Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

For lunch that day, they had sandwiches from a nearby Pacific Blues. Hollingsworth dunked his onion rings in ranch dressing, which prompted an oddly relevant discussion of flavor combinations encountered in fast-food joints. As a kid, Hollingsworth had liked Maui Zaui pizza from the Round Table chain—a pie topped with ham, bacon, pineapple, tomatoes, and onions that he loved dunking in ranch dressing. He also discovered a bizarre delight one day when he dipped a French fry in a caramel sundae from McDonald’s—the hot crunch of the fry, the sweet caramel, the cool ice cream. It might sound like a surprising guilty pleasure for a guy who ended up a sous chef of The French Laundry, but he’s managed to apply the central combinations to his sophisticated surroundings: when the waiters at Bouchon ask him what condiment he wants with his fries, he orders crème fraîche. And, though he didn’t offer the comparison, the mille-feuille topped with crème fraîche and caviar that he was trying out for his fish platter had much in common with those culinary memories as well. (Hey, if Thomas Keller can make history from a visit to Baskin-Robbins, why couldn’t one of his sous chefs look to Round Table Pizza as a muse?)

  Aside from lunch, they stopped only to hang out briefly with a surprise visitor, Daniel Humm, executive chef of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, who was in the area to guest chef a holiday event at a Bay Area hotel.

  At four fifty-five, the sound of the front door being swung open was audible in the kitchen.

  Chef Keller, wearing his chef’s jacket and black slacks, entered, slipped off his clogs, and strolled right into the kitchen. His demeanor, as is often the case, was unassuming.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

  “Hi, Chef,” said Hollingsworth. “It’s going well. But we’re not quite ready. I heard you were coming later.”

  “You want me to come back?” said Keller, doing a convincing impression of a man with nothing else going on in his life.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, when?”

  “You could maybe taste in an hour.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll come back then.”

  For the next hour—as The Nationals’ CD, Mansion on the Hill, washed over the kitchen—Hollingsworth and Guest worked in total silence. As Hollingsworth butchered beef, Guest pulled all the delis (cook-speak for plastic, Tupperware-like containers) from the past few days, all the items and components that had been prepped in anticipation of this evening. Hollingsworth made a custard with clarified butter, eggs, Champagne vinegar, and xanthan gum (a thickener). Then, as he cut pommes dauphi-noise and mille-feuille into rectangles, Guest blanched broccolini florets and stalks and turnip rounds, sliced chive slivers, plucked celery leaves, stripped thyme sprigs of their leaves, and warmed clarified butter for heating vegetables.

  As the hour drew to a close, Hollingsworth put tarragon sprigs in the shellfish bouillon, gave a stir, then discarded them. He then cut the top off a small lemon, squirted a few drops of juice into the mixture and sniffed. He shaved the bresaola and prepared the smoke glass; there were already brunoised pearl onion and Granny Smith apple in the base, which he topped with the bresaola slices. He added a quail egg yolk to the smoker, topped it with the lid, added the smoke, then set the timer for three minutes, after which both he and Guest took spoons in hand and tasted.

  “More salt?” asked Guest.

  Hollingsworth nodded. Yes.

  Cooking for The Chef was no small matter. Keller was much more than an employer to Hollingsworth, who had basically grown up at The French Laundry. When the two worked side by side, Hollingsworth was continually awed by his talent and his precision. “You could just sit there and watch … watch him fillet a fish … anything he was doing, you wanted to watch him, because he was always doing it the way that you wanted to do it. I never saw him do anything wrong. I could never say his station is a little messy now. I could never say that about him,” he said.

  Hollingsworth was also among the last generation of cooks to witness Thomas Keller as a daily presence in the kitchen, before The Chef ascended to his current higher level of being. The young cook would check the schedule to see when The Chef was working because that was automatically more pressure. “You felt his presence and his pressure and the need to do your best whenever he was around,” said Hollingsworth. We [always] put pressure upon ourselves … but when he is around, he … pushes you to be even better.”

  Meet Keller today and his placid demeanor makes it difficult to imagine exactly what this must have been like, but front-and back-of-the-house veterans describe working alongside him as an honor that occasionally required thick skin. Keller wasn’t a constant screamer, the way some chefs can be, in those days, but “if something went wrong, the whole town of Yountville knew it,” said Benno.

  Keller also had a great deal of respect for Hollingsworth, even when the younger man was a commis. “He has always been the go-to guy,” said Keller. “Out of the teams he was always the strongest.”

  Told of the comment, Hollingsworth was surprised and gratified: “It doesn’t shock me but it’s not something that I have heard said aloud. I have always tried to be like that. I think that comes from my father, too, because I worked with him a lot as a kid and he was really intense to work for. So if he needed a tool or anything, I was always like, okay, what is he going to need? Okay, he is going to need a crescent wrench or this or that? I wanted to be one step ahead always.… That’s really carried on from construction … to being in the kitchen and wanting to be the person who is one step ahead. I know The Chef is going to ask for this, I am going to get it. Really being able to read someone.”

  Would he have read The Chef on this day? Would he put something in front of him that excited and pleased him? That made him … happy?

  He’d find out soon enough.

  AT 6:03, CHEF KELLER returned to the Bocuse House and again slipped off his clogs. Hollingsworth, who’d been exhibiting his surfer-level aura of carefree nonchalance all day, spun his head around so hard and fast it could have caused whiplash. Something that looked like panic seeped into his eyes and set his jaw on edge. He recovered immediately, looked at Guest, and they both nodded. They were ready.

  The first thing the team prepared was the current iteration of the smoker garnish, which Hollingsworth had adjusted overnight: he put some leek puree in the bowl, topped it with a maple-braised beef cheek cube (made by straining and reducing the beef’s cooking liquid, adding syrup, then glazing the cubes with the mixture), set a spinach ball on top and a soft-boiled quail egg, then fired some smoke into the glass.

  Keller stared at it, curiously, neutrally.

  “When are you going to put the smoke in?” he asked.

  “When the platter comes back.”

  Keller’s facial muscles tightened, indicating disappointment. “There’s something provocative about it smoking on the platter.”

  “I know. But it takes too long. The food gets too smoky.”

  Keller nodded. He suggested that maybe another kind of smoke would solve the problem, but he didn’t know what that might be. He lifted the lid and the smoke tumbled out, dissipated into the air. Keller tasted.

  “Who’s going to lift the lid?”

  “I’ll explain to the maitre d’ and he’ll have the servers do it.”

  Keller made a little muffled “mmm” sound and nodded, pondered.

  “The puree really absorbs the smoke,” said Hollingsworth.

  Keller thought for a moment longer, then spoke: “Maybe you could put an isomalt [a sugar substitute] disc so that everything below it doesn’t taste like smoke.” He hadn’t let go of that provocative smoke. “If you lose smoke, you lose drama.”

  Keller began sketching on a paper towel on the stainless-steel prep table.

  “I’d almost look for something …” he said as he rendered a rough cross section of the smoker, creating in pencil a mushy mound with a circle perched atop it.

  “… like a puree of apple or something. Bind it. Giving you the ability to top it. Like a panna cotta.”
r />   Hollingsworth considered this, but not for long because Keller moved on to the subject of the egg.

  “What if we deep-fried the egg?” asked The Chef. “It’s still kind of clunky. Is there any way to make it round and deep-fry it? The issue is how to make it stay crunchy forever, but we know that we can do that.”

  Keller didn’t actually know what the method to accomplish this might be, but as his organization had grown, populated by talent he doesn’t have to micromanage, he’s developed the opinion that no goal is out of reach— he has the time, funding, and resources to solve any riddle.

  “I think that would be fun,” Keller said.

  Keller held up one of the smoke glasses, and it became clear that he’d been mentally multitasking, reconceiving the garnish on a macro level as he’d been discussing the micro.

  “I think we need to coat the glass with parsley puree, or maybe coriander,” he said. “Liquefy it, put it in the glass, turn it. That would obscure it and you would have the pureed horseradish, apple, beets. As you eat it, you get the parsley off the side, or coriander or whatever. You get the flavor, texture, color, precision. I think it would be critical. Precision is critical.”

  Hollingsworth didn’t say much, but he wasn’t sure how much of this input he’d be able to use. The pureed green coating the glass was something that would have to be executed to perfection—on fourteen individual glasses (twelve for the judges plus one for the official photographer and one to serve as an example for the servers)—and it went well outside his comfort zone. He was also worried about what an obscuring coat of green would do to the smoke and lights effect he’d fallen in love with. Additionally, he hoped that The Chef wasn’t making any judgments about the lack of precision in the bowl. Despite his belief in being precise at all times, in this instance, he wasn’t going for precision; he was still stuck on flavors and how to get there. But that was a small matter; because after weeks of realizing, “I can’t smoke this; I can’t smoke that,” and becoming frustrated almost to the point of thinking nothing but a piece of meat could survive a turn in the bowl, the concept of the isomalt barrier was a potentially revolutionary one that gave Hollingsworth room to breathe as he honed the smoker garnish.

  As his sous chef turned all this over in his head, Keller shrugged and shifted into his aw-shucks informality: “Okay, I mean, that’s just some ideas.”

  Next up was the pommes dauphinoise. Guest browned a few potato wedges, presenting them to Hollingsworth on the prep table. Hollings-worth built a stack: pommes Maxim, topped with the pommes dauphi-noise, on one end he set a chestnut, on the other a celery salad, then he drizzled a little chestnut-infused clarified butter over the chestnut.

  Keller asked if it would be possible to slice the potato thinner and use it as a wrapping for other components. He asked Guest for plastic wrap, cut a narrow sheet and laid it on the table before him. He then cut a thin sheet of pommes dauphinoise from the pan, set a broccolini spear across the potato, and used the plastic like a sushi mat to roll it up. Then he twisted the ends of the plastic over and over, squeezing the contents into a cylindrical shape.

  “You can make it as big as you like and put the chestnut in the center,” he said.

  Next Hollingsworth assembled the deconstructed beef stew. Atop a punched-out circle of turnip, he set a punched-out circle of black truffle, a stewed beef cheek cube, and a baby beet wedge (inspired by his tour of the hoop house that morning), and topped them with broccolini florets and three small punched carrots speared on a stripped thyme sprig—an all-American composition singing with Northern California produce.

  Keller’s response was instantaneous: “It’s beautiful.”

  He studied it for a moment. “Why do you put the truffle on the bottom?”

  “It keeps the sauce off the turnip.”

  “Do you want to do truffle twice?” There it was, that French Laundry bias against repeating major flavors on the same plate.

  “Not necessarily. We’re still working that stuff out.”

  Keller popped the little tower into his mouth.

  “Mmmmm. It’s really good. I think the flavor of the turnip, carrot, and beef cheek is exceptional.”

  “What do you think of the size?”

  “Perfect. I wouldn’t get any bigger.”

  Keller continued to taste and think.

  “I like it,” he said. “It’s natural. It’s not manipulated. You don’t want everything to be manipulated.”

  The comment was a relief to Hollingsworth who not only had a personal preference for simple elegance, but with so little time in which to work, didn’t want to create platters with more places to fail than to succeed. Hollingsworth also took great pride in what happened next, or more precisely what didn’t happen next. As he and Guest prepared the first of the fish garnishes, Keller lowered himself to his knees. He rested his hands on the stainless table and stared at the empty plate that had held the deconstructed beef stew. He tilted his head from side to side, leaned back, thought some more.

  But he didn’t say a word.

  Hollingsworth took the silence to mean that The Chef couldn’t come up with a way to improve the garnish, and it was a good feeling.

  Keller popped a baby turnip from the table into his mouth and stood up.

  “So that’s the garnishes for the beef?”

  “Yes”

  “Is the fillet like we did it before?”

  “Yes.” (He hadn’t actually decided to use the bacon-wrapped tenderloin for sure, but didn’t want to worry The Chef with his lack of finality.) “Cod will be en persillade, with scallop mousse. Maybe diced shrimp.”

  Hollingsworth paused, sighed. “The côte de boeuf, I’m having a hard time with,” he said. “Anything beautiful I can think to do, like a showpiece, it won’t carve.”

  Keller nodded, but didn’t have an immediate suggestion to share.

  Hollingsworth next made the potato garnish for the fish platter: topping a rectangle of mille-feuille with caviar, a crème fraîche quenelle, and chive. The crème fraîche benefited from a subtle employment of molecular gastronomy: Hollingsworth whipped a little gellan gum into it, which kept it from melting on the hot potato.

  Keller took a bite. Then another.

  “That’s excellent,” he said. “Where’s the bacon from?”

  “Hobbs,” said Hollingsworth, which was French Laundry shorthand for Hobbs Shore, a Marshall, California charcutier who had just passed away on December 15.

  “Are you going to take this bacon with you?” asked Keller.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. The bacon over there is smokier.” Hollingsworth had heard this before, one of many references to the multitude of details that would have to be adjusted to on the ground in Lyon.

  “Maybe a bacon chip on top,” said The Chef. “Something that gives it some crunch.” The bacon chip was on Keller’s mind because Grant Achatz had just been in town to do a joint cookbook promotion with Keller, and had done a bacon chip as part of his meal. The chip is featured in his Alinea book, hanging dramatically from a wire.

  Hollingsworth put some scallop carpaccio on a melba. He set this on top of a glass featuring the custard and lobster glace. Keller asked him about the glass. Hollingsworth said he was thinking of using a clear glass.

  Keller tasted and made a so-so gesture with his hand.

  “The sauce is a little intense,” he said, then after a few more seconds, added, “and the shrimp are overcooked. You need to just drop them in.”

  Because he used to work at The Chef’s side at The Laundry, Hollings-worth understood what he meant by “intense.” The sauce wasn’t burnt-tasting, it was too strong, and the reference to just dropping the shrimp in meant they could go into the broth at the last second and would be cooked by the liquid.

  “Can we do anything else with the scallop? Like a mousse?” asked Keller.

  Again, Hollingsworth knew what The Chef meant. “He was referring to the scallops being sliced like that. A
nd eating the whole thing when the scallops are kind of sliced so … if I were to just puree it and add a little bit of crème fraîche or acid or whatever it is and spread it out; when you eat it you can take as much or as little as you want.”

  “We’ve done it raw,” said Hollingsworth. “We’ve done it cooked. I’m thinking about putting something between the scallop and the melba to keep it from breaking down.”

  “Nuts,” said Keller, all but snapping his fingers at the thought. “Toasted, chopped nuts. I’m thinking about ease of eating. How are they going to get all that in their mouth at one time?”

  Keller asked what was in the custard and Hollingsworth told him it was clarified butter, eggs, Champagne vinegar, and xanthan gum. He was also thinking of simplifying the custard recipe, using a more conventional and easier-to-make blend of eggs, milk, and cream, flavoring it with agrumato oil, a lemony oil made by pressing lemons and olives together.

  “You need something on top of the scallop. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  “What about kumquats?” said Keller. “Kumquats are in season. Or just the skin. You can brunoise the skin.”

  They discussed the bowl. “It’s going to be on the fish platter, which is porcelain,” said Hollingsworth. “Silver and porcelain might be nice.”

  “We can have it made,” said Keller, who again pulled out his notebook and wrote in it.

  Keller and Hollingsworth walked over to the kitchen counter next to the sink and opened The French Laundry Cookbook to page 252: a picture of a Roquefort trifle in a funneled glass (like a martini glass minus the stem) that sat in a heavy, steel base. Keller said he would get in touch with Scan-nell to see if these other pieces could be created in time.

  Before he wrapped up his feedback, Keller again mentioned the idea of coating the smoke glass. “Parsley would be too strong,” he said. “It could be watercress or coriander.” Hollingsworth didn’t say anything, but he was leaning toward not following that particular piece of advice. The technique, he felt, didn’t suit his strengths and could not be mastered in time.