Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  Of the first Bocuse d’Or, Weaver recalls that at the time, it was a bigger food event than anybody had ever staged. “It was more like a hockey game,” she said of the bleacher seating and boisterous crowd. There was even a home team—the French, in the person of candidate Jacky Fréon. Weaver didn’t mind at all; because all eyes were on him in the final, virtually nobody noticed when an oil spill in her kitchen caused a fire.

  “Once they got past the fact that I was a woman and that I could actually cook and beat out the majority of these guys, they had a twinkle in their eye for me. They were like, ‘Okay, then!’ They nicknamed me La Petite Américaine. If you see Paul Bocuse today, and ask him about La Petite Américaine, he remembers.”

  Weaver was followed by Jeff Jackson from the Park Hyatt in Chicago in 1989, then by George Bumbaris from the Ritz-Carlton, who placed seventh and received the prize for Best Fish in 1991. (Best Fish and Best Meat are Bocuse d’Or consolation prizes, somewhat misnamed because they are handed out to the top-scoring platters in those categories outside the top three.) In 1993, the first non–Windy City candidate was fielded, Ron Pietruszka from the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills, California, who placed ninth. From there, the results were an up-and-down affair: in 1995, Paul Sautory from The Culinary Institute of America placed thirteenth, and the next three candidates placed eighth, ninth, and tenth, in that order.

  In 2003, Handke’s sixth-place finish (and Best Meat booby prize) set the high-water mark, but the Sisyphean American history next logged an eleventh-place finish by Fritz Gitschner in 2005, followed by Kaysen’s fourteenth place result.

  Bouit concluded and proceeded to introduce the chefs and commis who would be cooking and competing over the next two days …

  AMONG THE APPLICANTS WAS Rogers Powell, for whom the Bocuse d’Or represented an opportunity to sweeten a sour moment from his past. An instructor at The French Culinary Institute (FCI) in New York City, Powell was one of the few who wasn’t immediately put off by the rigorous nature of the application and the short turnaround time of just four weeks.

  In 1996, Powell had found himself in a perhaps-permanent hiatus from his culinary career. To pay the rent, he worked for his uncle’s business, promoting a man-sized robot with a pivoting head at trade shows around the world. (The robot was immortalized in cinema when Rocky Balboa gave one to brother-in-law Paulie in Rocky IV.) One day, while waiting to board a flight to an expo in Portugal, Powell’s friend Jean-Jacques tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Look who’s over there!” he said.

  Powell turned to see Paul Bocuse and another legendary chef, Joël Robuchon, recognizable even without their chef’s whites and toques. “We all knew Bocuse,” said Powell, whose childhood was spent shuttling back and forth from New York to France. “When you go to culinary school, you study him.”

  Deciding to have a little fun, Powell discretely worked the robot’s controls, causing it to slide across the terminal’s slick floor and up to the chefs. Arriving at Bocuse’s side, the robot (actually Powell via a tiny remote microphone that he cupped in his hand) spoke to them in its tinny, electronic staccato: “Hello, Mr. Bocuse. Hello, Mr. Robuchon. I like my steak medium rare.”

  The chefs and fellow passengers chuckled agreeably, then boarded the flight. Powell took his seat in first class, disassembling the robot and parking its torso in the seat the company purchased for it. Hours later, waiting for the other passengers to deplane in Portugal, Powell felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw Bocuse staring down at him, a friendly smile forming beneath his hawk-like eyes.

  “Good luck, l’artiste,” said Bocuse, having determined that Powell was responsible for the preflight entertainment.

  Powell almost told Bocuse that he, too, was a chef, but it felt a bit silly under the circumstances. In time, he found his way back to the kitchen, and eventually to a role helping to train future chefs. Now, he explained in his letter of inspiration, he was eager for the challenge presented by the Bocuse d’Or, and to meet Bocuse himself “as a chef, not a comedian.”

  About forty miles away from Powell and the FCI was John Rellah Jr. Even devoted foodies haven’t heard of Rellah, but years ago he cooked in the rarefied air of Gray Kunz’s kitchen at the opulent restaurant Lespinasse, working as a chef de partie (station chief) alongside future celebrity chefs such as Cornelius Gallagher and Rocco DiSpirito. There are plenty of men and women out there who, like Rellah, flirted with big-city gastronomy but ended up leaving the metropolis for the quiet pastures of suburbia or the country. By 2007 Rellah had become the chef of Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, New Jersey. He saw the Bocuse d’Or as a challenge into which he could pour his amassed knowledge, much of which was gathering dust in some nether region of his brain, and set about preparing an application.

  In Philadelphia, twenty-nine-year-old Kevin Sbraga, culinary director of the Garces Restaurant Group, heard about the Bocuse d’Or USA from a weekly e-mail he received from StarChefs, an online magazine for foodservice professionals. He had recently seen a documentary on Food Network about Tracy O’Grady, the American who competed in 2001, and remembered it well. Sbraga, a former high-school wrestler from Burlington County, New Jersey, who attended Johnson & Wales University on scholarship, had participated in three small-scale cooking competitions as a student and enjoyed it, and this seemed like the ultimate culinary throw-down. “It was almost like magic,” he said. “I thought, I’ve got to do this.”

  One of Sbraga’s competitors had experience in a different type of culinary competition. In June, at the Food & Wine Magazine Classic at Aspen, Hung Huynh, the season three winner of Top Chef, picked up a piece of literature from an American Express booth that alluded to its sponsorship of the Bocuse d’Or USA. Top Chef viewers will remember Hyunh as the ambitious, unapologetically intense Vietnamese American with mad skills; even host Chef Tom Colicchio was left speechless at the sight of Hyunh breaking down chickens in fast motion. Every reality show has one contestant (cheftestant in Top Chef lingo) who says things like, “I’m not here to make friends; I’m here to win.” Hyunh was that guy.

  Some applicants were prodded by members of the Bocuse d’Or USA organization: Michael Rotondo, the chef de cuisine of Restaurant Charlie, Charlie Trotter’s Las Vegas outpost, was encouraged by Trotter himself, who had once been a judge in Lyon; Percy Whatley, the unassuming executive chef of The Ahwahnee in Yosemite, California, was nudged by both longtime acquaintance Kaysen and by Roland Henin, who oversaw him as part of his role as corporate chef of Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts.

  Henin also encouraged Richard Rosendale, chef-owner of Rosendale’s restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, to apply. Rosendale, who has a large, flat nose and dark black hair combed back into a near-pompadour, had more culinary competition experience, exponentially more, than the rest of the field combined: a member of two United States Culinary Olympic teams, Rosendale had participated in two three-year apprenticeship programs in his young career, including one at The Greenbrier, the fabled hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. As part of his education there, he was expected to do competition-like exercises after work such as mystery baskets (cooking spontaneously from an unannounced selection of ingredients) or putting up buffet platters. These sessions lasted until about two in the morning, and included a critique by his supervisors, who offered no leniency. “The expectation was perfection all the time,” said Rosendale.

  Though the next installment of the Olympics was set to start on October 19, just a few weeks after the event in Orlando, Rosendale was attracted to the opportunity presented by the new Bocuse d’Or USA. “I really want to see an American win,” he said. “We have way too many talented chefs not to have placed any higher than we have.”

  Rosendale could have been channeling Kaysen when he said that the reason the United States hadn’t done better in the past wasn’t the candidates, but the resources. “People underestimate how much it takes, not just the commitment from the candidate but financial resource
s. When you’re trying to figure out what one of your garnishes is going to be and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for that via a fundraiser, [it’s] a very difficult thing to do. Plus your day-to-day job.”

  That’s what attracted Rosendale to the Bocuse d’Or USA in 2008: with the involvement of Boulud and Keller, and the attendant money that had rolled in, “the United States has its ducks in a row,” he said.

  AS THE APPLICATION DEADLINE neared, on the evening of June 23, in Yountville, California, in the kitchen of The French Laundry, Timothy Hollingsworth, a sous chef with an all-American visage, brawny build, and tousled sandy blond hair, looked at the ticket in his hand and called out to the kitchen brigade, “Ordering two tasting menus.”

  “Two!” called back the cooks stationed around the room. It was a uniform response. A military response. The commander had spoken and the troops would execute his order. The immediacy and intensity of the callback—and it always came with comparable force—left no doubt of that. As Keller himself says, “It is a command-response environment in a kitchen.”

  Different kitchens are organized differently, but each of them has a chain of command. At The French Laundry in June 2008, Corey Lee was the chef de cuisine, and Devin Knell the executive sous chef. There were two sous chefs: Hollingsworth and Anthony Secviar. On any given night, any of these men might be expediting—executing “his” menu (more on this in a moment)—and any of the others might be stationed at the SAS (sous chef assistant station), acting as first lieutenant. After that came the chefs de partie. These were the people who worked the kitchen that year, and cooked the food that is almost unanimously considered the best in the United States and among the very best in the world. At the top of the kitchen’s unwritten org chart was Chef-Proprietor (Chef Patron in the classic French vernacular) Thomas Keller. Although Keller no longer cooked or expedited in the kitchen with any regularity—a concession, he says, to the toll it took on his body—his restaurants continued to operate in his image, run by people who for the most part idolize the chef and his role in the industry, some of whom had spent years at The French Laundry working their way up from commis to line cook to chef de partie to, in the case of Hollingsworth, sous chef.

  The two prep rooms just beyond the kitchen were lit, but nearly silent, the sounds of the hot line echoing against their white tiled surfaces. That was where the meat butcher, commis, and externs toiled by day, under the direction of morning sous chef Walter Abrams, beginning at 5:30 a.m. The commis do the prep work for the restaurant, everything from turning root vegetables (peeling and shaping them into uniform shapes, not unlike elongated footballs) to making pasta to baking melba toasts, and as the evening crew prepares for service, the commis are cleaning up their area, splashing hot, sudsy water around and wiping the surfaces to a shimmer before departing for the evening.

  At the end of the night, Hollingsworth and his cooks scrubbed down their stations. Everybody who works in Thomas Keller’s kitchens cleans; it’s practically a way of life. When Hyunh, who briefly worked at Per Se, first met Keller, the legend himself was scouring kitchen shelves.

  Hollingsworth and his crew then pulled stools up around the stoves and went through a nightly exercise: creating the menu for the next time Hollingsworth would be expediting. This is a hallmark of both The French Laundry and Per Se: the creation of the menu, daily, by the cooks who work there. According to Hollingsworth, the reason for this is that by helping to conceive the food they cook, each team member will be more personally invested in it, and that will show up in the final dishes.

  In these meetings, the kitchen takes on the air of an academy. Every cook contributes ideas to the menu. If Hollingsworth likes one, he’ll nod and write it down. If he doesn’t, he’ll try to help the cook find his way to a better place, offering suggestions or employing the Socratic method. (For example, “Tarragon with that? You sure?” Translation: “Tarragon with that is a bad idea.”)

  The next afternoon, June 24, as Hollingsworth was turning some carrots at the SAS, Executive Chef Corey Lee—a slight, quietly intense Korean American with a shaved head—came up behind him.

  “You want to do the Bocuse d’Or?” asked Lee, characteristically dispensing with any small talk. Hollingsworth was used to it. The two young men were good friends and former housemates and had been working long hours together for several years. Hollingsworth knew about Keller’s association with this year’s Bocuse d’Or, but he himself hadn’t taken an interest in it. In fact, he used to make fun of the contest. Years earlier, he had rented a modest house in Yountville, known to insiders as the Pink Place, and took on subtenants to help pay the rent, sometimes housing them on the living room sofa. Most of them were foreign cooks working stages and extern-ships at The French Laundry. (A sign of the uptick in global respect for American cuisine over the past two decades is the fact that European cooks now come to a place like Yountville questing for knowledge, which would have been unimaginable twenty years ago.)

  In 2001, a Bocuse d’Or year, Hollingsworth had a Scandinavian housemate, Jonas Lundgren from Sweden, who would talk about the competition—who was competing, who had won in years past, and so on. Hollingsworth had never heard of it, nor did he have any interest in cooking competitions—“not at all, zero” is how he gauged it at the time—but this guy was into it, and even spoke of competing himself someday. Hollingsworth would tease Lundgren, poking fun at the turducken competitions and similar events his roommate described. “I kind of frowned upon it,” Hollingsworth says. In the small-world department, by the time Lee approached Hollingsworth, Lundgren had already been selected as the 2009 candidate for Sweden, but that didn’t change Hollings worth’s mind. “Nah,” he said, “I’m a restaurant chef, not a competition chef.”

  Lee seemed disappointed.

  “Would you do it?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “If I were going to do a cooking competition, this is the one I’d do,” said Lee, referencing the history and renown of the event.

  “Let me think about it,” said Hollingsworth. Lee had Carey Snowden, the restaurant’s culinary assistant, print out the application and some other information for Hollingsworth to peruse.

  Hollingsworth spent some time at home that night looking over the material, as well as surfing the Internet at his one-bedroom apartment on Main Street in Napa, about nine vineyard-lined miles south of Yountville, just off Route 29. What he saw didn’t particularly interest him: the kaleidoscopic presentations and the fact that there were platters involved seemed terribly old-fashioned, manipulated, and show-offy, not really what one associates with the restaurant where he’d been learning and cooking since 2001. For all of its acclaim, The French Laundry remains a fundamentally unassuming place, where the kitchen’s emphasis is on quality, flavor, and the satisfaction of the guest, not on inflating the cooks’ egos.

  “Should I do it?” he asked his girlfriend, Kate Laughlin, a transplanted Northeasterner who had been culinary liaison at Per Se before moving west and taking up a position as assistant to the chief operating officer and chief financial officer for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group.

  “Do you want to do it?” she asked. “If you want to do it, you should do it. It’s a great opportunity.”

  Hollingsworth looked through the packet that Snowden had printed for him. The idea of completing the application, let alone conceiving the dishes, in the six remaining days before the deadline seemed undoable and unappealing.

  The next day, he walked into work, went right up to Lee, and told him he wasn’t interested. When Hollingsworth referred to the application as a barrier, Lee took gentle exception.

  “We could get it done,” he said. “We have Carey to help.”

  Hollingsworth didn’t perceive it at the time, but he later came to believe that Lee, his friend as well as his higher-up, wanted him to apply for the Bocuse d’Or candidacy because it would be a growing experience; after so many years at The French Laundry, Hollingsworth was a prime contender to ascend in
to Lee’s coveted position when the chef de cuisine moved on. He had periodically discussed this with Lee and occasionally with Keller over the prior twelve to eighteen months, though no final decision had been made. In reality, Lee’s motives were more abstract than that: “Tim’s always been someone who’s looking for that next thing … I know that for the past couple of years he’s been very restless, so … it made sense to me to propose this to Tim … to take a lot of that anxiousness and filter it into something very meaningful.…”

  Though he sensed that he was disappointing Lee, Hollingsworth held his ground and begged off.

  About a week later, The French Laundry chefs and sous chefs, including ranking members of the pastry team, were gathered around a large round table in the main dining room on the ground floor of the restaurant for one of the periodic meetings that takes place about once a quarter to sync up the various culinary groups. Keller came in during the gathering—squeezing a visit in between a meeting that went long and another that was set to begin imminently.

  “I have a few things to talk about, is that okay?” he asked. Keller often waives his own authority, asking permission to speak on conference calls and in meetings where nobody would dream of denying him the floor. The gesture has the effect of shrinking the divide between his godlike stature and that of the people who work for him.

  Among Keller’s list of housekeeping items to discuss with his team was something new:

  “So nobody wants to do the Bocuse d’Or?” he asked.

  All eyes went to Hollingsworth, who aired his concerns about the application and the time frame. A bit blindsided, Hollingsworth had thought the issue was beyond moot; the official deadline was now in the past. He didn’t know that Pelka, in New York, worried about receiving enough applications, and having received requests from other potential candidates seeking extensions or an okay to submit incomplete packages, had begun granting leniency in both thoroughness and punctuality. (For example, Hung Hyunh had called that very day asking if he could still apply and was told yes.)