Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  His list of tips was extensive: watch your sanitation, don’t taste with your finger (“Use a spoon!”), show good time management, and coach your commis well; if you don’t, “they make mistakes and then their mistakes become your mistakes.” To that end, work side by side or front to front “so that you are one.” Be efficient: if you go to put something away, bring something back with you. And maximize ingredients—use the trimmings of everything, from chickens to mushrooms.

  As for the food, in competition a combination of textures is essential: the three primary ones being “crisp/crunchy, meaty, and soft.” By way of illustration, Henin pointed out that apple pie à la mode, which he described as the most popular dessert in the world, has all three: the crust is crunchy, the apple is meaty, and the ice cream is soft.

  Proper seasoning is also important, as is being distinctly American. Henin didn’t buy into the notion that you had to cook French to win the Bocuse d’Or. He believed that you need to celebrate where you come from. “Maple syrup, wow!” he said. “They don’t have that anywhere else in the world.” This particular subject is the source of much debate among those who organize, participate in, and observe the Bocuse d’Or USA. To this day, Kaysen, for one, is convinced that a reason he didn’t do better at the Bocuse d’Or is that his food was too American.

  Kaysen himself followed Henin, joined by his commis from 2007, Brandon Rodgers, who was then working at Daniel. The two talked about their experience, and how important the timing was, and about the noise in the competition hall, specifically the cowbells from the Swiss fans. This aspect of the Bocuse d’Or has attained near mythic status; past competitors and observers alike warn of the earsplitting, rafter-shaking volume of the audience, which is so overwhelming that many participants and observers (including many reporters) routinely refer to “thousands” of spectators when the true number is in the high hundreds. Some even wear earplugs to shut out the noise, though this can impede communication between chef and commis. (In 2007, when coaches were not allowed near the kitchens or to communicate with their team in any way—a rule that was changed for 2009—Kaysen considered using earpiece walkie-talkie setups to shut out the audience while still allowing him to communicate with Rodgers, but he was warned that it might appear he was cheating.)

  The candidates were divided into groups of four and given two hours to prepare a fish course. They wouldn’t have to present it on a platter, but they would have to serve five plates, to Boulud, Keller, Henin, Kaysen, and Rodgers. As they cooked, Kaysen and Rodgers observed them and Henin roamed the floor taking the kind of notes the technical judges might take in Lyon, about how sound their butchering technique was, and how clean they kept their stations.

  When the cooking was done, the judges tasted the food and conferred in private, concluding that it was a mixed bag. To avoid embarrassing or discouraging any candidates, rather than critiquing individual dishes, they offered their commentary en masse, though some opinions were delivered rather bluntly, as when Kaysen told the group that only two chefs’ fish were cooked correctly, an especially significant note because proper doneness is a crucial consideration in the Bocuse d’Or; the French have a word for it: cuisson.

  IN THE WEEKS AFTER the orientation and group-cook at The French Culinary Institute, Kevin Sbraga took Coach Henin’s advice to heart—including the part about preparing physically. Sbraga, whose combination Italian and African American heritage lends him a hard-to-place swarthiness, didn’t have a regular workout routine, but as a former athlete who always enjoyed training, he rediscovered his inner jock, rising at five thirty every morning and biking between fifteen and twenty miles. He also stopped shaving his beard, a not-unusual tradition for athletes preparing for a big occasion.

  For a solid month, Sbraga—who had tapped Aimee Patel, a cook from Amada restaurant, as his commis—spent four or five hours a day, four or five days a week, developing his dishes. The rest of the candidates prepared in their own ways, but with the exception of Rosendale, each of them had to go through a learning process because he wasn’t a competition cook. For example, Rellah focused his research on past winners of the Bocuse d’Or, which made him question Henin’s go-American advice. “I trained in two French restaurants and have looked at a lot of menus and information about what other teams have done in the past … I don’t think [acclaimed Swiss chef and judge] Philippe Rochat wants to taste maple syrup,” he said.

  Jérôme Bocuse agreed: “For me, [maple syrup] is comfort food,” he said. “Maple syrup is for the pancakes in the morning for breakfast. Barbecue is for Sunday with your friends … I know it is part of the [American] heritage and the culture … but can we bring it to a gourmet level? I am not sure. Maybe by tweaking it. Maybe we can bring some barbecue flavor into it. But are you going to do real barbecue at the Bocuse d’Or? Certainly not.”

  Rellah, Sbraga, and Whatley ended up in about the same place, deciding to call on American terminology and reference points, delivering them via classic French technique. Rellah, for example, devised a meat platter he dubbed the Blackboard Special. One component was a tenderloin of beef, split open, filled with a farce or forcemeat (finely chopped, seasoned meat) comprising the scrap and mushrooms (“almost like meatloaf”), wrapped in Swiss chard and sealed with the help of transglutaminase, essentially a “meat glue” that binds proteins together. Rellah planned to sous vide (cook in a vacuum pack) the entire composition before presenting it.

  Similarly, Whatley planned a deconstructed cod chowder theme for his fish platter, and a Southwestern “Texas ranchers” theme for the beef, including wrapping the tenderloin with chorizo he made himself, roasting it, and saucing it with a “sort-of barbecue sauce reduction.” He also planned chiles rellenos stuffed with beef cheeks, and oxtail timbales with pinto beans. Having lived in Georgia, Sbraga eventually settled on a Southern Hospitality theme—his meat platter came complete with candied yams and a maple-bourbon jus that paid homage to red-eye gravy—drawing on his personal history.

  Meanwhile, in Yountville, Hollingsworth, who had spent most of his adult life working at The French Laundry, decided to forgo competition style in favor of the understated elegance he lived daily. He drew heavily from The French Laundry’s Garden for inspiration, and planned to bring all of his produce from Yountville, leaving nothing to chance.

  Hollingsworth found preparing for the Bocuse d’Or USA to be a revelatory experience. “It has made me learn a lot about myself and who I am,” he said. “If you come to work and you cook every day, you learn by working with the product. But if you cook with the same product every day and you’re doing these different techniques and you’re really analyzing the food that you do, then you learn more about the style that you prefer and what better represents you and how you work and how you handle different kinds of stress.”

  Sbraga reached out to the community of chefs to help with his preparation, starting with George McFadden, a certified master chef he had kept in touch with back in Naples, Florida, borrowing a kitchen at a Philadelphia restaurant school to train in, and even driving up to Johnson & Wales University in Providence to do a tasting for some chefs he knew there, videotaping the practice for his own review.

  By Labor Day, Rellah had his themes all set (his fish platter was titled “An Indian Summer in Cape Cod”) and he began to consider his platters and other ancillary concerns. He started doing timed trials fives times a week after work, beginning at 10:30 p.m., and going for five hours. That might sound like a lot, but Rellah had no trouble slipping into his old work habits. “I worked in two four-star restaurants in Manhattan for a total of seven years,” he said. “That is, like, the pinnacle of pressure.”

  Where Rellah felt the most pressure was in preparing his commis, Vincent Forchelli, for the challenge ahead. Because Forchelli was right out of culinary school, Rellah felt it was important to create a stressful environment for him, so he’d put him on the line and throw curveball after curve-ball at him.

  The result of that brutal
ity? “He is a different person today,” said Rellah. Forchelli agreed: “I think it improved my skills dramatically. Any competition where you push yourself you will always be better than the guy who doesn’t do competitions.”

  For the two weeks leading up to Orlando, Whatley and his commis, Josh Johnson, a chef de partie who had worked with him for two years, performed exhaustive practice runs every day—not just the five-and-a-half hours of cooking, but also another several hours for prep and then a few more for clean-up and debriefing—about a twelve-hour commitment per day. As he practiced, Whatley came to respect the Bocuse d’Or, as opposed to, say, cold-food contests. “This particular competition really makes sense,” he said. “You have to be organized. You are on a timeline. You have to work clean. You have to make things sizzle. Smell good. Being in a live stadium with an audience is the ultimate Iron Chef.”

  Asked what he had done to prepare a week before the competition in Orlando, Hyunh—who was working in the kosher restaurant Solo in midtown Manhattan while its owners got a new project together for him—cackled gleefully. “I’m not!” he said. “This is a kosher kitchen … I’m competing against Thomas Keller’s guy, Charlie Trotter’s guy. They have all the resources in the world. Here I am, I have two vinegars—red wine and rice wine vinegar—and some vegetable stock.” He shrugged. “It’s very hard.”

  “I know what I’m going to do,” he explained. “But I haven’t had time to perfect it. I’m just going to bring ingredients down there … and I’m gonna go … I’m gonna cook, with proper techniques, and I’m going to hope it tastes good. I don’t know if it’ll be the most perfected dish of my career— definitely not I would say—but given the circumstances I’m in now and given what I can do and get out of it, I think it’s going to be excellent.”

  “I cook best under pressure,” he said, snapping his fingers. “And at the moment. Shit’s gonna go down. Things are gonna burn. Things are gonna break. I’m gonna go with the flow, and do what I do best. Cook!”

  Clearly, this was not the ideal preparation, but in many ways, Hyunh’s attitude exemplified the ideal of culinary competitons: He embraced the experience.

  By the week before the competition, Richard Rosendale, who had been practicing overnight alongside Seth Warren, a string bean of a cook who worked for him at Rosendale’s, between overseeing the build-out of a new restaurant and trips to Rye, New York, to train for the Olympics, had stopped rehearsing.

  “All of the hard work should have already taken place,” he said. “Right now, as we get ready for next week, it’s a lot of packing and going through pack lists, making sure shipping addresses match up, all those little things.”

  Did Rosendale feel like the favorite going into Orlando? “Absolutely not. I know … from competing over the years, you can never underestimate any of your competition … I hope that I’ll win, but I also know there’s some very talented people that I’m going against.… It’s any given Sunday. Anything, and I mean anything can happen that can really just throw your game in that five-hour period. The Olympics is a perfect example of that. Four years of preparation comes down to spilling a sauce, or scorching something, or overcooking venison loins.”

  Rosendale took about twelve hours to pack his toolbox, which was about the size of a chest freezer, in the most efficient way, and the tools and equipment would be set up very precisely according to when and where he’d need them in the kitchen in Orlando, all with an eye toward maximizing time.

  “Every second counts,” he said. “If you go to reach for something and you bring your hand back without something in it … you lose precious seconds … you add that up and by the end of the competition you have lost five or ten minutes … that might not seem like much, but if that’s your window [to present your platter] …

  “Packing is huge.”

  ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, a bombshell rocked the financial world. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the first stirrings of what would quickly reveal itself to be a financial crisis that would alter the world markets and the presidential election. The next morning, Senator John McCain uttered his faux pas for the ages, that the “fundamentals of the economy” were “strong,” triggering his downward spiral in the polls; by midweek, he would engage in a game of chicken with the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, as McCain threatened to pull out of the first planned presidential debate that Friday night so that he could return to Washington, D.C.

  Yet all this election-season melodrama was mere background noise at the World Showplace by Thursday afternoon, drowned out by the power tools employed to bring the new Bocuse d’Or USA to life. In the auditorium, construction teams worked furiously to finish the setup for the next two days: a scaled-down facsimile of the Bocuse d’Or space in Lyon.

  A staging area had been set aside for the candidates—a large high-ceilinged space with industrial carpeting on the floor and a few long folding tables. As the chefs arrived—some had already gotten there the day prior—they went scavenging around the back corridors of the facility and into the kitchen area in search of speed racks, sheet trays, and other sundry items they needed to transfer their ingredients.

  It was Jérôme Bocuse’s idea to make the competition hall in Orlando as similar as possible to the one in Lyon, to give the candidates a chance to visualize what the day would be like in January. Smart, because one of the distinguishing challenges of the Bocuse d’Or is that it’s a culinary Brigadoon that only exists for the few days during which it takes place. Candidates who weren’t selected two years before their entry, or didn’t go on their own in years past, simply cannot see or experience it until they get there. To bring Bocuse’s vision to life, Nora Carey had worked for months to coordinate the efforts of Disney’s Entertainment, Culinary, and Operations teams, reviewing video footage of the Bocuse d’Or for inspiration and accuracy, and holding weekly meetings and planning sessions.

  That afternoon, Jennifer Pelka and Coach Henin held a briefing for the candidates at the American Adventure Parlor. With Revolutionary War music, all flutes and drums, wafting in the windows from outside, it was the first time that all of the candidates and commis were in one room. There was the air of a mass blind date about it. Henin, dressed in a camel-colored Ralph Lauren Oxford with the sleeves rolled up and Pelka, in a sleeveless black dress, set up an easel with a giant pad to brief the group on the rules and regulations of the competition: the start times would be staggered by ten-minute intervals; they’d be required to prepare their platters as well as six plated portions; and waiters would take the actual plates to the judges.

  The separate preparation of plates and a platter was a marked departure from the standard operating procedure of the actual Bocuse d’Or, where platters are paraded before the judges and the audience, photographed by the media, then delivered to a carving station, where they are portioned out onto plates for tasting and evaluation. This protocol results in one of the more vexing elements of the Bocuse d’Or: it may be the preeminent culinary competition in the world, but after the twelve-to fifteen-minute lag time between preparation and service, the food is received by the judges in a manner that would be unacceptable in any restaurant: it’s cold.

  When Henin opened the floor to questions, Rosendale’s depth of experience became clear, as he peppered the coach with one query after another: Could anything that wasn’t connected to plumbing be moved to customize the work space? Would there be a runner and dishwasher the whole time? Would there be an ice machine or a runner who can fill an ice bin?

  “Good one!” exclaimed Henin, writing the question on the pad.

  After the meeting, the chefs emerged into blazing sunlight and made their way to the French Island, a recessed area alongside the lagoon around which Epcot is centered, where they were met by a humbling spectacle: the chefs who would be observing and serving as judges, many of them members of the Advisory Board. There were old-guard legends such as Alain Sailhac, former Lutèce chef Andre Soltner, and Georges Perrier, chef-owner of Le Bec-
Fin in Philadelphia. There were young bucks such as Daniel Humm of New York City’s Eleven Madison Park, and Laurent Tourondel, partner in the fast-expanding Bistro Laurent Tourondel (BLT) restaurant group. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, chef and co-owner of restaurants all over the world including Jean Georges and Vong, was on hand. And of course, Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller. All were dressed in their whites. If there was a chef heaven here on earth, this was it.

  Boulud, Keller, and Jérôme Bocuse each spoke, then the candidates drew lots to determine in what order they would compete: on Day One, Rosendale, Sbraga, Rotondo, and Whatley would cook; on Day Two, Hyunh, Powell, Hollingsworth, and Rellah. The chefs were presented with official Bocuse d’Or USA jackets, then Boulud, Keller, and Jérôme Bocuse posed for a picture. Before the photographer could snap the first one, Boulud—ever the showman—looked over his shoulder and realized something was missing. “Get the French Pavilion in the background,” he said.

  The chefs pivoted, the photographer relocated, and the photo was taken.

  Shortly thereafter, at the World Showplace, the chef-judges were briefed. With Henin and Kaysen chiming in, Boulud and Pelka ran through the timing for the two days of competition and how the scoring would be broken down: 50 percent for taste, 30 percent for artistry (presentation of the platters), and 20 percent for “execution/kitchen skills.”

  AT THE RECEPTION LATER that evening, Dieter Hanning, a vice president for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, took the floor. An energetic German, Hanning launched into a hilarious recap of the milestones in world gastronomy, with a focus on American dining. Hanning began more than a half-century earlier. “In 1952, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened up,” he recounted, his German accent making the factoid sound automatically ironic. “And in 1954, the Burger King.” Sensing confused delight in his audience, Hanning said, “You’re going to ask, ‘Where is that going to fit in with the Bocuse d’Or?’ Just bear with me.”