Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  The one illustrative transaction Hollingsworth did volunteer is what might be aptly dubbed The Turnip Incident. He asked the commis to turn a turnip, a simple enough task—cutting a turnip down to a sharply angled football shape. But turning isn’t just about shaping. Even though this turnip wasn’t bound for the dining room, a turned turnip, in the chef’s mind, has certain connotations no matter where it is headed: it should be immaculate, it should be thoroughly peeled, and the edges should be as defined as a D flawless diamond.

  Instead, the cook brought him a turnip to which traces of peel were still attached, along with a few coffee ground–sized particles of dirt.

  This alienated Hollingsworth. “What you bring to me is a reflection on yourself … it reflects on you and what you think of me,” said Hollingsworth. This wasn’t the first time he’d encountered a cook who perceived a difference between dress rehearsal and performance, but it irked him fiercely. “They show me something and I will be, like, ‘You are going to show me something and tell me, “Well, I will do it differently next time?” ’ ”

  The monologue was a perfect illustration of the influences of his two fathers—the professional father, Keller, and his talk of precision as a way of life, not something that can be switched on and off, and his all-but-biological father, Quentin Hollingsworth, pointing out subpar workmanship and saying, “We don’t do that.”

  Such is the culture of mutual respect within the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group that, despite his frustrations, Hollingsworth wasn’t willing to unceremoniously dismiss the commis, especially since it was he who had invited the cook to join him in the Orlando adventure in the first place. He spoke to Corey Lee about his predicament, then to The Chef. Both supported his need to captain his own ship. At Keller’s suggestion, Hollingsworth called Phil Tessier, chef de cuisine of Bouchon, and explained the situation, then met with the commis in what became a ninety-minute conversation that Hollingsworth wanted to be as constructive as possible.

  But first, he had surreptitiously begun the hunt for a new commis. One of The French Laundry’s chefs de partie, Rodney Wages, who worked the fish station at the time, pointed him toward Adina Guest, a commis at the Laundry who had come on for a three-month externship and was hired as an official employee two months in based on her strong performance and because a position had opened up. Hollingsworth had had very little interaction with Guest, and in fact had only recently realized she was American. Her face, with its round, somewhat sunken cheeks, and the halting cadence of her voice led him to believe that she was European, maybe Swiss. He wasn’t too far off: Guest’s mother, Katrin, is Swiss by birth and she and her younger sister Arielle had lived in Switzerland for a time. “You looked at her, and the first thing you thought was: Heidi,” said Frank Leake, who instructed Guest at Kapi’olani Community College, and whom Guest considers a mentor.

  Hollingsworth had taken note of Guest before. Believing that you can tell if somebody has the right stuff, or at least the right attitude, almost at first sight he appreciated her head-down determination and respect for the chain of command.

  He also believed that she had talent. One of the preparations the commis are regularly charged with at The French Laundry is making chive chips—paper-thin slices of potato fused around a chive segment. The final product is plunged into truffle oil–infused custards served in an eggshell, one of The French Laundry’s signature offerings. Hollingsworth often came into the prep area with a linen-lined pan of freshly made chive chips in hand, pointing out why they had to be made over from scratch. There were any number of reasons why they might need to be redone: if there were air bubbles between the layers, if the chive wasn’t straight, if the chip wasn’t crispy, or maybe the color was off.

  One day, Guest made the chive chips: she shaved translucent potato slices on a mandoline, laying them on a Silpat (a nonstick baking mat made from fiberglass and silicone) brushed with clarified butter and sprinkled with salt; positioned a chive segment in the center of each slice; topped it with another potato slice; squeezed out the air; then topped it with another butter-and-salt treated Silpat. She pressed out any air bubbles, weighted the stack with press pans, and baked them in the oven. When they were done, she walked them out of the back into the main kitchen, and up to Hollings-worth.

  “Chef, if these are not all right, I’ll do them over,” she said.

  Hollingsworth scarcely looked at the chips.

  “Adina,” he said, “I can tell from here that those are fine. What I need you to do is show those other guys how to make them like that.”

  With The Turnip Incident firmly in mind, he asked Wages to take six carrots to Guest and tell her to turn them as fast as she could. When Wages found Guest, it was at the end of her day, and she was scrubbing the windows that looked out on the courtyard.

  “Am I going for perfection or for speed?” asked Guest. Ironically, though she had no idea what was behind the task, it was her competition experience that drove the question; she had participated in four competitions, both individual and team events, and the timing component of Wages’s command brought them to mind.

  Guest stopped cleaning the kitchen, switched gears, and went to work on the carrots, her hands dancing over them with the peeler, the knife cutting them into segments, then both hands working in harmony to turn and shave them down to the desired shape. Guest is an intense person and an intense worker, and her focus, especially when handed a specific task, is absolute. And she is fast.

  “Done!” she yelled. Just two minutes had elapsed.

  Wages gave nothing away, no sign of either disappointment or approval.

  “Keep cleaning,” he said, and she went back to work.

  Hollingsworth didn’t really care how many carrots Guest turned. What he wanted to see was whether she got it—did she peel the carrots thoroughly before turning them? Were they good and properly turned? Were they clean?

  The answer, on all fronts, was yes.

  Hollingsworth wasn’t surprised, because he’d seen Guest’s handiwork, and expected the level of perfection that The French Laundry demanded. Thomas Keller, in his introduction to The French Laundry Cookbook, set down one of the most famous lines ever inked in a recipe tome: “When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy. That’s what cooking is all about.”

  Keller says that he wrote that line “because everybody says, ‘Thomas Keller is this perfectionist.’ Over and over again it is what I hear: ‘Thomas Keller is a perfectionist.’ But I don’t necessarily believe that about myself. I am always striving to do a better job in the quest for perfection. Does that mean I am a perfectionist? I don’t know. It always bothered me. I wrote that phrase. This is it. This is what cooking is all about. Not to be perfect but to make people happy. At the end of the day that is what it is about. It can come from a quest for perfection in sourcing the best lamb. It can come from a quest for perfection in cutting the perfect brunoise. It can come from a quest for perfection in having the most beautiful china. At the end of the day what is it going to do? The plate is going to come and sit before you and you are going to eat it. And what do I want to have happen? I don’t want you to say, ‘Well, Goddamn, that Thomas Keller is a perfectionist.’ I want you to be happy with what you are eating.”

  The line is immortalized on plaques in the kitchens of The French Laundry and at Per Se, and even in Keller’s more casual establishments, and there’s an air of twelve-stepdom about it—the acknowledgment of a higher power and a lesser-known Alcoholics Anonymous mantra, the desire to achieve “progress not perfection.” Keller didn’t offer this connection, but any observer of kitchen culture will attest that chefs can be perfection junkies, criticizing themselves and their colleagues ad infinitum. On a day when ninety-nine things go right, they will home in on the one that went wrong. This makes for better cooks, but it can also be devastating to morale, as well as se
lf-esteem.

  “We have to be able say we really did a good job,” said Keller. “We have to be able to pat ourselves on the back. We have to be able to feel that we have achieved some level of success. We may not have achieved exactly what we wanted to do. We have to be able to feel confident and comfortable, too, and kind of celebrate our successes rather than continuously beating us down. That is my, I don’t want to say biggest fault, but I am constantly my worst critic.… You give me something that is amazing and I will try to find something wrong with it rather than telling you it is really a great dish.… It’s a hard thing being hard on yourself and how that translates to everyone around you. I have heard many times throughout my life, ‘Chef, can’t you tell us once in a while that we did a good job?’ ”

  “All I hear is, ‘You are not happy? You are not happy? Can’t you say you are happy once in a while?’ For the past several years, five years or so, I have been trying to say ‘yes’ and not at the same time try to encourage people to do better work. But acknowledge our successes …”

  Despite this philosophy from The Chef, there’s no shortage of talk about perfection at The French Laundry. Of those carrots and his selection of Guest to be his commis, Hollingsworth said, “Being in this environment you know the level of perfection that you have to do. You know that if you are turning a carrot or you are shucking fava beans or splitting peas. Whatever you are doing, it better be done correctly or something will be said to you. It’s not like you turn a turnip and there is still a little piece of peel. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

  Guest herself, though still a relative newbie, had already absorbed this aspect of life at The French Laundry. She had already attained a level of authority among the commis that required her sometimes to correct externs, or tell them to do a more efficient job with, say, their brunoise. She would sometimes get pushback, which she attributes to her youth and sex. This used to throw her, but now she has no hesitancy to demonstrate her own lightning-quick technique in order to make her point. She recognizes the importance of at least striving toward perfection because, as somebody once pointed out to her, “People are getting charged $250 [actually $240] per [meal]. You are here to learn. This is how we do it, so I expect you to do it like this from now on and push yourself to do better.… It’s one of the best motivational things to say. Yes, of course all 100 of those arugula leaves have to be perfect. There is no point in arguing, ‘Oh, it’s just arugula’ or ‘That’s just a bug bite.’ Pick the better arugula.”

  Minutes after delivering her carrots to Hollingsworth, Wages told Guest to report to the chef’s office, a glassed-in cubicle with a sliding door, right next to the kitchen. Inclined to be hard on herself—she routinely sits on the edge of her bed at night agonizing over what she might have done better throughout her day, whom she could have been kinder to, or what she could have improved in her work—Guest naturally assumed that she had failed some kind of test.

  “So, I guess you know I’m doing the Bocuse d’Or,” said Hollingsworth.

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “Would you like to do it with me?”

  “Yes, totally!” she said without hesitation.

  The commis could scarcely believe it, especially because she knew there was another commis on board. But more than that, she loved competing. “It is in my blood,” she said. “It pushes me to the extremes and challenges me to be a better cook, a better person, a better everything.”

  She left the office and headed back to work; the Game Face slipped out of place for a moment, but she had righted it by the time she got back to her colleagues.

  IN PREPARATION FOR ORLANDO, Hollingsworth and Guest practiced in the evenings on days when Hollingsworth worked a lunch service, commandeering the prep kitchen of The French Laundry and starting when the hot line went into dinner service. It made for endless days, which affected them differently: Hollingsworth, accustomed to cook’s hours and raised in a double-shift environment, had no problems with it. Guest, who had never worked service and freely admits to needing a full night’s sleep, found it tiring, but the adrenaline sustained her.

  The intensity of such a working relationship, and the sweet nectar of victory in Orlando, might have made for a quick friendship in other scenarios, but Hollingsworth was careful not to let things get too casual between himself and Guest because, when it was all over, he’d need to go back to being a sous chef at The French Laundry and she’d need to go back to being one of the commis. There was no room for an intimacy that would make it difficult for him to give orders to her the same way he did to anybody else, or for others to feel that there was favoritism in his treatment of her. The chain of command had to be preserved above all else.

  Besides, after they’d won in Orlando, they were back home, and weren’t spending much time together. Though the Bocuse d’Or USA had publicized a paid three-month sabbatical for the chef-candidate, Hollings-worth wasn’t ready to jump off The French Laundry ship just yet. First he wanted to spend some time getting his head around the competition. And while he was prepared to train mightily, he wasn’t ready to abandon his job. It might have been different if he’d known back in, say, January, that he was going to audition for the part—then Lee could have taken the necessary steps to prepare for his absence. “If I said, ‘Tomorrow I am going to quit my job, I want to give my notice,’ my notice is not a month. It’s not three months, either. It’s six months. It’s a year. It’s a very respectful time that you give to leave your job and your position,” he said. Hollingsworth had given this topic some thought about this time because he had privately considered leaving The French Laundry, most likely for an extended stay in Thailand to chill out and recharge, but had decided against it.

  About the sabbatical, Thomas Keller said the idea was born out of an abundance of excitement, and because he and other committee members had heard about how intensely some Europeans trained. “We weren’t thinking of it practically, realistically … we didn’t think it out very well,” he said. Echoing this sentiment, Corey Lee said, “I think that the Bocuse d’Or organizers highly publicized that there would be this time given to this candidate was a little bit unrealistic and very poorly planned … there’s no fine-dining restaurant in the world who can replace a significant sous chef in two months. When that came out I think everyone knew that was an unrealistic thing.… I don’t think there was a question in anyone’s mind that he wouldn’t have that opportunity to take a full three-and-a-half months off … the American selection process was way too close to the actual competition.”

  For Hollingsworth, staying on was an unspoken expectation. His commitment to his job had always been unflagging; in seven years, he had only asked for an extra day off once, to attend his brother’s wedding. So after Hollingsworth won in Orlando, he and Lee hashed out an arrangement for an extra four days off per month for him and Guest in October, November, and December. Conveniently, The French Laundry would be closed for most of January, as it is every year, so the three weeks leading up to the competition were wide open.

  The shift in plans was essentially concealed from the public and the competition. “I’ve been helping out,” was how Hollingsworth was directed to answer media inquiries about his schedule. But members of the Bocuse d’Or committee said they were fine with it. “We were thinking like that [having a three-month sabbatical] because we were having a candidate coming from who-knows-where and we had to put him somewhere in a boot camp, but he [Hollingsworth] was already in the camp there,” said Boulud.

  Moreover, Hollingsworth wanted to conceive his Bocuse d’Or food where he’d done just about everything else related to cooking for the past seven years, not just where he honed his craft, but also where he’d helped shape and execute new menus on a daily basis. As a manager-level staff member, he was confident he’d be able to carve out time in his day to devote to the Bocuse d’Or. “Every day that you are in that kitchen cooking, you are training,” he said. “I am thinking about the menu when I am turning carrots. I am
thinking about the menu when I have free time to try to do something that I want to work on.” Hollingsworth also planned to incorporate ideas for his competition food into the restaurant’s menu when possible, trying them out in a real-world context.

  Hollingsworth also needed time—a lot of time—to think about his menu. The style of cooking that wins the Bocuse d’Or and other competitions, with very few exceptions, was almost antithetical to the mindset he’d been honing at The French Laundry, where the daily menu comprises a series of compositions that are elegant but rarely elaborate: the quality of the ingredients and the finesse of the staff are such that a few perfectly cooked vegetables, a piece of protein, and a jus, unfussily arranged, are one possible equation for a meat course.

  “He knows how to execute our food,” said Devin Knell, executive sous chef of The French Laundry. “It is a big challenge to learn how to cook [competition food].… Our food is: one, ingredients; two, flavor composition; and three, execution.… We don’t try putting so many cooking techniques into one dish to show off. We are trying to do the best we can with a piece of striped bass.”

  Translation: Thomas Keller might just want to make people happy, but when those people happened to be the Bocuse d’Or judges, there would only be one way to achieve that: perfection.

  ROLAND HENIN, VETERAN CULINARY competitor and coach, understood this only too well. He also believed that Hollingsworth’s learning curve would be steep. Henin hadn’t tasted Hollingsworth’s winning dishes in Orlando, but he had seen them: “The presentation in Orlando was pretty simplistic, to be nice,” he said later. “The taste of the food is what carried them in Orlando and I believe strongly that it is the taste of the food that will carry them [in Lyon]. Whether or not it will carry them all the way to the top it is difficult to call. I am not sure.”

  With all of that in mind, Henin was fashioning a month-at-a-glance training schedule that assumed Hollingsworth and Guest would be available full time. It was an aggressive plan that called for developing “tentative menus with first and second options” the week of Monday, November 3, then spending the following week honing the fish platter in the kitchen and the week after that doing the same with the meat platter. According to Henin’s vision, the team would actually serve guests in January, to provide them essential practice plating from the platters.