And that was that. The Chef had dispensed his advice, and the candidate had received it.
Keller shook hands with Hollingsworth and Guest, slipped on his clogs, and disappeared into the December night. Though he had put on a good face during the tasting, he felt that Hollingsworth still had a lot of ground to cover before the competition, both conceptually and in execution. For the chef, it was also a powerful reminder of how quickly things were moving and how little time he’d been able to carve out to help his longtime associate: “Running into the house one day in December and tasting Timmy’s garnishes after I have had ten meetings that day is not really productive,” Keller commented later. “I think I came up with some good ideas for him but were we able to sit down and drill down into what we wanted to do? No.”
Despite this lament, Keller didn’t want to impose his vision on Hollingsworth too much; he believed that the sous chef had to make his own decisions, like the chefs de partie in The French Laundry kitchen, so that he could feel comfortable and confident in what he would cook in Lyon.
Inside the house, Hollingsworth wasn’t where he wanted to be, even by his own somewhat flexible internal schedule. By night’s end, he’d be freely admitting to himself that he wished he had more time, and right then, after the session with Keller, he felt like he could use a few weeks of just brainstorming. But the interaction with The Chef did him good. Though he’d been around him for years, he still felt “shocked” at how supportive he was, but at the same time, he felt more nervous because after weeks of going it on his own, he suddenly had the feeling that he had somebody to report to, which upped the sensation of pressure. Being a cook, this all had the net effect of getting him excited, putting some spring back in his step.
“I am almost ready to go again,” he said.
ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19, Hollingsworth and Guest deep-cleaned the Bocuse House kitchen and brainstormed. He tried three different adjustments to the beef platter’s potato dauphinoise, infusing the cream with chestnut; truffle and chestnut; and chestnut cream. He liked the last variation the best, but found the cream too intense for the potato, and to his eye, the colors marred the pure white hue that Hollingsworth found so lovely. He was leaning toward a black-and-white composition of potato and cream layered with black truffles—three distinct layers of potato with perfect black lines of truffle pressed in between, similar to the mille-feuille he had served in Orlando.
He also devoted some time to thinking about the custard cup garnish, the one that would be served in the little glasses he now had on order, but for which he still needed to secure a silver base. He and Keller had talked about adding kumquat to it and he found himself thinking of a dish they occasionally serve at The French Laundry, a citrus salad, sometimes made with olive, and sometimes with tarragon. Since Guest was jonesing to do a brunoise, he thought about topping the scallop with a brunoised citrus salad, maybe made with blood orange, or with candied citrus zest, julienned, with perhaps some cilantro shoots on top and Niçoise olive on the custard.
For all of the progress he’d made over the past few days, Hollingsworth still didn’t know what he was going to do with the central proteins. He didn’t have any ideas for the côte de boeuf, and although he’d been telling everybody he knew what the cod would be, he privately felt that that persillade crust was just too damn plain for competition. He might have known what a centerpiece was, but he didn’t know what his centerpieces would be, and until he did, those garnishes would be conceptually unmoored, like rogue planets with no sun to orbit.
And then out of the blue, during his weekend at The French Laundry, he had a major breakthrough on the cod when he had the idea of enveloping it with a scallop mousse, then sealing it not in breadcrumbs, but with a crust of brilliantly green Sicilian pistachio nut crumbs. He played with the dish Saturday morning, and again Sunday afternoon, both times working at the pass. To make the nuts as fine as possible, he chopped them to a powder, then passed them through a tamis (a strainer-like tool comprising a meshed screen stretched across a frame), pushing them through with a scraper to knock the dust off. He spread the nuts out on his work surface, then set the cod cylinder at one end and gently pushed it along. As it turned, it was transformed, no longer just a mass of white but a beautiful, beguiling green object d’art.
He shared the moment of creation with the kitchen. It’s a phenomenon that sometimes occurs at The French Laundry. In a cooking monastery where new dishes—or at least new variations on existing dishes—are conceived and realized daily, there are still moments when something new turns heads. And so, as Hollingsworth put the finishing touches on his centerpiece, turning the cod in that almost glitteringly green pistachio dust, the cooks around him stopped working, craning their heads to get a good look at what he was doing. This wasn’t an easy crew to impress, and their attention confirmed for Hollingsworth that he had a winner on his hands.
He was psyched, not only at the outcome, but because he had never, even in all of his cookbooks, seen anybody else confit a piece of fish with a scallop mousse attached to it. All aspects of the moment—the inspiration, the location, and the silent approbation of his colleagues—he took as a confirmation of his belief that working through much of his training was the right thing to do.
“I don’t think I would have come up with the cod if I hadn’t been in the restaurant,” he said. And he felt the same way about the citrus salad. “Working in that kitchen [at the Bocuse House], it’s kind of hard to in some ways to be creative. It’s nice to kind of step away and be in that same kind of place where you’re being creative on a daily basis.”
There was still fine tuning to be done: the Sicilian pistachios, not a crunchy nut to begin with, were a bit gummy, so he wanted to cut them with toasted, chopped brioche or regular pistachios. He was also considering a nougatine of pistachios, but worried that might be too crunchy and sweet.
But it didn’t matter. He had come up with the elusive centerpiece, and with it one of his two platters was coming into focus. Best of all, he felt that he was balancing on that tightrope between something clean and elegant that he would cook and serve at The French Laundry and something that, as he understood it, the Bocuse d’Or judges were looking for—one component wrapped in another, then rolled in yet another. “I think the chances of us being successful with something like this is really, really good,” he said.
That night, a member The French Laundry’s pastry team was in for dinner with her parents. They were served discs of cod that all but glittered with a fanciful green dust. They didn’t know it, but they were the first people tasting the prototype of the centerpiece of Team USA’s Bocuse d’Or fish platter.
THE FOLLOW ING WEEK, HOLLINGSWORTH received a belated Christmas present. Still searching for a new way to use the beef fillet, the Fates threw him a bone when Corey Lee told him to make a potato-and-truffle tart for a table of VIPs.
There are a number of ways to structure a tart. Lee told Hollingsworth to make his with a layer of potatoes topped with a layer of truffles. But tart had certain connotations for Hollingsworth and he pictured a round of flaky pastry topped with overlapping circles of potato and truffle. Lee told him to go ahead and try it. When Hollingsworth showed him the finished product, Lee immediately said, “You should do that on your platter.”
“Yeah!” said Hollingsworth, imagining punched-out circles of beef incorporated into the composition. He considered whether he wanted to introduce a piece of cooked meat to those delicate flavors. “Do you think it’d be nice with the fillet raw?”
Lee thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you think I should sear it?”
“No.”
Hollingsworth agreed. His mind was racing. He knew that this was it: a tart was French, but a beef tart came with all kinds of American connotations. He was already using potato on the beef platter, but maybe … maybe … what? What could take the place of—
Celeriac! That would be a good alternative. Picturing it in his head�
�� the white of the celeriac, the rosy red beef, the black truffle—he realized that the color palate was not unlike that of a pepperoni pizza. And if the competition demanded a touch of audacity, then serving the beef raw was his way of doing it.
Before the restaurant closed for the winter respite, he decided that he would add an endive marmalade—a Thomas Keller recipe made with endive, shallots, bacon, onion, and sherry vinegar—to the tart, layering it between the pastry and the “toppings,” though he would go easy on the honey, ensuring a balance that any judge, from anywhere, could appreciate.
He still had no idea what to do with the shrimp. But he had solved the riddle of the beef tenderloin with something he believed was true to himself, America, and the Bocuse d’Or.
The New Year was looking better and better.
4
Training Season
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
—ALICE WALKER, THE COLOR PURPLE
TIMOTHY HOLLINGSWORTH WOULDN’T SAY THAT HE THOUGHT HE was dreaming. That’s too melodramatic for him. But he couldn’t quite believe his eyes when he opened his e-mail early Sunday morning, January 4, and read that Paul Bocuse himself was arriving in Yountville the next day.
Team USA was at T-minus twenty-four days, and counting, until the competition. With The French Laundry closed for the first three weeks of January, Hollingsworth possessed exactly one objective for the next month: do well at the Bocuse d’Or.
On Saturday, he and Guest had performed their first practice, with an encore scheduled for Monday. Daniel Boulud and Jérôme Bocuse would be jetting cross-country for the day, to observe, taste, and offer feedback, and a reporter and photographer from the Los Angeles Times were expected as well.
When Hollingsworth powered up his laptop Sunday morning, among the e-mails was one from Jennifer Pelka, which said:
“Hi, everyone. I have just learned from Jérôme that his father wishes to join the group in Yountville. I realize that the group is getting quite large now, but I do hope everyone is comfortable with Chef Bocuse being added to the trip.”
Hollingsworth stared at the note, blankly. It didn’t compute. Paul Bocuse is coming here? Tomorrow? To watch us practice? He wouldn’t learn until later that the chef was in the midst of one of his periodic extended visits with son Jérôme in Orlando, so it wasn’t like the guy was coming all the way from France. But still.
“Oh, my God,” he said, as it sank in.
Laughlin peeked at the message over her boyfriend’s shoulder, and burst out laughing. What else could she do? Besides, there was no time for dwelling on it. The sun would rise on Monday soon enough. The best way for Hollingsworth to move forward was with the same plan he’d had before he’d learned that one of the planet’s most historic chefs would be present: Get ready.
In retrospect, Saturday’s practice had been like losing one’s virginity: the main thing had been to get it out of the way. Now improvements could commence. The team hadn’t choreographed their routine yet, but Guest took the initiative to give herself the structure she needed, ordering her tasks on a printed grid in neat little fifteen-minute blocks. Such grids are the North Star for culinary competitors, the itinerary to which Roland Henin had referred in his briefing at The French Culinary Institute back in July. They are also exercises in extreme optimism; reducing jobs that require extraordinary coordination, talent, and precision into one or two words. For example, “melbas” meant actually to make melba toast: slicing the brioche, punching it out, and baking the pieces to perfection between Silpats.
Hollingsworth, meanwhile, opted to wing it for Practice Number One, operating in the way he first learned to cook, intuitively, relying on his experience to mentally MapQuest the five-hour journey for him. He would get around to regimenting his chores, but he needed to get there the same way he got to his dishes, on his own time and in his own way. On Saturday, he just wanted to cook.
The only other person in the Bocuse House that day had been Laughlin, who reprised the role she’d played in the Orlando practices, taking notes as the team called out items they’d need to talk about, or adjust. (At this time, Laughlin was transitioning to a new job with Soutirage, a rare wine merchant based in Northern California, and so had time to devote to helping the team.) Some addressed timing and sequencing, such as “Cook PD [pommes dauphinoise] for less time than 1 hour—check at 35 minutes,” “Melbas were 4 minutes at 315 degrees,” and “Heat up broccoli last.” Some indicated necessary ingredients, equipment, and tools, such as “Paintbrush and olive oil for tart.” Some were stand-alone adjustments such as “Freeze beef” [to make it easier to slice for the tart] and “Grind more panko [Japanese breadcrumbs], and grind to a powder.” Others were geared to establishing that essential, time-saving efficiency; for example, “Butcher all beef together at once,” “Do all meat glue at once (cod and meat),” and “When Vita-Prep is out: horseradish foam, chestnut puree, pistachio puree, prune puree.” By the time the day was done, the list would run down the left-hand side of three typed pages.
For four hours, Team USA belied the brevity of their preparation, as both Hollingsworth and Guest adroitly fulfilled their responsibilities. But they hit a patch of turbulence at plate-up time. Athletes refer to a transition game: switching from one mode that requires a specific set of skills, to another—relocating from the baseline to the net in tennis, or toggling back and forth between offense and defense in basketball. The transition game in the kitchen might be defined as shifting from prep to service, assembling all the individual components you’ve been amassing, and getting them all out to the diner at the same time, and piping hot. In the Bocuse d’Or kitchen, transitioning meant much more than that: instead of a full brigade, there are just two people charged with putting up close to forty individual pieces (twelve of each garnish plus the centerpiece), each one flawlessly composed and as synchronized on the platter as the North Korean People’s Army on a parade march.
The team lost time here, as plating-up became something of a game of Twister. But they finished: on the fish platter there was the cod, the millefeuille, and the custard cup. (The team also had also prepared a shellfish boudin, or sausage, wrapped in a sushi-like band of Swiss chard. It was lovely, but it was just a placeholder, there to take up practice time and fill up space on the platter. Hollingsworth still didn’t know what he was going to do for his final garnish.) The meat platter housed the tart, the deconstructed stew, and the potato dauphinoise topped with the celery salad and chestnut. In the week and a half since Keller’s tasting, the smoke glass had also morphed into something Hollingsworth felt good about: in the base of the glass were brunoised blanched Savoy cabbage, green apple, bresaola, pickled red onions, and small croutons that had been sautéed in olive oil and salt. They were topped with an airy cloud of horseradish mousse on which rested a delicate slice of bresaola. Hollingsworth had also figured out what to do with the remaining cut of meat: with the tenderloin riddle solved, he would wrap two cylinders of beef cut from the côte de boeuf in bacon, sear it, then roast it.
There was a lot of tweaking to do. Hollingsworth and Guest met at the Bocuse House Sunday afternoon to review these topics as well as the list Laughlin had created, and to determine the changes they needed to make for Monday’s practice. Two hours were required to get through it all, but Hollingsworth was feeling good, satisfied that his approach—drawing on techniques familiar to him and Guest from their daily work—was working. If he had created a menu that had required them to master techniques from scratch, the first run-through may not have gone so well. His strategy was ultimately to design the division of labor to max out Guest’s schedule, while leaving him free to take on tasks should she fall behind during competition. In sports terms, Hollingworth was not just the team leader but also the ultimate “utility player”—able to step into any position—except that where that phrase connotes mere competence, Hollingsworth could perform any task expertly. It was another application of his French Laundry experience to the Bocuse d’
Or; just as he had worked every position in that kitchen, he was able to take on any task in this considerably smaller one.
The battle lines drawn, they were ready to take on their first adversary: time.
ON MONDAY MORNING, TEAM USA had a taste of what the Bocuse d’Or would be like as they prepared to cook publicly for the first time since competing in Orlando. As they readied the kitchen, arranging armfuls of produce and equipment in optimal locations, Kristine Keefer, public relations manager for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, looked on along with Betty Hallock of the Los Angeles Times and a freelance photographer there to take pictures for her article. After conferring with the photographer, Keefer asked Guest if it would be okay to move a table from the corner of the kitchen so a reflector could be positioned there.
Guest was so in the throes of the chain of command that she wouldn’t give an answer, even though the table was outside the practice area. “Ask Chef Tim,” she said.
The three Frenchmen arrived minutes before the planned twelve noon start time: Paul Bocuse, nattily attired in a black-and-white checkered blazer and black scarf, along with Daniel Boulud and Jérôme Bocuse. Others had stayed to one side of the imaginary line that marked the perimeter of the training kitchen, but after making his hellos, Boulud marched right in and engaged in some shop talk with Hollingsworth, asking how the equipment had been treating him and how the preparations were going.
As soon as the dialogue stopped, with no fanfare Hollingsworth and Guest began working. Hollingsworth set about butchering the beef while Guest was out of the blocks with a demonstration of her quick hands and the precision of her technique: one of her first tasks was to peel several Yukon Gold potatoes, which she accomplished by standing the potatoes on end, one at a time, and rotating them with one hand while the other brought her knife down with the persistent ferocity of a wood-chipper, filling the kitchen with a rat-a-tat-tat.
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