Knives at Dawn (3 page)

When Bocuse made his request, Boulud naturally agreed. That's what you do when you're a chef and Paul Bocuse comes a-knocking. There are no two ways about it.

P
AUL
B
OCUSE HIMSELF, FRESH
off a flight from Lyon, sat just behind Keller as he made his toast on that September evening at Epcot. Eighty-two years old, with a persistent tremor in his right hand, he silently scanned the room. At Epcot, with its ersatz nations lined up like department-store windows, one could be forgiven for thinking that this wasn't really Paul Bocuse, but a Disney-engineered mirage. But Bocuse it was, there to help usher in what he hoped would be a new era for the United States in his namesake event.

When it comes to the Bocuse d'Or, chefs have been saying “
oui
” to Paul Bocuse since the mid-1980s. That was the time that the organizers
of the Sirha, Europe's largest international hotel, catering, and food trade exhibition, which is held at Eurexpo, a Lyon convention center gargantuan enough to register on satellite images, were looking to add a culinary competition to their roster for the 1987 show. They approached Albert Romain, director of the Parc des Expositions venue of Lyon, who turned to his good friend Bocuse, and suggested attaching his name to it because of the worldwide clout it would automatically confer on
le concours
(the contest).

There are many immortals in Bocuse's kitchen generation—Vergé, Alain Chapel, the Troisgros brothers—but the respect and affection of the world's chefs for Bocuse is a little special. He is widely recognized as the first of his comrades to march proudly into the dining room to commingle with the clientele, an act of emancipation that helped his professional brethren migrate from the heat of the kitchen to the glare of the spotlights.

“We chefs and celebrity chefs owe so much to Bocuse; we were
domes-tiques
, now we are nobility,” said Alain Sailhac, who was present at Epcot to act as a judge for the next two days. Formerly the chef of Le Cirque and now executive vice president and senior dean of programs at The French Culinary Institute in New York City, Sailhac remembers that when he was a young cook in France, before the Bocuse reformation, he would conceal his profession from young women he was courting; if forced to confess that he worked in a restaurant, he would claim that he was a
chef de rang
, or dining room captain, which had more cachet.

In time, Bocuse's prominence extended around the world. The promotional copy on the back of the menu at Paul Bocuse sums up his contribution: “More than anyone else, it is he who rendered eminence and dignity to chefs, making them the undisputed stars of the professional food establishment. Yesterday's employee (or, worse, yesterday's lackey) is today's entrepreneur, restaurant owner, concept designer and marketing specialist—exactly like Bocuse and in large part thanks to Bocuse.” That sounds awfully boastful, but few in the industry would dispute the claim.

The irony of his gift to the profession isn't lost on Bocuse. According to son Jérôme, he ventured outside the kitchen not exclusively for personal
fame and glory (though he has reaped plenty of both for decades), but to elevate the appreciation for his craft in general, and for French cuisine in particular. Many of today's young chefs crave a permanent relocation to the artificial world of a television-studio kitchen, but Bocuse points with pride to the fact that when he returned home from his globetrotting, he always parachuted right back into the kitchen. To this day, though he requires an afternoon nap in his home above his restaurant, and retires most evenings while guests downstairs are still slurping tastes of his famous
Soupe aux truffes noires V.G.E
. (a hearty broth of black truffles and foie gras created to honor President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1975) or nibbling on other signature creations such as red mullet with potato “scales,” when he's not traveling, he's in the restaurant.

“Now it's time for everybody to get back in the kitchen,” he joked about today's young talent.

Memories differ slightly over exactly how the Bocuse d'Or's format came to be. Albert Romain recalls coming to Bocuse with the concept of an international cook-off already in mind. Bocuse's recollection is that, presented with the opportunity to dream up a cooking competition, he envisioned the Bocuse d'Or as a response to what he considered a lamentable state of affairs on the global table. In his travels during the 1970s and early '80s, he had noted, sorrowfully, that food everywhere was “becoming the same. It was the time of broccoli, kiwi, and avocados.” He conceived the Bocuse d'Or as a competition in which young chefs from around the world would come to Lyon and cook the food of their homelands for a panel of judges. In short, the unofficial ambassador for French cuisine was conferring ambassadorships on others.

To help bring the event to life, Bocuse enlisted the assistance of a handful of acclaimed local chefs who were more than colleagues. Every morning for decades they had socialized with each other at the Halles de Lyon marketplace. After rising before the sun and loading up their little trucks with livestock and produce, the gentlemen would sit down to a
mâchon
, or feast, at one of the little cafes situated in the market, fortifying themselves
for the day ahead with a steady diet of pig's feet, charcuterie, sausage, coffee, and—why not?—white wine before sputtering off to their respective restaurants. (For a sign of Bocuse's eminence in Lyon, look no further than the fact that in 2006, after a renovation, the market was renamed “Les Halles de Lyon—Paul Bocuse.”)

That year, twenty chefs came to Lyon to compete, and before long the Bocuse d'Or had become the preeminent cooking competition in the world. Such is its reputation that casual observers often refer to it as the Olympics of cooking, even though there is an actual International Culinary Olympics, the aforementioned
Internationale Kochkunstausstellung
, which was first held in Frankfurt in 1900. It seems safe to assume that one reason for the Bocuse d'Or's lofty status is that, of the two reigning competitions, it is the only one in which the French participate.

Among the American culinary competition cognoscenti, it is taken as gospel that the French stopped going to the International Culinary Olympics because they couldn't stomach a third-place tie with the American team in 1976, the last year they attended. “France, Germany, they were always the top countries,” said Roland Henin, who would coach Team USA for the 2009 Bocuse d'Or. “Then comes this newbie in the picture with [Ferdinand] Metz as the captain—USA. They come in the late 1970s … and they do well. So then France becomes
execo
[tied] with the U.S. And the French were in an uproar. ‘How could that be? We have been cooking for centuries! This new country that can't cook anything but a hamburger! And now they are
execo
with us.' So they quit.”

In 1980, Paul Levy, food correspondent for
The London Observer
, suggested another rationale for the French retreat: that differing sensibilities among various French chefs' organizations, some of which found the Olympics “old-fashioned, even reactionary,” led to their opting out. Because
“a food competition without French participation
would lack legitimacy … the organizers hinted that the fact that in 1976 France had tied with America … had left the taste of sour grapes in French mouths.” (Ferdinand Metz, captain of the 1976 United States team, does not recall
any visible outrage from the French team when the results were announced that year. “All I can tell you is that we were there in '76, we tied France for third, and they didn't show up any more,” he said.)

The most seismic shift in the Bocuse d'Or since its debut has been the food, which has become increasingly ornate with each passing contest. The cuisine presented in the first few Bocuse d'Ors might have come straight from the pages of
Larousse Gastronomique
or one of the other bibles of classic French cooking—a whole salmon sliced open at the back, gutted, and decorated with compositions of roe and vegetables, truffle-topped suprêmes of fatted Bresse hen, glazed vegetables, and so on. In 1989, Luxembourg's Lea Linster, the lone woman champion in Bocuse d'Or history, made the centerpiece of her meat platter a saddle of lamb in a potato crust. The recipe, published in the book
Gourmet Challenge
(Glénat, 2005), is scarcely more complicated than that for a standard-issue potato pancake wrapped around a portion of lamb saddle, briefly grilled and finished in the oven.

Linster, who was on hand in Orlando and still serves her Bocuse d'Or menu today at her self-titled restaurant in Luxembourg, claims that she had never cooked all of her components at the same time until she was actually in the competition kitchen in Lyon, an approach that would all but cinch a last-place finish today, as many teams execute scores of practice runs to master ever-more-elaborate compositions. Modern Bocuse d'Or platters resemble little culinary circuses, showcasing bits of derring-do that food enthusiasts would associate more with sweet than savory cooking: pastry cups, tuilles, and the like. The Bocuse d'Or's own Web site marks 1991 as the dawn of “artistic” dishes, with special reference to France's gold medalist Michel Roth's jewel egg with truffle garnish, but in stylistic terms, that was just the beginning. The complexity of the food has steadily been ratcheted up year after year. The 2003 silver medalist Franck Putelat's beef platter counted among its garnishes artichoke hearts filled with a foie gras “crème brûlée” and shingled with hand-cut zucchini petals. Serge Vieira's winning 2005 fish platter was anchored by a monkfish loin filled with a porcini mushroom saveloy sausage, ringed with batonnets of black truffle,
celery, and carrot, held in place with scallop mousse, all bundled up in pork fat, seasoned with
piment d'Espelette
(a mild pepper popular in Basque cooking), steamed in the oven, and finished in a frying pan.

Assemble four or five dazzling components like that on a custom-designed platter and the effect suggests a dance sequence that Busby Berkeley might have dreamed up had he gone to sleep on a woefully empty stomach. These visual pyrotechnics must be largely responsible for the popularity of the Bocuse d'Or. After all, spectators can only look; they can't taste, and that's just as true for those who follow the event on television or via the Internet. But for all the allure of the presentations, there's a potential downside: If the food weren't so technically sound and didn't taste so good, it would qualify as a parody of the excesses of fine dining. And it's so expensive to produce—requiring huge investments of money and time—that many feel it still has very little application outside of competition.

“It's like the haute couture fashion shows in Paris,” said former White House chef Walter Scheib. “The stuff may look great but nobody's ever going to wear it.”

But the organizers and supporters of the Bocuse d'Or passionately believe that the event's value transcends the superficial, combining the showstopping presentations and technical rigors of cold-food competitions with the insanely high pressure and, most important, taste expectation of a world-class restaurant kitchen. Bocuse
himself
insists that taste—which accounts for two-thirds of the score, forty of sixty possible points from each judge—must always be front and center. To illustrate his point, he likes to tell the following story: “A maitre d' comes into the dining room with a dish from a chef. He shows it to the guest and says, ‘Look at what the chef did. The architecture! This is a work of art.' ” Bocuse then pantomimes the customer handing the dish back to the maitre d'. “The guest says, ‘Can you frame it for me, please?'
The cuisine is first to be tasted, not to be framed
.”

Eventually, in an attempt to reign in the preoccupation with presentation, and because it had gotten to the point that, according to Bocuse, some teams “were coming with [platters the size of] soccer fields,” Bocuse and
his colleagues imposed a size limit on the platters: no larger than forty-three by twenty-seven inches,
including handles
.

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.

C
ONTINUING 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.