Yet the Bocuse d’Or hasn’t become the platform for world cuisine that its founder originally envisioned. After a few years, most competitors, no matter from where they hailed, began cooking in a classic French style, perhaps because in 1987, the first, tone-setting year that the Bocuse d’Or was held, it was won by French candidate Jacky Fréon.
“They saw that France and the people that were cooking a little more traditional had more chance of winning,” said Jérôme Bocuse, who acted as the English-language emcee for the past several Bocuse d’Ors. A number of observers, Thomas Keller among them, have concluded that when you bring together judges from twenty-some countries, the food most will understand is classic French. “I don’t know if a single man can have that knowledge of twenty-three different cuisines and … how they should taste,” said Jérôme Bocuse.
Incidentally, the Bocuse d’Or wasn’t Jacky Fréon’s first time in a cooking competition; he had participated in several others, including the International Culinary Olympics. In 1976.
CONTINUING WITH HIS REMARKS at the American Adventure Parlor, Thomas Keller introduced Gavin Kaysen, “a young man who I just met recently, but who I have enormous respect for, not only for what he did for the Bocuse d’Or in 2007, but for what he has done working for Daniel, because I know how difficult he can be.”
Kaysen, a wisecracking, thirtyish fireplug of a chef with ink-black hair turned up in a wisp, prompting one friend to nickname him Jimmy Neutron, laughed at the joke and gave a little nod to the crowd. But in spite of his good humor, there was nothing lighthearted about this endeavor for him: Kaysen’s eyes were trained on the horizon, at the last week in January, when the United States would learn how it had fared at the Bocuse d’Or for the first time since he had cooked for the Stars and Stripes.
It was Kaysen who initially whetted Boulud’s appetite for the Bocuse d’Or. The two met in 2005, when Kaysen came east from El Bizcocho restaurant at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego, California, to stage (that is, work for a period of time, usually as an unpaid learning/growing opportunity) for Boulud in New York City. Later, whenever he came through town, Kaysen made a point of connecting with Boulud at Daniel, where Kaysen regaled him with tales of his Bocuse d’Or adventure.
Kaysen is a rare bird, a true-blue American restaurant chef who happens to have a passion for the Bocuse d’Or. He all but stumbled into the competition world at age twenty-three when the chef of El Bizcocho asked him to compete in the United States edition of the National Trophy of Cuisine and Pastry.
“I can’t do this because I am French-born,” the chef told him. “You have to be American-born.”
Kaysen didn’t have to think about his answer. “He just handed me this piece of paper and told me to do it and he was my chef so I said ‘yes,’ ” he recalls. In time, though, Kaysen decided that the competition would be “a great opportunity to challenge my creativity and energy.”
Kaysen won the contest, held at Johnson & Wales University, which qualified him for an international competition in Paris. He trained intensely, even flying in experts to help him hone his craft. When he got overseas, his first exposure to the international competition scene was intimidating. He remembers that the captain of the Norwegian culinary Olympic team “looked like Ivan Drago in Rocky 4 … I was terrified. But I knew what I had to do. I had practiced it so many times and I knew what I was up against.”
Kaysen placed third in the event, making him the first American to reach the podium in twenty-six years. (He also took first place for his fish platter.) This is where his Bocuse d’Or commitment began: Acclaimed French chef Pierre Gagnaire approached him and suggested that he compete in the Bocuse d’Or. “I was, like, ‘That’s a good idea,’ ” remembers Kaysen. “And that was it.”
In those days, the Bocuse d’Or USA was under the stewardship of Michel Bouit, a French-born, Chicago-based chef and businessman who had served as executive director from 1991 to 2008. Kaysen enlisted a commis named Brandon Rodgers and the two practiced more than thirty times in their run-up to the American finals. In those days, teams first had to compete in one of three regional semifinals before a competition at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago in May 2006, at which the national team was selected.
Kaysen and Rodgers made it to the finals where, despite their preparation, they were thrown a few curveballs that tested their ability to adjust—the same way restaurant cooks have to do throughout their day, often during service. When the slicing machine they ordered didn’t show up, Kaysen borrowed one from the Hobart booth at the trade show. Then, just before the competition began, an overhead light shattered, raining molten glass down on Kaysen, Rodgers, and their prepared ingredients.
Kaysen, a sports-movie fan and former high school hockey player, turned to his commis and said, “Have you ever seen the movie The Natural?”
“No.”
“It’s this baseball movie and what it comes down to is that at the end of the movie he hits this baseball and it goes so far that it hits these lights and the lights shatter. So, if that is the worst thing to happen to us today, we are going to win. So now we have fifteen minutes to clean up and go.”
They cleaned up what could be cleaned up, replaced what needed to be replaced, and were up and ready again just in time for the official start. They won the event, earning the right to represent the United States in the Bocuse d’Or.
Becoming the American candidate to the world’s most prestigious cooking contest was a gut-check moment for Kaysen. His life for the next eight months had changed dramatically. It wasn’t just that he had to get ready for the competition: Because the Bocuse d’Or had never garnered much attention in the United States, the U.S. team had very little support. So while many European countries buttressed their representatives with the equivalent of more than $1 million, Kaysen had to raise his own money and support, cold-calling potential sponsors and organizing fund-raising dinners in San Diego.
In retrospect, this aspect of his Bocuse d’Or campaign infuriates Kaysen, who points out that in the past, the first query on the questionnaire submitted to U.S. candidate finalists by Bouit was, “How do you plan to secure the funds needed to finance your training and participation in the Bocuse d’Or World Cuisine Contest?” The form went on to indicate that “Past candidates have needed as much as $150,000.” (“I won the competition and was given a check that said ‘minus $200,000,’ “says Kaysen of his selection as the U.S. candidate, adding $50,000 to the estimate. “Dig yourself out.”)
It also rankled Kaysen that, of the $150,000 mentioned in the old application, $15,000 was paid to Bouit as a management fee. In time, Kaysen developed the opinion that, rather than focusing on the financial needs of the candidate, Bouit used the Bocuse d’Or primarily as a wagon to which he could hitch his touring business, The World of MBI, which he runs with his business partner Liz Bergin (also his life partner), every two years. But Kaysen does not speak for everybody: Best-ever U.S. candidate Handke, on hand to act as a judge in Orlando, praised Bouit’s organizational skills, Lyonnaise network, and deep-seated grasp of the ins and outs of the Bocuse d’Or, all of which he found indispensable when he competed. Handke enjoyed fundraising and points with pride to the fact that he helped Bouit round up his biggest posse of spectators. “Naturally, Michel is also a businessman because that is where he makes the money, when he brings a lot of people,” he said.
Despite his growing discomfort with the business structure of the enterprise, Kaysen immersed himself in his preparation, engaging in more than fifty full practice sessions of more than five hours each. The attention to detail was staggering: in addition to rehearsing the preparation of the food—his platter included a Norwegian halibut torte, a Louisiana chicken pot pie, and a BBQ chicken wing served with butter-poached potato, barbecued baked beans, and a California tomato tuile—the team also packed boxes of ingredients and equipment (in the same way they would have to do in Lyon), stashed them in their cars, and orchestrated the unloading and
unpacking of them.
Kaysen and Rodgers also embarked on two three-week trips to France as part of their training. (One reason for the trips was that the primary meat for 2007 was Poulet de Bresse, a breed of chicken from the Rhône-Alpes region that was essentially unattainable in the United States.) Bouit organized these jaunts, and even though Kaysen continued to resent the expense, he found Bouit, with his Rolodex of contacts in Lyon as big as the Ferris wheel that turns behind the statue of Louis XIV in the town’s central Place Bellecour, invaluable overseas.
The trips were both productive and enchanting: when the coach that Bouit enlisted for the team proclaimed their ballotine (roll) of chicken not good enough, Bouit arranged for the team to spend a full day at Le Porcelet Rose (The Red Pig) outside of Paris. They spent hours making ballotines and videotaping the seasoned cooks making ballotines, picking up tricks for keeping the chicken intact and a methodology for adjusting the recipe based on the weight of the individual bird. At the end of the long day, they had a bottle of Champagne and ate a ballotine in the kitchen. Bouit also arranged a dinner for Kaysen and Rodgers in another kitchen, at Restaurant Paul Bocuse, and Kaysen retains a unique souvenir of the evening, one of the restaurant’s spoons. (Kaysen has a technically criminal but ultimately harmless pastime—pilfering spoons from as many restaurants as possible; they are collected at home in a drawer, or mounted and framed in his living room.)
On the day of the competition in January 2007, for the first time all week, it snowed. At four-thirty in the morning, Kaysen—aided by his food and beverage director from the hotel, his father, his brother, and a friend—rode to the competition site with Rodgers in the same passenger bus that had been transporting Bouit’s spectators around town. In the dark, nearly empty behemoth of a vehicle, with the Dave Matthews Band jamming on his headphones, Kaysen watched the white particles trickle down from the heavens, and steeled himself for the hours ahead.
Kaysen remembers the competition itself as “intense.” As seems to be the case for just about everybody who’s ever cooked in the Bocuse d’Or, he was struck by the crowd’s decibel-level, especially the different noise-makers many teams’ supporters brought along to demonstrate their enthusiasm. His kitchen was near the Swiss team’s, and their fan base banged on cowbells for the last several hours of the contest. The noise and the stress produced some minor missteps: for all their planning, Kaysen and Rodgers were always ahead of schedule, and they forgot to stay hydrated by drinking water frequently or to pop the energy bars they’d brought along into their mouths.
Team USA was also dealt a devastating blow at the last moment. When the time came to prepare the plates that would be paraded before the judges, Kaysen couldn’t find the sheet pan that held his chicken wings.
“It’s on my cutting board,” said Rodgers, but Kaysen still couldn’t find it. He asked the commis from the Institut Paul Bocuse if he knew where they were. (The Institut Paul Bocuse provides an extra commis to each team, somebody to help them with rudimentary tasks.) The commis said, “I ate them.” He claimed to have mistaken them for garbage, but Kaysen privately wondered if it was sabotage.
“I wanted to stab him in the face,” Kaysen said. “[But] at that point there [was] nothing I can do.”
Kaysen called over Jérôme Bocuse (a stranger to him at that time), who acted as the English-language emcee through 2007 and also represented the Bocuse name at the event, but was told that nothing could be done.
When the winners were announced, Kaysen and Rodgers ended up placing fourteenth. The chef was crushed. “I felt like someone ripped my heart out of my chest,” he said.
Rodgers, too, was in a state of disbelief. All that work, and they had the least successful result of any American team. Kaysen’s only consolation was that the lack of attention the United States effort received would ensure that nobody noticed their failure. “Whether we got first or fourteenth, nobody would have paid attention to it in the U.S.,” he said.
For Boulud, who had heard all these stories, supporting the Bocuse d’Or wasn’t just an opportunity to pay homage to Paul Bocuse; it was also a way he could belatedly support something important to Kaysen, who in the intervening years had come on board as chef de cuisine of Café Boulud in New York City. Kaysen enjoys a unique relationship with the French superstar; unlike many young chefs who put on airs in hopes of currying favor or merely gaining acceptance, Kaysen was intense and irreverent. “My grandfather always told me to be myself with everybody,” said Kaysen, who possesses enough confidence to have flourished under that advice. With Boulud, Kaysen’s natural persona made quite an impact: “I found Gavin very cute and very young and enthusiastic, very driven, and yet I wish at the time I could have done more for him,” said the chef.
Kaysen wished others could have done more for him, too. Minutes after learning his result, his resentment at the lack of financial support for Team USA boiled over. How much more could he have achieved if only he hadn’t had to worry about the money as well as the food? How much mental focus could have been preserved and redirected? Standing there in the competition hall, he fumed to his friend Eric Brandt, managing partner of Brandt Beef who had journeyed to Lyon to cheer him on, that he’d never again allow the United States to be so underfunded.
“This will never happen again,” he vowed.
PAUL BOCUSE HAD PICKED the right man to realize his United States dream: Daniel Boulud has a gift for getting people together socially, often with an eye toward some larger goal. “That’s a fair statement,” he said. “Because I think we all belong to the same fraternity, but there are different branches and some people don’t always know each other … so when there is an opportunity to be able to bring the two together, I think it is important.”
And so Boulud arranged a trip to San Francisco the first weekend of March 2009 to attend La Paulée, a Grand Burgundy tasting that draws chefs from around the world. He had Kaysen join him, and the two of them planned a visit to Yountville on a Friday afternoon, along with 1995 Bocuse d’Or winner Régis Marcon, Marcon’s son and cochef Jacques, and a few other friends and colleagues.
The Napa jaunt was vintage Boulud: ostensibly, its purpose was to follow through on Boulud’s casual and exuberant suggestion, “Let’s show Régis The French Laundry!” But in reality, it was a carefully orchestrated series of “coincidences” that brought together Keller, Marcon, and Kaysen. Marcon’s presence was especially important to Kaysen because he wasn’t just a past winner of the Bocuse d’Or, but also president of L’Académie des Lauréats Bocuse d’Or, the association of previous champions. If Keller could witness Marcon’s passion and dedication to the Bocuse d’Or himself, perhaps it would entice him to join the cause.
On their arrival at The French Laundry, Keller greeted the visiting contingent in his whites. Keller always wears his whites in Yountville, where his restaurants dot the main thoroughfare, Washington Street, like properties on a Monopoly board. The French Laundry occupies an unassuming stone building at the corner of Creek Street, its Garden (typically modest Laundry-speak—except for the capital G—for the restaurant’s own farm) right across the street; down the road is Bouchon, his Adam Tihany–designed dead-on replica of a French eatery with Bouchon Bakery right next door, and about half a mile down the road is Ad Hoc, which serves a set four-course menu every night.
When he’s not in New York keeping tabs on Per Se and the Manhattan outpost of Bouchon Bakery, Keller lives in a house adjacent to The French Laundry property, and also—either via The French Laundry or jointly with his partners—owns the house next to The French Laundry on Washington Street and the one next to that, a 1940s ranch-style house with two bedrooms where his father, Edward, a retired Marine Corps captain, lived until his death in 2008.
Keller had his VIP guests seated in the Courtyard outside The French Laundry, and stole Boulud and Régis Marcon away for a tour of the restaurant. Then he served the group canapés, including two French Laundry classics—cornets (little ice cream-style cones)
filled with salmon tartare and topped with sweet red onion crème fraîche, and oysters and pearls, a dish of lightly poached oysters atop a sabayon of pearl tapioca custard that’s garnished with osetra caviar—and champagne. Afterwards, Keller himself led the group as they strolled along Washington Street to Bouchon, where he left them to enjoy lunch, returning at its conclusion.
Following the meal, over espressos in California, Boulud began chatting up his old friend from New York about the Bocuse d’Or. Keller, whose cautious, analytical nature is among his most defining attributes, wasn’t unmoved by the passion on display, but he confined himself to practical questions, such as “What would my role be?”
Boulud’s answer, as it often is to these kinds of things, was “Don’t worry about it, Thomas; you won’t have to do anything.” But Keller was wise enough, about Boulud and life, to know that more due diligence was in order. Among his concerns was the fact that they were already into March, and his calendar, kept by his assistant, Molly Ireland, did not have the Bocuse d’Or factored into it. With less than a year to prepare for the contest the next January, this was no small matter; the reservation book at The French Laundry is opened just two months before a given date, but Keller’s dance card has commitments up to twelve months away. In addition to being a chef, said Ireland, “he’s also the executive of a 900-plus person company.” Ireland also said that it’s important to Keller that no matter where he is in the world, he be available “to keep mentoring staff and be available to them, and that requires a lot of time as well.”
Kaysen didn’t say much at the meeting, but he was—figuratively if not physically—at the edge of his seat, and he welcomed it when Keller turned to him and asked what he thought of the competition. He told Keller that the only way to secure the sponsorships required to fund a legitimate U.S. effort was to have the best chefs in the country, if not the world, on board.
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