Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  Skeie had also put himself though physical hell in service of his childhood dream. In 2005, he fractured his kneecap in a car accident in the mountains of Norway, ramming into another car on his weekly commute from Oslo to the hotel where he was employed. He underwent strenuous physical therapy in order to firm up the muscle groups around it for extra support, eventually doing the exercises on his own, without a therapist. His doctors told him that the injury would shorten his kitchen career and that eventually he’d have to replace the kneecap, but these prognostications did nothing to deter him from his goal.

  Hollingsworth, who had just learned that he’d be representing the United States, had no way of knowing the details of Skeie’s preparation, but the Norwegian had made the most of his long lead time. For more than a year after he was selected to represent his country, he continued to work as chef de cuisine at Mathuset Solvold, where his employer, not coincidentally, was Odd Ivar Solvold, who won the bronze at the 1997 Bocuse d’Or. During that time, Skeie thought about his cuisine, not cooking even one garnish, but instead visualizing elements and compositions, imagining their flavors and how they would harmonize, taking them apart and reassembling them in his mind. In September 2008, about the same time Hollingsworth was finalizing his dishes for Orlando, Skeie was taking his actual Bocuse d’Or food out for a test drive in a kitchen outfitted with the same equipment he’d be using in Lyon; he’d have started earlier, but his participation in the Bocuse d’Or Europe in July (one of the continental contests that had been introduced in recent years), ironically, distracted him from the upcoming world competition.

  In addition to employer Solvold, who was on board as Skeie’s coach, the community of Norwegian Bocuse d’Or medalists and other past participants was crucial to Skeie. “Most important was Odd Ivar, because he was with me all the time,” said Skeie. But other past candidates gave him important input: When Skeie and Solvold had the idea of outfitting a van with a training kitchen while in Lyon, so that he would be able to simply cook, without having to lug equipment to and from a training space, Eyvind Hellstrøm, who had placed fifth at the Bocuse d’Or in 1989, offered a hearty endorsement of the notion, opining that it would be well worth the trouble. As his training progressed, Skeie would also invite Hell-strøm and Stiansen (the one he had watched on television as a boy) to taste his food and offer feedback.

  In addition to Skeie, Hollingsworth couldn’t help but think of Lund-gren, who displayed a short and spiky hairstyle in his photo, which showed him holding a spoon and grinning almost mischievously—the very picture of quiet confidence. Lundgren hadn’t been selected until February 2008, which was about the time Boulud was courting Keller in the United States, but which Lundgren considered “too late. You should select your candidate as soon as the [previous] Bocuse d’Or is over.”

  Lundgren is an athlete: he plays soccer and participates in amateur body-building contests, and he likened preparing for the Bocuse d’Or to training for the Olympic Games. Determined to make the most of his one shot at glory, he withdrew from his restaurant work after the Bocuse d’Or Europe in July, though he did take some part-time work for the money, as did his commis, Öyvind Novak.

  Like Skeie, Lundgren was able to glean advice and inspiration from former Swedish competitors, primarily Matthias Dahlgren, who brought home the gold in 1997, and 2001 silver medalist Henrik Norström. Though he was wary of being able to incorporate much input from that many chefs, he found the practical information from these consiglieri indispensable in preparing for the singular, fleeting demands of the Bocuse d’Or such as that onerous lag time between platter and plate.

  “You are not used to working like that,” said Lundgren. “Normally, you cook, your ten people plate the plate, and thirty seconds later the guest has the plate. That is the beauty of a restaurant. Here you have to plate something that is going to be fantastic and really good after half an hour on a silver tray. That is difficult.”

  Denmark was also on Hollingsworth’s mind. “I know the way the Scandinavians are thinking and I know how competitive they are and so I thought that they would be a challenge,” he said. Recent results bore out his logic: Denmark was on the march in the Bocuse d’Or, having won bronze in 2005 and silver in 2007.

  Hollingsworth also took special interest in these candidates because the chefs from these countries were all about his age, with similar kitchen experience. This meant something to him because, while he proffers a great deal of respect for history, he is also a fiercely forward-looking chef; he rarely uses the adjective traditional to describe classic cookery, opting instead for the pejorative old.

  And, of course, he thought about Philippe Mille, the French candidate: in all the years of the Bocuse d’Or, when the French had competed, they had never placed lower than second. But beyond that, he knew the reputation of Mille’s employer and mentor, Yannick Alléno, the acclaimed chef who won the silver medal at the 1999 Bocuse d’Or. “I thought he would definitely be a challenge because of France and because of Yannick,” said Hollingsworth, who had made a point of picking up Alléno’s book 4 Saisons à la Table No.5: Le Meurice, Paris and was impressed by how “tight” it was, the word Hollingsworth uses to describe a real clarity of vision.

  Mille was an unusual candidate for the Bocuse d’Or because, other than the contest to become the French candidate, he had never participated in a culinary competition before. “I am not what we call informally in French une bête de concours [a beast of competition],” he said. But, although he had never attended the Bocuse d’Or, he had been attracted to it since observing Alléno’s preparation in 1999. “I was quite impressed by his training, his involvement, and even the pressure and the enthusiasm around him,” said the chef. In turn, Alléno had proved invaluable to Mille in his preparation, advising him on how to manage the intense media scrutiny the French candidate is subjected to, and helping conceive dishes, such as the caviar pie garnish that would figure prominently in Mille’s seafood platter.

  AND WHAT OF THE American candidate, Hollingsworth himself, the young cook who would be representing the United States?

  The twenty-eight-year-old was born to divorced mom Karen Chavez in Houston, Texas, in January 1980. He was originally christened Timothy Chavez, although Chavez wasn’t his biological father’s name; it had been his mother’s married name. When Timothy was four months old, Karen met Quentin Hollingsworth at the Baptist church they both attended. The two began seeing each other, married, and eventually moved to the town of Shingle Springs, California, when Timothy was in second grade. In time, since Quentin Hollingsworth had filled the role of Timothy’s father since before he could walk or talk, the boy took the man’s last name, just as his mother had before him. Today, Hollingsworth always refers to his step-father as his father, and rarely feels the need to explain the adoptive nature of their relationship.

  When Timothy was in fifth grade, the family moved to Grizzly Flats, California, nestled in the mountains between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, a rural area where the closest sundries shop was a quarter of an hour away, and “our backyard was a national forest.” (In truth, the national forest was about one-eighth of a mile down the dirt road from where the Hollings-worths lived in the company of just three neighboring houses.)

  His parents recall him as a confident kid, capable in sports, even though their remote location made it tough for him to play on school teams because of the onerous transportation demands it would have put on his family.

  His first food role model was his mother, although she was more of a baker. “I never had Oreo cookies in my school lunch. I never had Chips Ahoy,” recalls Hollingsworth. He and the rest of his family—Michelle, Brian, Kevin, and Amber, half-siblings all—fondly recall homemade lasagna, pizza prepared from scratch, chicken and dumplings, and beef stew, although Karen Hollingsworth, an exceedingly shy, modest woman, doesn’t have much of a memory for her own repertoire.

  As a boy, Hollingsworth never envisioned a lifetime in the kitchen. His first work experi
ence was not with his mother, but with his father. When he was in the fifth grade, he began spending weekends working construction alongside his dad, a burly man who sports a goatee and spectacles today. They worked long hours, often spending the day on paid business, breaking for dinner, then helping fellow parishioners renovate or repair their homes, which they did free of charge as members of their church and community. Being reared in such a devout environment had a reverberating influence on Timothy: to this day, though he’s capable—as most chefs are—of letting an occasional f-bomb fly in the heat of a dinner service or after work at Yountville’s lone late-night watering hole, Pancha’s, he doesn’t swear in front of his parents. He also prides himself on his integrity, how he treats others both at work and outside the restaurant.

  Hollingsworth’s father was demanding, described even by Karen as a “perfectionist,” and young Timothy learned to be exacting working alongside him. “See there,” his father would tell him, stabbing his finger in the direction of a shoddy paint job. “See how they didn’t cut in right?” Timothy would study the streaky, uneven coats, nod his comprehension and, in time, the contempt his father felt for a job poorly done became his contempt. If they borrowed tools or equipment from other workers, Quentin Hollingsworth would deep-clean them, dismantling and reassembling the parts if necessary, returning them to the owner in better condition than they had gone out. “See that,” he’d say to Timothy, turning a tiller to show him the freshly glinting steel. “Remember how it looked before? It looks better now, right?”

  Timothy had an aptitude for construction. Quentin Hollingsworth recalls that, by age ten, he had begun tagging along to jobs, and naturally evolved into an extra set of hands that he could count on. And Timothy wasn’t alone; his brothers followed in his boot-clad footsteps. Quentin Hollingsworth’s boss was so impressed by Timothy and his siblings’ work ethic that he told Mr. Hollingsworth, “When my son gets of age, he is working for you.”

  “I don’t know,” says the senior Hollingsworth on hearing himself describe the family dynamic. “Maybe I demand too much. They seem to learn. All of my boys are hard workers … we have worked twenty-four-hour shifts and [Timothy] is right there working with me.”

  When he reached his late teens, Timothy decided he wanted to find something he could call his own. He considered becoming a fireman or an EMT (emergency medical technician), which he imagined offered an appealing lifestyle and relatively little risk in such a small town, “the ability to be able to work out and kind of have a good life. Something a little bit exciting.”

  That might have been his path had his brother-in-law, Aaron, not worked at Zachary Jacques [Country French] Restaurant in nearby Placer-ville, and had he not gotten Timothy a job there as a dishwasher. The restaurant was a true mom-and-pop operation, owned by a couple, Christian and Jennifer Masse, who ran it after a classic fashion: he was the chef; she was the maitre d’ and pastry chef. Before long, Timothy, who had never considered becoming a cook, let alone a chef, was promoted to the restaurant’s equivalent of garde manger, the cook charged with salads and other cold food preparations. He demonstrated an aptitude for cooking, and in the small kitchen the owners were delighted to teach him as much as he wanted to absorb. He developed into the chef’s right-hand man, and picked up some pastry prowess along the way. Their trust in Hollingsworth and his ability were so complete that, when the couple went on vacation, they’d leave the place in his care.

  Hollingsworth enjoyed cooking, and had the combination of basic skills that make for, at the least, a successful culinary professional: a good and malleable palate, soft hands, and a tireless work ethic. He also had a flair for cooking instinctually, which was useful in a kitchen where there were a total of four employees and the chef passed his recipes down like oral history. Chef Masse also shared his personal story with his young protégé, spinning yarns of his time in various cities around the world, learning his craft. He talked of the great chefs of France, with a special emphasis on three-star Michelin honorees. Hollingsworth, who had never been across an ocean, was intrigued: the romanticized tales sparked something in him. He’d look at the sauces and salads, pâtés, and plats du jour they were preparing, and envision them in their original contexts; the combination of stories and stimulation created something akin to a chemical reaction: he had to know more. To this day, he can’t put words to why. The attraction was as unexplainable, and unexamined, as love at first sight.

  Masse loaned him the works of Escoffier and Louis Saulnier’s Le Repertoire de la Cuisine. Hollingsworth read them at home, then would bound into the kitchen the next day, eagerly asking about sauces and preparations, which the chef was only too happy to explain. The next thing he knew, Hollingsworth was addicted to culinary books, buying them up from the nearest Barnes & Noble. “I never stopped reading,” he said. “I would read and read. I would wake up in the morning, I would read. Go to the gym, work all day, and then after work sit at the bar in the restaurant and talk and read the books. Then go home and read.”

  Hollingsworth moved into his own apartment in Placerville, and started trying his hand at cooking beyond the restaurant’s repertoire. Sometimes he’d invite his mother and maternal grandmother over and make them simple dinners; his mother recalls fish with “little asparagus and some kind of little potatoes.” Following the example of his employer, he rarely used recipes except for formula-like pastry recipes, instead preferring to operate on intuition and instinct.

  One of the countless cookbooks he read around this time was Thomas Keller’s much-lauded The French Laundry Cookbook. As much a biography as a collection of recipes, The French Laundry Cookbook depicts, in breathtaking photographs by Deborah Jones, the food and setting that had been slowly but surely earning the restaurant a reputation as one of the premier dining destinations in the country. The book resonated with Hollingsworth more than almost any other. He would experiment with the techniques that author Keller periodically stopped to describe, such as bigpot blanching, his preferred way of cooking green vegetables to preserve their color and uniformly season them by using a lot of water relative to the quantity of vegetables so that the temperature didn’t drop significantly when the ingredients were added, and a lot of salt, about one cup per gallon of water. Where Masse only put a modicum of baking soda (rather than salt) in his blanching water for, say, green beans, Hollingsworth tried Keller’s recommended method, but only when the chef was away, so he wouldn’t get upset at the expense.

  The more he read and cooked, the more he found himself gravitating toward Keller and to Alain Ducasse, the deified French chef who had opened a restaurant at the Essex House Hotel in New York City in 2000, and who had himself penned a number of exquisitely produced books. Hollingsworth made a one-man fact-finding trip cross country to check out the nation’s preeminent cooking school, The Culinary Institute of America, and dined at Le Cirque and Ducasse. But he decided against both culinary school and New York City, realizing that he’d rather stick close to home.

  And so, he set his sights on The French Laundry.

  Hollingsworth hatched a plan to gain employment at his target destination, making a dinner reservation for himself, his girlfriend at the time, and two acquaintances who owned a cooking shop in Grizzly Flats. When he booked the table, he confirmed with the reservationist that Keller himself would be working the night of his visit, and told her that he wanted to meet the chef during a kitchen tour—a by-request tradition at The French Laundry dating back to the days when it was owned by Don and Sally Schmitt—and to personally hand him his resumé.

  The quartet went to dinner. They were on a budget but wanted to try everything, so they shared the foie gras dish that required a supplemental charge. Hollingworth was “blown away,” and after the meal, a manager led him through the hushed corridor known as The Breezeway, where waiters and sommeliers transition from the pressure-cooker setting of the kitchen to the elegant hush of the dining room. Up ahead, in the shimmering kitchen, Thomas Keller himself was s
tanding at the pass, a marble table draped with white linen fastened in place with green tape, and tickets lined up along the edge closest to him. Hollingsworth introduced himself and handed off his resumé.

  Back in Placerville, Hollingsworth began a telephone campaign. He rang Keller but declined to leave a message for him, instead calling incessantly until he finally caught the chef at a moment of availability. Keller invited him to come to the restaurant and “trail” for a day, meaning that he would be put to work, observed, and evaluated. Hollingsworth did, but failed to impress the chef de cuisine, Eric Ziebold. Then the funniest thing happened: Keller hired him anyway. “It was really a miscommunication between Eric and me about Timmy’s future,” recalled Keller. “Eric didn’t think that he would amount to anything and I did.”

  Regardless of how it happened, Hollingsworth was over the moon. He still has the letter from the restaurant’s human resources associate offering him the job. “It was the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.

  ONCE HE WAS ACCEPTED as a finalist for Orlando, Hollingsworth’s first order of business had been to identify a commis, the assistant whose success would help determine his own and, if he won, that of Team USA.

  He had heard some buzz about a young cook at Bouchon, Keller’s bistro down Washington Street from The French Laundry, and gave the kid a shot, but friction ensued. Hollingsworth is too polite to say much more than “his personality wasn’t a good match for me to be working with day in and day out, side by side, for something that was so important.”