Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  “Don’t let me forget to take pictures,” he said to Guest, remembering Pelka’s e-mail from the previous day. “We have to send them to,” he paused here for comedic effect, “The Corporation.”

  Then Hollingsworth left to check on something two doors down Washington Street, at The French Laundry. As soon as he was gone, Guest, who was slicing carrot ribbons on a mandoline, stopped working, walked into the living room, squatted down next to the sound system, and lowered the volume considerably, a benign violation of the chain of command.

  BY MID-A FTERNOON, A NUMBER of preparations were ready to be finished and tasted. Hollingsworth removed the pressure-cooker lid from the beef. After the accumulated steam was released, and the meat had been allowed to rest and absorb some of the flavorful cooking liquid, he fished out a piece of beef cheek with a pair of tongs, set it on his cutting board, seasoned it with salt and pepper, cut a piece, tasted it, and grinned like a little kid.

  “That’s my mom’s beef stew,” he said.

  Apart from this comment, there was virtually no personal chit-chat; what little talk there was was related to the task list.

  Moving right along, Hollingsworth heated a sauté pan, added some oil, and seared the three seasoned oxtail pieces to the tawny color of well-done bacon, periodically draining the fat from the pan. He then returned the beef cheeks’ cooking liquid to the pressure cooker, added the oxtail, and snapped the lid back into place. The oxtail would fortify the liquid, which would become the basis for the meat platter’s sauce. For the moment he did not plan to incorporate the oxtail itself on the platter, for the simple reason that he didn’t have an idea for how to use it. It was a risky decision because judges who noticed the absence of the cut might be inclined to penalize him for this end run.

  Guest, meanwhile, had baked the potato dauphinoise to a deep golden brown, the cream bubbling up around the edges between the potato and the pan, and had chilled it in the freezer to make it easier to manipulate. She had moved on to making pommes Maxim: punching out one-and-a-quarter-inch circles out of sliced potatoes, tossing them with clarified butter, seasoning them with salt, arranging them in an overlapping circle, and baking them in the oven between two weighted Silpats, which browned and fused them together.

  Hollingsworth pulled the potato dauphinoise from the freezer and composed the garnish he had in mind: punching out a cylinder of potato and setting it atop a pommes Maxim, wrapping that in carrot ribbons, top-ping it with a daisywheel of black truffles, and topping the composition with a hard-boiled quail egg.

  Late in the day, Keller himself dropped in to say hello and check in. Seeing the pommes dauphinoise wrapped in carrot, he smiled and said, “That is really French.”

  Hollingsworth took note of the comment. He knew it meant something, but wasn’t sure what, and the chef took off before he could probe him for more feedback.

  The team tried a few other preparations that afternoon. Hollingsworth fashioned a light truffle hollandaise, transferred it to an ISI gun, and attempted a version of the smoke garnish with leek puree, a stewed beef cheek cube, and pickled pearl onion. They added smoke with The Smoking Gun, an electric pipe manufactured by PolyScience featuring a carburetor that one lit, and a button that forced the smoke through a long tube.

  They covered the bowl for a few minutes, then removed the lid and tasted: the smoke wasn’t especially prevalent, so nothing really pulled together the flavors of the beef cheeks and the sweet vegetables, and the puree was too loose.

  But Hollingsworth wasn’t really focused on the smoke glass. He couldn’t get his mind off the pommes dauphinoise. He unwrapped the carrot and topped the potato cylinder with a turned carrot and a pickled pearl-onion layer.

  Hollingsworth rested his hands on the table, a pose he lapses into when he’s frustrated, when his thinking isn’t clear. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he felt adrift, unsure of himself and his decisions.

  Guest left him alone and started scrubbing the pans in the sink.

  After they cleaned up for the night, Hollingsworth went for a drive to clear his head, then home to Napa. He fulfilled his reporting duties, sending a lengthy e-mail (typed by Laughlin) and several digital photographs of the day’s haul to the committee, then he plopped down on the couch and cracked open his sketchpad. He also leafed through those books he’d picked up over Thanksgiving, skimming for inspiration.

  But he found himself unmoved. Worse, he was confused. And then it hit him: the food in those books might have been beautiful, but it was only beautiful because it was different. “It is not American and not what you would typically do,” he thought to himself.

  In retrospect he felt he understood what Keller had meant by his comment earlier in the day—“That is really French.” He thought that The Chef was trying to tell him: “Tim, you know deep down inside [that this is not you], so why do you go and do something that is not you? Why aren’t you being yourself?”

  Hollingsworth slammed the books closed, pushed them aside, and broke out his copy of The Flavor Bible, the new book by Dornenburg and Page, whose earlier Culinary Artistry had gotten him through those menu meetings during his formative years at The French Laundry. He thumbed it to death that night, looking up possible accompaniments for caviar, for cod, for scallops, and for any number of ingredients, both assigned and elective, that he had been grappling with.

  He stayed up until three in the morning like that, filling his head with new ideas, sketching them in his notebook, getting ready for the next day, a day in which—if nothing else—he would cook from the heart.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17 WAS a sunny day in Yountville, with temperatures in the mid-fifties. On his morning e-mail review, Hollingsworth received a note from Kaysen, responding to the update and photographs with a characteristically friendly and supportive missive. But it also contained a question that all but screamed out at him: “Can you explain the garnishes in the pictures for me please … what am I looking at?”

  What am I looking at?

  WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

  For Hollingsworth, the query reinforced the epiphany of the night before: he was drifting too far from the food he wanted to make, veering into the land of nonsensical flourishes. “It’s really important that I believe in the food and that I’m comfortable with it,” he said, sounding as sure of himself as he had since winning in Orlando. “I can’t even tell you how impossible it would be for me to serve the pommes dauphinoise with carrot wrapped around it.”

  By 11:00 a.m., a sense of déjà vu permeated the Bocuse House as Hollingsworth and Guest were back at it. Once again, he braised beef cheeks, which he sliced and put into a sous-vide bag with maple syrup, then steamed in the oven. The utility of developing and practicing on the Bocuse d’Or equipment was fast becoming apparent: it was taking Hollingsworth some time to get used to the oven. Each time he opened the door to check on the meat, he had to jerk his head back to avoid a face full of hot steam, not the kind of thing you want to have happen when you’re being observed on the world stage.

  And, as was the case the day before, there was a steady stream of music DJ’d by Hollingsworth, only now it was being piped out of a Bose iPod dock he had brought in and stationed in the kitchen.

  As Eminem sang about his daughter, Haley, Hollingsworth butchered a whole cod. Although Guest moved quickly in these sessions, Hollings-worth butchered the cod more slowly than he normally would, using the opportunity to take the fish apart as a chance to imagine the possibilities of what he might do with it. He still didn’t have that fish centerpiece finalized, and he hoped—to no avail on this day—that the intimacy of butchering might deliver inspiration.

  Guest meanwhile was preparing the potato garnish Hollingsworth was considering for the fish platter, a potato mille-feuille—similar in construct to the dauphinoise, but made by brushing each potato layer with butter, seasoning them with salt, and inserting overlapping strips of bacon every five layers. She moved even faster on this day than she had
the day before. Maybe it was because Robert Plant was screeching “Whole Lotta Love” in her ears.

  As Mickey Avalon’s hardcore rap anthem, “Waiting to Die,” shook the kitchen, Guest also retried the pommes dauphinoise; yesterday’s were too creamy, the layers slid apart and were hard to punch out. Though this was how Hollingsworth had first made it at home, it wasn’t the desired effect for competition. This time, she weighed all the ingredients, even the salt, to track and adjust and be precise. “Otherwise you’re just guessing,” she said. She also used only cream, with no milk, and omitted the black pepper, which Hollingsworth realized marred the truffle’s flavor. (In time, he would also omit the garlic.)

  Around 2:00 p.m., Hollingsworth sliced a few wedges from the previous day’s dauphinoise and set them aside. He then heated some olive oil in a sauté pan and added some spinach, working it with a silver spoon as it wilted. He sliced some meat from the leftover oxtail from the day before, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and topped it with some grain mustard. This he put between slices of bread, set on a plate, and spooned spinach and potato cake alongside. It wasn’t a garnish: it was lunch for him and Guest. Even this kitchen had its version of a family meal.

  Guest was ready to move on to her Silpat work for the day. Among the garnishes they would be trying was another new one: Hollingsworth had moved on from the custard “stacks” that were part of his first dish conception, but still wanted to include some kind of custard: it was a luxurious and versatile component and one that Guest could make. By now, he envisioned a custard, made unconventionally with eggs but no dairy, and flavored with Champagne vinegar, that would be presented in individual glasses. The custard would be topped with a small amount of intensely flavored shrimp consommé. (He planned to use shrimp consommé in competition but because there was always lobster glace on hand at The French Laundry, that’s what he used in this and subsequent practices.) Until he could think of a shrimp-focused garnish, he would add chopped shrimp to the consommé for the sake of using them. A melba topped with sliced scallops and sized to hover high in the glass would complete the composition. In addition to the flavor, Hollingsworth was attracted to the idea of having an inch or so of space between the melba and the custard—his understated way of playing the competition game.

  Hollingsworth used French Laundry shorthand to describe the melba toast he had in mind: “Just like the garlic melba, but light.” Guest knew that this meant to adapt a melba they used at the restaurant, leaving off the garlic and parmesan. So she set to work, slicing thin mushroom-shaped slices from a loaf of brioche, punching out circles, layering them between Silpats, weighting them, and baking them to the exact desired degree of color and crunch; just thirty seconds too long and they would be over-cooked and have a burnt flavor. If they were cooked too little, they might lack the fortitude to support the sliced scallops they had to carry, or to survive the hang time over the steaming hot liquid, which threatened to wilt them.

  Over the course of the afternoon, they made several garnishes:

  For the fish platter there were:

  The custard: Hollingsworth sliced a raw scallop into thin rounds and overlapped them in a circular pattern over a brioche melba, then set that in the glass high above the custard, finishing it with a quenelle of Petrossian caviar; and

  The mille-feuille: Once Guest had baked and cooled it, Hollingsworth unmolded it and cut out a rectangle with angled ends, topping the piece with crème fraîche and a quenelle of caviar.

  For the meat platter, there were:

  The revised pommes dauphinoise: A rectangle of the potato preparation was set on a rectangular pommes Maxim, the browned top layer trimmed and decorated with chestnut and a salad of shaved celery, green celery leaves, and cutting celery (a microgreen);

  The smoke glass: into the orb that everybody loved went apple puree topped with a tornado-like twirl of bresaola, a brunoise of cabbage, and a chiffonade (long, thin strips) of quick-pickled pearl onion.

  The deconstructed beef stew: a punched-out turnip round (made by pushing a cookie-cutter-like tool through a slice of the vegetable) topped with a cube of stewed beef cheek, then small buttons of punched-out carrots threaded on a thyme sprig and perched horizontally, and pickled pearl onion … before tasting that, Hollingsworth put another cube on a paper towel to its left, topped it with broccolini florets and stem segments and pickled pearl-onion layers. He professed a preference for the look of the second one.

  Hollingsworth felt better about this day’s work product. In comparison to the carrot-wrapped potato concoction, the one he had just made—with the celery salad and chestnut on top—pleased him both as a chef and as a potential eater. “That looks like something I want to eat,” he said. “The other one does not.”

  Guest agreed with her chef’s assessment of the prior day’s experiment. “There’s just no purpose to it,” she said. “Especially the carrot.”

  Nothing was completely nailed down, and there remained a number of issues unique to the competition: for example, the brioche melba had become soggy after just twelve minutes of resting over the steam of the hot consommé, which wouldn’t be a concern in a restaurant, but at the Bocuse d’Or, with that lag time, could prove fatal.

  Nonetheless, he was getting warmer. “Once you have one really good thing on a dish it’s easy to support those good things. So now it’s going to be about going home and defining, finalizing a couple of things, even though they might change.”

  Despite his growing optimism, once he stopped working, it dawned on Hollingsworth with alarming quickness that he was bone-tired, and the exhaustion spread through him like a cancer on the way back to Napa—his eyelids were at half-mast, at best, and he felt his shoulders slumping. He pulled off the highway and knocked back a coffee from Starbucks, but that didn’t do the trick; back home, in his living room, sitting at the table by the front door, trying to hone his concepts, he felt the claws of slumber reaching up though the floor of his apartment, pulling his head down. Fighting for a few more hours of consciousness, he bolted out the front door and sprinted around the block, but it was useless; no amount of stimulation could revive him. He returned to the table, his notebook open before him, but failed to think, his head tumbling forward, then snapping back up in quick bursts of barely deflected sleep.

  “Go to bed,” implored Laughlin.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Go. To. Sleep.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Go to sleep and wake up early.”

  “Yeah, like that’ll happen.”

  But eventually, Hollingsworth did give in and go to sleep, feeling, for one of the first times in his life, the limits of his stamina, throwing in the towel on a day in which his to-do list exceeded the time he could find, or make, in which to get it done. This was no small matter. Forget the competitors he’d face in Lyon. Forget the judges and the notoriously noisy crowds. He was locked in a struggle with something bigger than all of that, a test of his creative powers and technical skill, his ability to apply all that he knew in an unfamiliar context, his readiness to step forward as a chef in his own right, to emerge from the cocoon of The French Laundry and his role as sous chef, holding forth two platters that announced, “Here, world, this is me. This is who I am and what I stand for.”

  No wonder he was tired. He was growing, and growth depletes the body and fatigues the mind of a full-grown man just as it does a small child. And there was something else, something he’d been keeping at bay, but that must have been taking its psychic toll as well: the next day, at 6:00 p.m., The Chef, Thomas Keller himself, the most acclaimed culinary figure in the United States, the one Hollingsworth had worked for his entire adult life, would be visiting the Bocuse House to taste his Bocuse d’Or dishes for the first time.

  It was enough to make anybody pass out.

  CULINARY GARDENER TUCKER TAYLOR’S name doesn’t appear on the menu at The French Laundry, but he has a hand in just about every dish served there, especially on the “Tast
ing of Vegetables” that’s offered as an option to the “Chef’s Tasting Menu.”

  On Thursday, December 18, Timothy Hollingsworth parked his SUV in front of the Bocuse House and walked across the street to meet with Taylor for a farm tour. The purpose was to see what was gestating in the hoop house, and might be ready in time for Lyon. He had a look at some fennel and beets, but was most impressed by the turnips—pristine white, with smooth skin and brilliant green leaves. He had an appreciation for the turnips, having taken the time to learn about gardening over his years at The French Laundry, both from Taylor, who occasionally loaned him books on the subject, and from Peter Jacobsen, proprietor of nearby Jacobsen Orchards, which provides produce to a number of Keller’s properties. He knew that it was the soil, the unrocky soil, that allowed them to grow into such perfect little orbs. He tasted the turnips raw, and tasted them cooked. He tasted the greens. He found the flavor clean, nutritious even. One of his secret weapons for the Bocuse d’Or, he figured, was the produce grown at The French Laundry—“You can’t buy that” was how Hollingsworth described the flavor.

  After the farm tour, Hollingsworth and Guest spent the afternoon cooking, getting ready for The Chef’s visit later that day. Befitting an emerging theme, the music reflected the mood with a mix of reflective rock, such as “Epiphany” by Staind followed closely by Metallica’s “One.”