Knives at Dawn (2 page)

“
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.
”

It is better to begin in the evening than not at all.

—
ENGLISH PROVERB

T
HOMAS
K
ELLER 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 Columbus, 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.

“There are many avenues for chefs to take in their careers,” said Keller, who gives the impression that he chooses his words as carefully as he sources his Elysian Fields Farm lamb. “The first competition that I saw was at the [International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show] … the only thing that you see is the finished platters. Everything is covered with gelatin. I was a young chef focused on restaurant
à la minute
cooking and the platter thing didn't really resonate with me. I never found it interesting to be involved with that. That is the path that I took.”

Many of Keller's American restaurant colleagues aren't nearly as polite about cooking competitions, regarding them as a curiosity with little real-world value, something that hotel or culinary school guys get together to do, but not
real
chefs. Even Jonathan Benno, Keller's chef de cuisine at Per Se, commented that, “I respect [the Bocuse d'Or's] history and tradition and the skill set involved to create those beautiful platters, but that style of
cooking doesn't really interest me.
This
interests me. Working in a restaurant every day with a team interests me.”

One reason for the divide between the European zeal for culinary competitions and the dearth of interest in the United States is that many, if not most, European chefs were raised in ultraconservative, traditional cooking environments, whereas many of today's American restaurant chefs came up in the rule-breaking, fiercely forward-looking culinary scene of the 1980s and '90s. The very name of the movement that drew many of them to the kitchen—New American Cuisine—underscores a desire to move on from both the past and the conventions of classic European techniques and dishes. Conversely, their contemporaries overseas maintain, even cherish, a strong connection to centuries-old traditions, which are themselves a source of national pride. As a result, many European teams are lavishly funded by foundations and other support organizations, and competitors' employers are only too happy to give them weeks or months off to devote to their preparation, something exceedingly rare in the United States, where most culinary competitors come from hotels or cooking schools, entities that can afford to grant them the time, and for whom the prizes hold great promotional value. “Because they work in [a private] club,” said Boulud of those who populate the ranks of America's competition chefs, “they don't really work in the competitive environment like we have. Often in private clubs, or in a situation where the chef is a teacher in the CIA [Culinary Institute of America], he has plenty of time to focus on that … but when you run a restaurant in New York, and you do it day in and day out, you are so busy there is no way to find a break to do it.”

Although Boulud had no relationship with the Bocuse d'Or prior to 2008, he did have one with Paul Bocuse, for whom he had briefly worked when he was a wee lad learning his craft in the kitchens of Lyon. Perhaps signaling early that he was destined for anything-goes Manhattan instead of France's more provincial Rhône-Alpes region, Boulud strutted into his first day of work in Bocuse's kitchen sporting sunglasses and a bass player–worthy mane. Bocuse kicked him out, literally. “He kicked my ass and said, ‘Go and
cut your hair. And we don't need sunglasses here to work!' ” remembered Boulud, joyously laughing at the memory of his own impetuousness.

The seeds for this evening in Orlando were planted elsewhere in Florida, on Saturday, January 12, 2008, when Paul Bocuse's son, Jérôme, was married in Palm Beach at Boulud's Café Boulud restaurant at the Brazilian Court Hotel. When Boulud was the chef of Sirio Maccioni's Le Cirque—
the
see-and-be-seen dining destination for the cultural and political elite of 1970s and '80s Manhattan—Jérôme, who had come to the United States to attend The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, visited him often. The fact that Bocuse and Boulud were both Lyon boys determined to make their mark in the States forged a quick and lasting bond; for example, Boulud is godfather to Jérôme's young son. Today, Jérôme Bocuse is an owner of Les Chefs de France restaurant at Epcot, the food and beverage facility his father founded in 1982 along with fellow French icons Roger Vergé and Gaston Lenôtre and which he took over in fall 2008. At a prewedding lunch at Café Boulud, the senior Bocuse asked Boulud to participate in the 2009 edition of the competition by becoming
Président d'honneur
(Honorary President), and to shepherd the American effort—in particular, to help him get Keller on board as president of the Bocuse d'Or USA.

The United States' best-ever showing in Lyon was Handke's sixth-place finish in 2003. Bocuse longed to see that track record improved. His motivation was partly sentimental: as a soldier in the First French Division, he was shot in Alsace. “I was taken to an American hospital in the countryside where I received a blood transfusion from an American GI,” said Bocuse, whose eyes moisten when recalling the larger sacrifice America made for his country. Of the American flag that flaps in the wind outside his eponymous restaurant along the river Saône, he said, “Remember the sixth of June, nineteen forty-four.
Ten thousand people died
at Normandy.” All of that he said in French, but then he paused, and said, in English, his voice creaking, “Thank you, America.”

Bocuse's fondness for the United States deepened when son Jérôme took on dual U.S.-French citizenship and married a Yankee, and the two
produced an American grandson. But Bocuse, the first great chef-marketer, surely also recognized that success by an American team would mean a wider audience for his competition, which is a phenomenon in many European countries: attended by several hundred screaming, flag-waving, noisemaker-wielding fans, the Bocuse d'Or is broadcast around the world via streaming video to 106 countries and covered live on French television, but was scarcely known in the United States, even to many chefs.

Jérôme Bocuse, a fit, bald, perennially tanned man whose Gallic fashion sense makes him easy to spot in the shorts-and-muscle-shirt theme land of Florida, had his own vision of what an American victory would mean to the Bocuse d'Or. A sports fan as well as an avid water skier, he had noticed a trend in American television coverage of the Olympic Games: “If the U.S. are not a strong competitor, they don't show the event,” he said.

“I am not judging that,” he added. “But it's just a reality and a fact.”

Translation: if the United States did well at the Bocuse d'Or, there'd be a whole new, massively huge nation of interested spectators for the contest that bore the family name.