Is there anyplace on Earth where Paul Bocuse isn’t a celebrity and somebody doesn’t want his autograph? In the living room, Keefer handed one of Bocuse’s own books to the maestro and asked him to autograph it for Keller, who was out of town that week. She offered a pen, but he raised a hand to freeze her, producing his own from his blazer pocket. The man is so used to signing things that, even at age eighty-two and at the crack of dawn in Orlando, before leaving he had thought to stick his own plume de choix in his pocket. Before the day was over, he’d have signed a wall in the living room as well, branding the house that unofficially bore his name.
Friends and fellow employees of the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group dropped in throughout the afternoon, lending the spectacle of the blue apron–clad cooks the air of a sideshow. Step right up, folks, and see the amazing Chef Timothy and his trusty commis Adina. Marvel at his nerves of steel. Witness the speed of her knife. You will NOT believe your eyes! Larry Nadeau, maitre d’ of The French Laundry, dropped in, as did Jennifer Fukui, director of private events for Keller’s Yountville restaurants. In the living room, Hallock interviewed Boulud, who was only too happy to explain the difference between the Bocuse d’Or and other competitions. “The taste is very, very important,” he said. This is a point of distinction that Bocuse d’Or’s insiders cite with great pride: their contest of choice eschews the outdated conventions of cold-food competitions, all that aspic-drenched stuff meant for the eyes rather than the palate. In the Bocuse d’Or, the chefs do real cooking and the judges evaluate primarily on taste. (In truth, though it features cold-food contests, hot food is also a major component of the International Culinary Olympics, but detractors of that event frequently decline to mention this fact.)
Having turned, cut, and cooked those potatoes in seasoned cream, Guest layered the slices into the square vessel in which they’d be baked. Her hands, gloved in latex, moved one square at a time into the mold. Her head was down, but something had occurred that breached even her well-guarded perimeter of attention: Paul Bocuse was standing just a foot away, watching her.
Compelled to say something, she called on the little French she knew to make small talk about the food.
“Pomme de terre, Chef,” she said. (Potatoes.)
“Oui, oui,” whispered Bocuse, in his gentle, ancient voice. “C’est pommes dauphinoise, oui?”
“Oui.”
“Avec oeufs?” (With eggs?)
“Non, Chef. Avec crème.”
“C’est bon, c’est bon,” said Bocuse, then added, “C’est très bon technique.”
Bocuse shuffled away, leaving Guest atwitter with emotion, concealed beneath a Game Face straining to its breaking point. “Just that little interaction with him meant the world to me,” she said.
Like Jonathan Benno before him, Bocuse was blown away. On his way out of the kitchen, he whispered to Boulud: “Très bonne, la fille.” The girl is good.
“When you watch somebody work, you can tell if they are good or not,” he said later. “The guy is really good, but the girl … if he wins, she deserves half the prize.”
The East Coast contingent excused themselves to have lunch at Bouchon, taking the car to save Monsieur Paul the walk. As they crossed Washington Street, the depths of Yountville’s food culture flowered as the smattering of locals and tourists alike stopped disbelievingly in their tracks; the only thing missing was the screeching brakes of a passing car. The effect was repeated when the trio attempted in vain to surreptitiously enter Bouchon through the back door, but nevertheless turned every head in the joint. Taking in the scene, with its avocado-cream-colored walls and palm tree exploding like a fountain in the center of the room, its bow-tied waiters and raw bar, Bocuse nodded. “This place is more Paris than Paris,” he said.
As they lunched on a plat de fruits de mer (seafood platter), and steak frites, the three men discussed the hour they had just observed. It was too early to make any judgments about the food, but the utility of the training center was already apparent. They also graciously posed for photographs with Culinary Institute of America students who happened to be dining there, and the cooks in the kitchen before heading back to the House.
At about a quarter after three, the men returned to find Hollingsworth and Guest right where they left them, cooking up a storm. Hollingsworth was multitasking: slicing rectangles of chilled mille-feuille at his station while whipping horseradish foam (preserved horseradish, nonfat milk, salt, and Simplesse, a whey protein that helps volumize the foam) in a Waring mixer on the counter by the back door. Boulud, uninhibited as ever, lowered the mixer’s speed. Hollingsworth presumed that the chef feared he was going to overmix the foam, but the truth was that it went into the mixer hot and had to be cooled off before it would elevate. Not wanting to correct his guest, the candidate kept mum. So the foam would take a little longer to happen. That was all right. They had time.
Boulud again walked right into the kitchen and stood inches from Hollingsworth, crossing his arms.
“How many run-throughs are you going to do in Lyon?”
“Jennifer said two,” said Hollingsworth. “But I think one is good for me. Just to test the proteins.” The fish and beef they’d be using in Lyon were from different pastures and waters than the ones they’d been using in Yountville. That detail aside, in the midst of just his second practice, Hollingsworth was feeling confident.
“Yeah, yeah. Exactly,” said Boulud, although they ultimately decided to book two sessions, for safety’s sake.
Guest pulled brioche melbas from the oven. “Ay, yi, yi,” she exclaimed.
“You wanted them less brown?” asked Boulud.
“Little bit, Chef. Thirty seconds makes a difference.”
Boulud continued to pace in and out of the kitchen and around the perimeter. He noticed the task list taped to the steel door of the freezer.
“You are fifteen minutes ahead, no?” he asked Hollingsworth.
“Don’t pay attention to that,” he said. “I haven’t looked at it the whole time.”
“Because you haven’t punched it up yet,” said Boulud.
“Cuisine spontanée,” said Hollingsworth with a shrug as he pulled turnip medallions, beet medallions, and chestnuts, each in its own sous-vide bag, from the circulator.
Periodically, Hollingsworth and Guest called out notes to Laughlin, who had arrived on the scene: “Less salt,” said Guest, regarding the chestnut preparation. “One brick for pommes Maxim.” “Add to prep time sheet hache [very finely chop] endive marmalade.”
Boulud took over the center of the living room and whipped out his cell phone to do business in his instant office. He called his assistant Absil back in New York to adjust his travel plans, then Pelka, to get her going on arranging two days in Lyon.
Corey Lee, in on a day off, and Coach Henin, just arrived in Yountville, walked in shortly before the five-hour mark, and Hollingsworth and Guest began operating with greater urgency. Guest floured mille-feuilles, preparing them for browning, then readied the custards according to a more conventional recipe than the eggs-only version Hollingsworth had first employed back in December: she mixed milk, cream, eggs, and that lemony agrumato oil together, then poured the mixture into glass dishes and set them in a bain-marie (water bath), readying them for steaming in the combi oven. Hollingsworth spread scallop mousse on the melbas and mixed the breadcrumb mixture for the cod in two small pans. Watching all of this, Paul Bocuse gleaned where Hollingsworth was headed. He hadn’t tasted anything, but he was already impressed with one aspect of the candidate’s strategy: this food did not need to be very hot to taste good.
Hollingsworth put his fish platter together on a sheet of parchment paper draped neatly over a cutting board, the white standing in for the ivory hue of the porcelain on the platter that was being fabricated. The cylinder of olive oil–poached, scallop mousse–encased, pistachio-crusted loin of cod took center stage. (The pistachios didn’t coat the cod as uniformly as he’d have liked: a challenge that h
e’d been wrestling with since conceiving the dish.)
Hollingsworth plated the food: A cross section of the pistachio cod. A slice of the boudin set atop a beet round that was, in turn, pressed into a blob of citrus mousseline, an emulsification based on hollandaise sauce. Dissatisfied with the boudin, once he had plated one portion, he dumped the rest so that as few people as possible would taste it. A wedge of potato mille-feuille topped with a dollop of gelled crème fraîche and a piece of chive. (There would also be a tiny quenelle of caviar, but not in practice.) Alongside the plate was the little “martini glass” with the custard topped with lobster glace (again standing in for shrimp consommé), and the scallop-spread melba with citrus salad on top.
In the kitchen with the team, Boulud and Lee tasted the fish.
“The cod?” asked Boulud.
“It was cooked before,” said Hollingsworth.
“You can push it a little more.”
“Cook it a little longer?”
“Yeah.”
Boulud poked at the center of the roulade-like slices of cod. “Did you dry the pistachios in a food dryer?”
“No.”
“Maybe to keep them more green and get them a finer powder.”
Hollingsworth disagreed, politely. “I think it works better with the brioche.”
As Hollingsworth conferred with Boulud, Corey Lee began washing dishes and pans for him, living that French Laundry ideal even on vacation.
Henin was taking it all in. This was his first hour back at the Bocuse House since November. Much impressed him, but it was far from perfect. To put the best face forward for the Los Angeles Times, Hollingsworth didn’t tell anybody, not even his coach, that the boudin was just a placeholder. It would have been useful information, and saved Henin some mental energy, because he was bothered by the boudin. The repetition of the two circular shapes (the cod was also cylindrical) wouldn’t win them any points. He stood one cod roulade circle on its side like a tire to give it height and add another dimension to the platter. Meanwhile, Boulud set the “martini glass” bearing the custard and scallop melba on the plate. “I think it’s important to incorporate this garnish inside,” he said, meaning on the plate, not alongside it. It was the same advice Viola had given, which Hollings-worth hadn’t heeded. Maybe it was his French Laundry aesthetic holding firm; many dishes at the restaurant are delivered to the table with what the runners call a “follow,” a freestanding but complementary component.
Next, Hollingsworth put up his meat platter, working on a new and improved mock-up made of white foam display boards from Daniel Scan-nell, the certified master chef who was overseeing the realization of the Tihany-designed platters, which had been lined with aluminum foil to approximate silver. The beef tart took center stage, flanked by two cylinders of bacon-wrapped rib-eye. On the tiered shelves behind them were alternating deconstructed beef stews and a mock-up of the smoker. Even on foil, there was a majesty to the composition, a deft mingling of confidence and subtlety that aptly reflected the chef who had conceived them. There was a hush in the room, the same hush that came over the kitchen at The French Laundry when something special went up on the pass. It was the silence of approval.
Paul Bocuse, having changed into his whites for a group photo, shook Hollingsworth’s hand. “Compliment,” he said. Congratulations.
This triggered a round of applause from the spectators, but the celebration didn’t last long as the chefs continued conferring. Boulud suggested squeezing some horseradish through cheesecloth into the cream at the last second to make it more pungent; Lee thought the celeriac and tenderloin slices should be thinner and that Hollingsworth should consider returning to the rectangular shape of the rib-eye that had wowed the judges in Orlando because it was an unnatural shape he created by binding two pieces of steak with Activa, the transglutaminase that “glues” proteins together, then using the powder to affix the bacon; Hollingsworth himself thought there was too much marmalade on the tart. As they spoke—and they spoke for a while—Boulud jotted notes in a leather-bound notebook.
Some of the suggestions were purely instinctual: Lee asked Guest to cut a mille-feuille wedge a bit shorter. She did. Everybody nodded: better.
There were also notes that Hollingsworth kept to himself: like the fact that the melbas didn’t survive the sitting process well, and that he was beginning to doubt that pureeing the scallops was the best way to treat them. He also chided himself for a rookie mistake: cooking the shrimp sous vide with butter led to the butter breaking when the shrimp were heated again in the boudin. He should have seen that coming, but with so many moveable pieces to shepherd, he hadn’t thought that one through. On the meat platter, he was considering incorporating oxtail into the endive marmalade on the tart, in order to actually use the cut on the platter and not just in a sauce. He wouldn’t usually combine raw and cooked meat in a single component, but for the sake of incorporating the oxtail, he was almost certain he’d at least try it.
Conspicuously silent was Jérôme Bocuse, who believed that the team had already missed the podium. “For me, referring to what I have seen in the past at the Bocuse d’Or … everything was there, but something was not there,” he would say later. Bocuse felt that the platters lacked a degree of difficulty and didn’t have that three-dimensional quality that judges were conditioned to expect. He also couldn’t help but notice that Hollingsworth and Guest, while efficient, were not working in the almost robotic way the top competitors in Lyon would be. It was all about routine to Bocuse, and Hollingsworth’s was far from polished. He thought that the intelligence of the food and the team’s obvious technical gifts might carry them into the top ten, maybe even the top five, but he doubted they’d be wearing Bocuse d’Or bling come January 28.
He didn’t share any of this because, frankly, he didn’t believe the gap could be closed. “Twenty days,” he said. “What are you going to change?”
Bocuse also felt that the number of advisers contributing opinions was too much of a good thing. “If you got my opinion and then if you got Roland’s opinion and then you got Keller’s opinion, and Daniel’s—at the end of the day, I think you are going to be lost. Daniel’s opinion could be the opposite of Thomas’s. They might not see the thing in the same way, so who are you going to listen to in the end? … For that we had Roland.… You cannot have five coaches on a basketball team. You have one coach and you listen to the coach.”
Ever the optimist, Boulud, as he gathered his things and prepared to rocket back to San Francisco, took the opposite approach. “I think you’re in a very good path here,” he said. “It’s just a matter of doing it in your sleep. Doing it blind. And don’t be afraid. Bonne chance.”
And with that the three Frenchmen were off, leaving Team USA to finish their preparations in private.
A PALL OF ANTICLIMAX hung over the Bocuse house on Tuesday, January 6. The Bocuses and Daniel Boulud were in the air, somewhere between the coasts, The French Laundry was closed, and it was cold and damp outside. The Bocuse d’Or USA adventure might have begun in summer, but it would end, one way or another, in the harsh chill of winter.
Henin, Hollingsworth, and Guest stood around those rolling carts in the kitchen, comparing notes on Monday’s practice. The agenda for the day was to fine-tune some elements of various garnishes, and get reorganized and ready for the next practice, set for Thursday, January 8. It was plain that the platters made great peacemakers: the tension between candidate and coach that had soured their November get-togethers was dissipating. There was now something to discuss, something tangible that had sprung from Hollingsworth’s own personality. And so, when Henin asked him if he had been practicing shucking his own scallops, as he’d have to do in Lyon, Hollingsworth didn’t mind at all.
“No,” he said. “You can’t get good ones here.”
Henin also asked Hollingsworth if he planned to emerge from the kitchen in Lyon to slice and plate the cod himself, or to avail himself of the option of letting the servers do it
.
“Do you think you’ll have time?” asked the coach.
Guest, in a rare show of bravado, nodded confidently. “Oh, yeah,” she said.
“If you put it together, you know how to take it apart,” said Hollings-worth.
The team broke. Adina Guest set up in the kitchen alone and began prepping for the next practice, scheduled for Thursday. As she chopped pistachios, holding the handle of her knife loosely in one hand, while dribbling the blade like a basketball over the nuts with the other, Hollings worth pulled his cap over his head, tucked his notebook under his arm, and walked over to the offices of the restaurant to meet with his friend Corey Lee.
Lee leveled with Hollingsworth: the flavors and concepts were solid— as he would have expected—but the execution needed work. In French Laundry parlance, they lacked finesse. For first time, Lee detected signs that the Bocuse d’Or was affecting Hollingsworth. Gone was the carefree aura the candidate usually exuded. In its place was a heaviness, a tightness of body and spirit. The mounting pressure was squeezing him out of shape, had forced the California smile right off his face.
When Hollingsworth returned to the Bocuse House, Guest had departed to go house hunting and Hollingsworth and Henin stood in the kitchen and discussed the platters. Henin was especially impressed with the beef tart.
“It’s a great idea, the carpaccio, or whatever you want to call it. Like a pizza pie. An American pie,” said the coach, almost swooning with enthusiasm.
Henin also ribbed Hollingsworth about the ubiquitous music he played when he cooked, suggesting that Hollingsworth turn it up real loud in preparation for Lyon.
“When it’s noisy, I can think,” said Hollingsworth. “When you’re alone in the kitchen and it’s quiet, it’s spooky. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a lot of brothers and sisters.”
“We never had this music in the kitchen,” said the coach. “You listened to the chef.”
Knives at Dawn Page 20