Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  The House had been somewhat hurriedly renovated, which led to a few idiosyncrasies: the ventilation system for the stove was positioned several feet away from the cooking surface rather than directly above it, and the area under the sink was not a finished cabinet but rather an open space that housed cleaning supplies and a garbage can behind a drab curtain. (This detail, above all others, nagged at Keller. “It really bothers me,” he said. Keller’s assistant Molly Ireland said that she knew when she and her colleagues put that curtain up that “it definitely was not French Laundry standard. How did we let that go?” Perfect food might be unattainable, but there clearly was a perfect curtain out there somewhere.)

  Hollingsworth and Kaysen—the present and most recent Bocuse d’Or USA candidates—sat down in the living room and got right down to business. They discussed the week on tap and the planning that would have to be done for Lyon. Rather than pushing Hollingsworth as he had anticipated doing, Kaysen adjusted his strategy and took the commiseration route; when Hollingsworth joked that second place in Orlando is the real winner (you get a cash prize and are done), Kaysen nodded: “It’s a problem. You feel like you won [but are just getting started].”

  They talked over the plan for January. Recently, a decision had been made that the team would spend two weeks in Lyon prior to the competition, envisioned as a period of settling in and performing two practices, a few days apart.

  “So the second practice and then what else do we do?” asked Hollings-worth.

  “That’s it. Otherwise we are in Lyon.”

  “Can we go and eat?”

  Kaysen nodded. “Go and eat. It’s really more to get your body adjusted to the time change because it’s going to take your body about eight days to be fully ready to go and feel comfortable. It’s funny: you walk around and all you see is Bocuse d’Or posters.” This was a reference to the promotional posters that each team was required to produce; Team USA’s poster had already been conceived and designed by Level, a five-person design firm that worked with Keller’s restaurants and on his books. The poster depicted Hollingsworth in the colors and style of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster that had become a fixture of the just-concluded campaign, from which the senator from Illinois had emerged victorious.

  “It’s crazy,” Kaysen continued. “You bring posters with you and you drop them off at restaurants. You go out to eat, when you pay your bill you say, ‘Oh, by the way, can you put my poster up?’ It’s a campaign.”

  Hollingsworth, not exactly an exhibitionist, received this information with a look of something less than enthusiasm.

  “Don’t worry, I will help you campaign. If you are too shy, I will take care of it. It’s fun. We had our posters all over.”

  Having finished her day at The French Laundry, Adina Guest arrived and the three of them walked across the street to the Garden, completely open to the public, without so much as a picket fence to keep locals and tourists from traipsing among the produce or plucking souvenir vegetables, which just doesn’t seem to happen. In the northwest corner of the field was a just-completed hoop house (similar to a greenhouse, but with no heaters), where The French Laundry’s Culinary Gardener Tucker Taylor and his team gave ingredients a head start during the winter, keeping them clear of the seasonal rains. Beyond that were the mountains that separate Napa and Santa Rosa. Two flag posts flying an American flag and a Relais & Châteaux flag stood tall in the middle of the field, between the first and second rows of beds.

  “When we work lunch, we sometimes sit on that bench over there and write menus,” said Hollingsworth.

  Kaysen laughed, imagining his urban setting back in Manhattan: “I write mine downstairs in the prep kitchen.”

  The trio walked along the patches surveying the produce: cabbage, pea tendrils, assorted herbs, petit lettuces, squashes (still the summer varieties), assorted greens, and the last of the tomatoes and peppers for the year. One bed also held a plentitude of tiny fraises des bois (alpine strawberries)— Kaysen knelt down, held the stem of a berry in one hand and with the other twisted the fruit off the vine. He popped it into his mouth, its nova of flavor a reminder of a season that was a distant memory in New York.

  Kaysen shook his head. “It’s November and you are eating fraises des bois …”

  With the waning sunlight throwing long shadows across the scene and a cool breeze coasting in over the mountains, the members of Team USA seemed more like contented suburbanites in search of a porch and a six-pack than competitors less than three months away from the battle of their lives.

  JOSEPH VIOLA WOULD BE right at home on a movie screen: his piercing eyes, stubbly beard, and receding hair slicked neatly back suggest the vaguely familiar, slightly unreadable presence of a veteran character actor—he could be the benevolent college professor or the next Bond villain.

  Viola, the chef Boulud had hired to tutor Hollingsworth in all things Bocuse d’Or, arrived at the Bocuse House, rolling garment bag in tow, on Monday morning, November 17, having slept off his transatlantic, transcontinental flight in a San Francisco hotel. Kaysen and Hollingsworth were already there, dressed for work—Hollingsworth in a French Laundry jacket with his name emblazoned on the left breast, black slacks, and black leather clogs; Kaysen in a crisp jacket, freshly ironed by his own hand in his temporary quarters at the Green House, one of the properties owned by Keller and company within walking distance of The French Laundry and the Bocuse House. (Guest was attending a wine seminar by day during this week, so would join the group in the evenings.)

  Hollingsworth speaks a modicum of French from some community college courses and from a brief stage at Lucas Carton in Paris, but is far from conversant, so the introductions were stilted, with Viola directing most of his attention to French-fluent Kaysen.

  Viola, too, produced a chef’s jacket from his bag: it bore the name of his restaurant, Daniel et Denise, with a 2004 MOF symbol on the chest—the symbol carries great meaning in France, shorthand for Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, a coveted designation that means one of the “best workers (or craftsmen) of France.” It’s one of the highest honors a French chef can attain and was the inspiration for the certified master chef program in the United States, though it is much more well known in its home country.

  Viola changed into his working clothes, and the trio gathered in the kitchen around the rolling prep tables. Time was short, as Viola would be returning to Europe Tuesday morning, so they got right down to business, breaking out color copies of past prizewinning Bocuse d’Or platters, notebooks, and file folders.

  Viola began talking to Kaysen in French. After a few sentences, Kaysen translated for Hollingsworth: “We were talking about the garnish. You should, when you’re tasting it, first, close your eyes. Don’t look at your garnish. Blindfold Roland, and let Roland taste it. If it’s not the explosion that he wants, then you worry about the taste. Because everything’s about the taste. The presentation is not as important as is the flavor. Then when you start to do the platters, take six of the garnishes [meaning one of each], taste six of them right away, hot. Then wait five minutes, see how they taste. If it has the same exclamation point as when they’re hot, you’re good. If it doesn’t have the same flavor when they’re warm or cold—which is what they’re going to be—then we have to adjust it.”

  This confirmed, once again, that the lag time between presentation and plating at the Bocuse d’Or was a real hurdle, that as good as the food had to be, it also had to be good cold. Viola suggested using a heating blanket to warm the silver platter before plating the food, so that there would be less time for it to cool off. (Unbeknownst to Hollingsworth, by this time, in Sweden, his old housemate Jonas Lundgren had hit on an even better solution, fitting a battery-powered heating element between the top and bottom panels of his platters, generating just enough warmth to keep the food hot without further cooking it.)

  Next, Viola studied photographs of the food Hollingsworth had presented in Orlando, then spoke to Kaysen, who nodded in agreem
ent, explaining that Viola had said how important it was for the visuals of the platter to be perfect, with uniformity of the garnishes.

  “Like if you want to do a baby turnip in olive oil,” said Kaysen, “all of the tips have to be the exact same way, and the same height.” Kaysen pointed to the trimmed green tips of the turnips in the photograph which, while attractively presented, were not in Bocuse d’Or–worthy military formation. “You spend all this time turning a turnip, and doing it perfect and then you have some going here and some going here. Just on the tip, when they look at it across the platter, they all have to be like this—” He touched the stems on the photo in quick succession, saying, “Boom. Boom. Boom.” It was fitting that Viola had focused on the turnips, the same ingredient that had exposed the gap between Hollingsworth and his original commis; now they symbolized the learning curve before Hollingsworth himself as he pursued the Bocuse d’Or.

  Viola pointed to the society garlic blossoms, the edible flowers that garnished the barigoule bread pudding on Hollingsworth’s Orlando platter.

  “Tim-oh-see,” he said, speaking directly to the candidate in broken English, as though addressing a child. “Be careful. Flowers …” He shook his head gravely. “No.”

  Hollingsworth’s head recoiled in surprise. Kaysen and Viola conferred.

  “A judge will ask himself if the flower’s edible,” said Kaysen. “If to him it doesn’t make sense, he won’t eat it.”

  “Why would he think it wasn’t edible?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “You have twenty-four different nationalities,” said Kaysen. “So, if the guy from Singapore doesn’t eat it because it has a flower on it because he doesn’t think the flower is edible, then you lose one judge. Know what I mean? That’s the hard part. You have to think worldly at that point.”

  Hollingsworth seemed annoyed. “Everything is edible.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people put things on the platter that aren’t edible.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  Kaysen showed Viola a picture of the artichoke gratin with Hawaiian blue prawns, a garnish that impressed many of the judges in Orlando, so much so that a number of them had made a point of mentioning it to Coach Henin.

  Viola spoke to him in French.

  “He says that’s a very good garnish, but for the finals of the Bocuse d’Or … it won’t work.”

  Hollingsworth was beginning to get the picture. “Not good enough,” he said.

  “Not good enough,” confirmed Kaysen. “It needs finesse.”

  It was an interesting word choice, because like that language about unattainable perfection, there are smaller plaques situated around the kitchens of The French Laundry and Per Se that remind those who work there of crucial elements in their collective success, such as “Sense of Urgency,” and “Finesse.”

  Hollingsworth spoke to Kaysen: “Ask him what the deal is with items on the plate and a vehicle, like a serving vessel.” Hollingsworth was thinking about the candy dish cum smoke glass that he and Kaysen had been dialoguing about, and which would have to go on a little saucer beside the main plate come serving time.

  Viola frowned, conferred with Kaysen.

  “He doesn’t really like it. All the chefs that have won have never taken the product and put it into something. You can use something as support to give it elevation.”

  “So it’s only one thing?”

  “It’s only one thing.” Kaysen located a color copy of Serge Vieira’s meat platters that won the gold in 2005: Royal Danish Veal Eight Ways à la Georges Roux. He pointed to a square-shaped potato garnish. “This is nothing but a pomme fondant. That’s it. But the cuisson is perfect. The seasoning is perfect.”

  Viola again spoke via Kaysen: “The easier the garnish is to lift off, the better off you are.”

  Something caught Hollingsworth’s eye: both Vieira’s fish and meat platter had potato preparations on them. At The French Laundry, where major ingredients are never repeated on a menu, this would be verboten. He asked about how such a redundancy would go over with the Bocuse judges.

  “It’s two different platters,” said Kaysen. “The fish platter comes out first. The jury for the meat does not judge the fish platter. They don’t make any notes on it. They have nothing to say.”

  The advice continued, with Viola free-associating and Kaysen interpreting:

  If you get down to the wire and you’re running out of time, don’t do everything “half-assed”; eliminate, say, a tuile and make what remains “perfect.” Kaysen editorialized that you often see chefs hurrying in the final minutes, sacrificing precision.

  You want your food to be complicated, but not “over the top.”

  Regarding the best mindset to take into the competition, Viola admonished Hollingsworth to imagine that, “It’s not the Bocuse d’Or. It’s not a competition. It’s not the people screaming. You’re cooking for twelve people only. You don’t go beyond that. You don’t take the stress and all the anxiety that goes beyond that. The second you put your platter down, everybody’s going to know you’re going to plate, and the music’s going to start.” Kaysen also warned him that the emcees will be talking about his food as he’s carving the protein and plating the garnishes. He needed to shut all that out.

  The garnishes aren’t judged as highly as the proteins.

  Viola also made a very dramatic show with his hands, holding them in the air like the pans of a scale. “If you have one platter that’s here [low] and one platter here [high], you lost. The one platter that’s here [low] will not let you win.”

  In just a few short minutes, Viola had revealed himself to be the very personification of the vagaries of the Bocuse d’Or: he understood the competition in his bones, and while he was trying his best to transmit his knowledge, it was an almost impossible task, full of contradictions (taste is all important … but your food better look perfect; keep it simple … but not that simple) and, of course, delivered in French.

  Then the group broke for a lunch from Bouchon Bakery, delivered by Carey Snowden at 12:30 p.m., sharp.

  AFTER LUNCH, THE CHEFS gathered in the living room and watched Canadian filmmaker Nick Versteeg’s documentary The Bocuse d’Or 2007, about that year’s Canadian team, on the flat-screen television mounted in the wainscoted entertainment center. The documentary follows the Canadian effort, from platter development through competition, and features interviews with other candidates, including Kaysen himself.

  Viola and Kaysen, the two guys in the room who had been to the Bocuse d’Or, watched platters float by on the television screen and critiqued them as only insiders could. (“There’s no work on that chicken.” “Stripes everywhere.”) To Hollingsworth, it wasn’t just that they were conversing in French, they were speaking an even more foreign language, competition-speak, the patois of the Bocuse d’Or.

  At one point, as Hollingsworth checked e-mails on his iPhone, Viola began talking to Kaysen about him as though he weren’t there: studying Hollingsworth’s face, Viola said, “C’est bien qu’il soit jeune.” It’s good that he’s young.

  “Il a vraiment une tête d’américain,” said Kaysen. And his face is very American. It was a reminder of the shifting times against which the 2009 Bocuse d’Or would play out. President-elect Obama would be inaugurated just one week before the competition began; the days of President George W. Bush, with its unfortunate slaps at Europe in general (for example, Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” dig of 2003) and France in particular (remember Freedom Fries?) were fast being forgiven. The continent that played home to the Bocuse d’Or was becoming more infatuated with an American politician than they had since the days of JFK’s Camelot.

  As the documentary reached its conclusion, and the audience cheered on the television screen, Kaysen shot up in his chair. “That takes me right back,” he said, sounding violated by the force of the flashback.

  A moment in the video had brought up another memory as well: the Canadian team
was ready right on time, their fish platter in the window, but the Norwegian team before them was ten minutes behind schedule. (Each team has a five-minute timeframe in which to present each platter although, curiously, the Bocuse d’Or technical file—the guidebook provided to candidates that includes the rules and regulations—does not specify, or even indicate, a penalty for going over.) By the time the Canadians’ food was served, seventeen minutes after completion, it was downright frigid.

  “Ice cold,” Kaysen said of the Canadians’ platter. “Once their platter sat and it went out it was no good. It was no good at all.”

  Norway did not medal that year, but it was awarded Best Fish, while Canada went home empty-handed. The episode illustrates a sore point among many longtime Bocuse d’Or observers, who feel that favoritism is showed to France and the home countries of frequent protein-providing sponsors, such as Norway.

  Kaysen didn’t think that there would be a moment like this at the 2009 competition. “I do believe, knowing Daniel and how he is, I don’t think that will happen this year.… I don’t think our food will sit this year at all …” Kaysen couldn’t say what exactly he thought Boulud would do, but he firmly believed that the irrepressible chef would have no problem rising from his chair on the competition floor and intervening to ensure fair play.