinner?”
Keller—age fifty-two at the time, and the only American-born chef operating two three-star Michelin restaurants—stands a lanky six feet two inches tall and speaks with the kind of homespun modesty you’d more expect from the proprietor of a general store than one of the supreme culinary talents of his generation. He paused for laughter before delivering the punch line: “I wasn’t really sure, but I knew what to say: ‘Oui, Chef.’ ”
The audience, a congregation of fellow whisks and industry insiders, erupted in laughter. They recognized the truth at the heart of the anecdote: chefs live a hierarchical existence. Even if you attain the status of a Thomas Keller, there will be an elder you revere and to whom you would simply never say no. “When a chef of that stature asks me to do something it is automatically yes,” said Keller. “There isn’t any question about it.”
Keller and his audience were assembled on a sauna of a September night in the American Adventure Parlor, a reception room done up in eighteenth-century décor at the American Pavilion of Walt Disney World Resort’s Epcot theme park near Orlando, Florida. The American Pavilion was situated in the World Showcase area of Epcot, where eleven countries are represented via pavilions (self-contained clusters of attractions, shops, and restaurants) arranged around a central lagoon. Across the lagoon stood the World Showplace, an enormous event space where the next morning, Friday, September 26, four two-person teams, each comprising a chef and a commis (assistant), would begin competing for the right to represent the United States at the next Bocuse d’Or in Lyon, France, in January 2009.
At the outset of the year, Keller could not have imagined that he would be standing in that room, let alone be there as the president of the Bocuse d’Or USA, the organization that coordinates the biennial search for a candidate to represent the United States at the world’s most prestigious cooking competition. Nor could Daniel Boulud, the irrepressible French-born impresario behind Daniel, Café Boulud, and other restaurants from New York to Beijing, have foreseen that he’d be on board as chairman. As Keller spoke, Boulud roamed the crowd, attired in a suit and no tie, shaking hands with sponsors, waving to friends and colleagues, and grinning an effusive smile beneath his always perfectly coiffed hair.
Neither Keller nor Boulud had ever paid much attention to the Bocuse d’Or, or to cooking competitions in general. Oh, sure, Boulud had been a guest judge on Top Chef, the Bravo network’s popular cooking competition program on which unknown or aspiring chefs go head to head in pursuit of a cash prize. And they both knew of other competition shows such as the Food Network’s Iron Chef, not that either of them had ever deigned to appear on them.
But another species of cooking competition, the most well-known being the Internationale Kochkunstausstellung (informally and unofficially dubbed the International Culinary Olympics) in Germany, predates these sensationalist programs. Generally speaking, these competitions are celebrations of craft rather than springboards to fame and fortune. By and large, their participants find that they have tremendous application to their vocation. In the Guide to Culinary Competitions: Cooking to Win!, Certified Master Chef Edward G. Leonard writes that “Chefs who can step into the highly charged culinary competition arena with all eyes upon them and perform at their best in unfamiliar circumstances deserve our commendation. Moreover, chefs who compete perform very well in their own kitchens, bringing much to the table in the form of new concepts and ideas.”
Hartmut Handke, the Colu
mbus, Ohio–based chef who represented the United States at the Bocuse d’Or in 2003, placing sixth, agrees. “When you do well in a competition, first of all it teaches you discipline and it makes you a better chef,” he said. “And if you [compete] a lot I think it’s eventually reflected in your everyday work in your own restaurant or in your place where you work … it [also] builds confidence.”
Richard Rosendale, then chef-owner of Rosendale’s (also in Columbus) and a member of two International Culinary Olympics teams, sees even more value in the competition experience. “In my opinion, one year on the Olympic team is the equivalent of five years in the industry,” he said. “In doing the team you have obligations to push yourself and research more and do more and learn more than what you normally would … I’ve competed in Germany three times, Luxembourg twice, Basel, Switzerland, twice, and all over the United States. Seeing these other countries and the food they’re putting up really makes you open up your mind and see food a little differently. There’s no boundaries.” Roland Henin, the French-born certified master chef who was set to coach Team USA for the 2009 Bocuse d’Or, and had coached the US Culinary Olympics team, echoes this sentiment, declaring that four years on the Olympics team “are the equivalent of ten or twelve years of life work.”
In addition to the International Culinary Olympics, there are other regional and national competitions all over the world that take many forms. Some focus on hot food cooked restaurant style. Others concentrate on classic cuisine and fundamental, sometimes antiquated, techniques: ice sculpting, ornate platter service, and cold food competitions devoted to butchery, slicing, and basic knife skills. (The International Culinary Olympics combines the two formats.) In the cold food arena, the product itself is often evaluated mostly, if not exclusively, on its appearance, such as how perfectly a terrine is composed and even sliced, rather than on its taste. (One reason for this is that the food is typically prepared ahead of time, chilled, and preserved under gelatin or aspic.) These contests are an ingrained part of the culinary culture in many European countries, but you won’t see them televised or covered in newspapers or blogs in the United States and they rarely, if ever, draw the participation of brand-name chefs.
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