Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  The phone call also produced a startling, though not fatal, revelation: nobody had conveyed to Scannell that the fish platter was supposed to be porcelain, so his company was producing silver trays for both fish and meat. It was yet another sign of how quickly things were moving, as these kinds of details almost never fall through the cracks in the worlds of Boulud and Keller. (The team would likely have ended up with a silver tray anyway because Scannell later pointed out that the time and expense porcelain demands would have made it impossible in the given timeframe.)

  Chef Henin returned to Yountville that day, and that evening, the team dinner took place. While Pelka went down the road to Ranch Market Too, an all-purpose grocery, sundries, and wine shop on Washington Street, Guest took to the Garden and procured some greens to accompany the roast chicken and root vegetables the coach would be preparing. There was no salad spinner at the house, so Henin taught her an old-school method for drying greens, instructing her to wrap them in a clean kitchen towel, take them out back on the deck, and swing them around like a mace.

  As a gesture of solidarity with Henin, Hollingsworth put Gotan Project on the sound system, a mellow, lyric-free hybrid of tango and electronica. Also out of deference, Hollingsworth offered that he and Guest would function as Henin’s sous chefs for the evening, executing his orders and his menu. When the time came to truss the chicken, Hollingsworth mentioned the story in The French Laundry Cookbook in which Keller recounts that at twenty-four he didn’t know how to truss a chicken, a failing that drove a French chef to fling a knife at him.

  Henin confirmed that this was no tall tale: “When Thomas came to me he didn’t know how to truss a chicken,” he said. It’s not easy to imagine Keller not knowing how to perform such a fundamental task, but we all have to start somewhere.

  Hollingsworth asked Henin to demonstrate the technique to him.

  “Oh, it’s really very easy. There’s nothing to it,” said Henin, as he took his kitchen twine to the bird. It was a fun, relaxed evening and with no discussion of the competition, Hollingsworth felt that he and Henin were connecting over a shared reverence for technique. The two men have more in common than that, though. It had taken a while for them to connect, and the relationship was still far from perfect, but they both have an almost animal attraction to cooking. Both had found their vocation almost by accident, and like Henin, Hollingsworth was known—at least within the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group—as a phenomenal and patient teacher with a rare gift for tailoring his tone and his language to whomever he happens to be instructing at any given time.

  Where as Hollingsworth once considered life as an EMT, Henin was supposed to have been an accountant. That’s what his father had ordained, and when he grew up in his time in France, that was all there was to it. The problem was, when young Roland started college, he continued to hang out with his gang of friends in the evening, returning home and doing his homework until the wee hours.

  His father didn’t approve, and when the second year of school began, he put his foot down.

  “When you live under my roof, you will do as I say,” said the father.

  “I said, ‘I don’t have to live under your roof. That is fine,’ ” remembers Henin. He moved out. With nowhere to stay, his immediate concern was money. In the newspaper, he found an advertisement for a job as a pastry cook that included room and board. Bingo! He applied for the job, and his timing was lucky: it was the holidays and the shop was doing a brisk business and in need of another set of hands. He was hired immediately and put up in the house the owners kept across the street. “I had a room just below the roof so it was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer,” the chef recalls today.

  He planned to stay in college, but soon realized that being an apprentice in a pastry shop excluded going to college. For one thing, he had to begin his day at four o’clock in the morning when he had to start the fire. For another, the apprenticeship came with a conflicting academic requirement: on Thursdays, he went to school (comparable to a community college in the United States) along with apprentices from the local butcher shops and restaurants, to take courses in topics related to his kitchen work, such as sanitation.

  That wasn’t all he had to do. With its classic French structure, the kitchen at the pastry shop didn’t have a dishwasher as you’d find in most American kitchens; all the menial chores were tasked to the apprentice. This kitchen had three apprentices, first-year, second-year, and third-year. As the newbie, Henin had to wash all the pots and pans and scrub the place down at the end of the day. And if he wanted to learn about baking, he had to do it all quickly. He made it his point to do this, and when he finally starting baking, he quickly came to see the work as magical, transforming flour, water, and butter into croissants and brioche. “I was fascinated that I could make these things with my hands. I was not a natural but I was mesmerized by this process. I said, ‘Wow, I did that,’ ” he recalled.

  Part of the reason he saw it as “magic” was that nobody took the time to explain the science of it to him. In time, this would become a theme of Henin’s kitchen evolution. “I was raised in a straitjacket of classicism,” he is fond of saying, summing up the French attitude as: “ ‘Don’t ask. It is the way we have been doing it for hundreds of years.… You do it and do it and do it and with repetition you become good.’ So you become a technician, but you don’t understand the why of what you are doing.”

  Henin quit college to devote himself to his new profession. The divide between his old life and his new one was illustrated almost every morning: when he woke up to go across the street and light the fire, his old friends would be coming home from dancing—a perfect evocation of the under-reported, unglamorous aspect of a working chef’s existence; he’s almost always toiling when others are sleeping, or at play.

  But Henin also saw the respect that a chef was afforded in France. “This guy was like the king. Even the owner bowed to him,” Henin said. “It was the best pastry shop of Nancy. It was right on Main Street. The best reputation. The best clientele. In the afternoon we did glacier. We would do the ice cream fresh every day. By the time they opened … it was all by hand. Every day we used fresh ice. There was no crystal in the ice cream. It was all fresh. The pastry chef to me was like a god and he had this big aura and everybody kind of agreed with whatever he said. To me that was impressive because I had never met anybody like this.”

  As the most junior apprentice, Henin was tasked with all the menial work. He’d end the day tired, but if he’d performed well, the chef, whom Henin recalls as a strong man of about forty-five years, would let him sit on a stool and watch him make chocolate, and then to swoop in and clean his marble, all of which—even the cleaning—Henin considered a reward.

  After about fifteen months, Henin was feeling burned out by the long, physical hours. He got to talking to one of the restaurant apprentices at his Thursday classes, who told him about a job opening at the Hotel Excelsior. Henin found the idea of switching tempting: “I was finding those hours pretty long. When those guys were in the kitchen they had breaks in the afternoon and they didn’t have to start until seven thirty,” he said. Henin worked things out with his chef and the academic authorities and switched to the Excelsior, finding it everything he’d dreamed of: “It was a piece of cake in relationship to the pastry shop. You have a better life. It was not as stringent. They had more fun and it was more relaxed. You had a break in the afternoon you could take a nap so if you were out at night you had time to catch up. That is how I switched to the kitchen. That went very good. You had a better group of people. You had more young cooks and more apprentice. We had a dishwasher and a pot washer. You didn’t take all the abuse. I was a little bit older and more into it.”

  Though he never returned to pastry, Henin found it to be the perfect foundation for becoming a chef. “It is more disciplined,” he said. “I would recommend that anyone who wants to become a good chef to start in pastry. Not to study the pastry, to learn the discipline tha
t is required. So that later on you can apply it and carry it with you all your life. You are so organized and meticulous sometimes to a fault. But you are a better chef. If you don’t get that at the very beginning, that discipline, you never develop it. That is the best time to develop it and it is the only time. Later on you can’t. I see some chefs taking the Master Chef and they can’t get their act together. They can’t get organized and have their priorities. They don’t have a system or methodology. In pastry you have to, otherwise you can’t make it.”

  MONDAY NIGHT’S DINNER WAS the last relaxed moment of the week; on Tuesday the team commenced the onerous task of packing for their trip, not just all the personal items required for two weeks overseas, but box upon box of equipment and supplies. The sheer volume of what had to be gotten to Lyon was daunting: among the things the team would be carting along to the airport in suitcases and boxes were plastic wrap, knives, butter warmers, saucepans and lids, towels, Silpats, a pepper grinder, squeeze bottles, circulators, cutting boards, carpets, The French Laundry jackets, and several copies of The French Laundry Cookbook to dispense as gifts to those who would be helping them in Lyon (even if they didn’t necessarily speak or read English).

  Keller had returned to Yountville by then, and Tuesday evening, at the request of The Chef, the team presented a new tasting of their fish dishes. Keller offered suggestions, despite the proximity of the competition: perhaps a small plate should go under the “martini glasses” that housed the custard, and similarly the smoke bowls. The avocados on the shrimp tart should shingle vertically (toward the “guest”) rather than left to right, a change Hollingsworth implemented.

  Keller also suggested that the caviar for the mille-feuille be presented in a glass tube that would rise up out of the platter, creating the illusion that the caviar was suspended in the air. Once again, Hollingsworth took to the phone, spending a good portion of his Wednesday working his network of sources, including his father and his construction allies, in search of just the right piece. (Ultimately, Daniel Scannell came through with the tube.)

  He would later say that spending so much time on the tube, trying to find just the right piece was a mistake, that it took a lot out of him at that point in the game. But, as ever, he did not want to say no to The Chef.

  Even measured against the yardstick of a week at The French Laundry, Hollingsworth was exhausted. He was barely sleeping, and the long work hours were taking their toll. He felt “pretty good” about his and Guest’s preparation, but the days were falling away and he didn’t have a moment to himself, not even for the gym. At least he had enough presence of mind to recognize that the building pressure was contributing to his state of body and mind.

  Thursday went by in a shot, as the team (minus Pelka, who had headed back to New York and would rejoin them in Lyon) finished packing and headed to the airport. That afternoon, on the East Coast of the United States, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, his engine kamikazed by a flock of geese, made his splash-landing for the ages on the Hudson River in New York City, saving every soul on board US Airways Flight 1549. The miracle captured the imagination of the world as an instantaneous, Lindbergh-like fame attached to the reclusive aviator, mere days before President-elect Obama, the first African American to ascend to the highest office in the land, was to be inaugurated. It was against this backdrop that Team USA boarded its flight to Lyon, wanting nothing more than to be the next Americans to pull off a historic and improbable triumph.

  5

  All the Little Screws

  You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It’s the little differences. I mean they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just … it’s just there it’s a little different.

  —VINCENT VEGA (JOHN TRAVOLTA), PULP FICTION

  TEAM USA GAZED OVER THE TABLE IN DANIEL BOULUD’S Parents’ home: house-cured ham, house-made bread, dry salami, homemade fig and raspberry preserves, coffee, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau 2008. The setting felt almost like a restaurant, and in fact had been a restaurant once, or at least a roadside café, when it was known as Café Boulud, which the family operated until 1957.

  Today, it was the eat-in kitchen of Daniel Boulud’s parents, in their modest house on a small, once-working farm in the town of St.-Pierre-deChandieu on the outskirts of Lyon. The team had been collected at Lyon’s St. Exupéry airport by Boulud’s father, Julien, a spry, humble man in his early eighties. They were also met by Adina’s stepfather, Dr. John Guest, an acupuncture physician, who had arrived a day earlier and would be joining them for their adventure in Lyon. Slight of build, Dr. Guest boasted an aristocratic and all-but-unidentifiable accent—vaguely European, with a pinch of Great Britain, an amalgam of the various places he had lived in the United States, Europe, and his current home of Toronto, Canada. (In an amazing coincidence, Guest, like Hollingsworth, had taken the last name of her stepfather, although she remains close with her biological father.)

  Somehow the team sailed right through customs without a single interrogative challenge to their mountain of luggage. It must have been because it was the Bocuse d’Or season, as young cooks roll into town every other January with similarly massive hauls. The team procured its rental wheels, a Ford sports utility vehicle with three rows of seats and a generous cargo area, and convoyed to the Boulud home, Coach Henin and the Guests in the SUV and M. Boulud transporting Hollingsworth and Laughlin in his petit Peugeot.

  The team wound its way along all-but-deserted highways, past rolling hills dotted with the barren trees of January, grassy fields webbed with frost, and a morning fog shimmering in the nascent sunlight. This was real farmland, with livestock around the homesteads and working vehicles, tires caked with hay, sitting idle.

  In the car, Dr. Guest asked Henin, who had grown up not too far from Lyon, if he missed France.

  “No, no,” said Henin, nostalgia, sorrow, and fatigue swirling together in his austere baritone. “The people are too petty, too closed-minded.” Gazing out over the hills, he recounted how, years prior, he needed to have a telephone installed for his infirm mother. The transaction would be a piece of cake in the States, but in France, the paperwork took three weeks and the installation of the actual phone took three months.

  The convoy swept into the Boulud home, a sprawling property bounded on one side by several hangar-sized barns. They were welcomed like old friends by Daniel Boulud’s mother, Marie, a diminutive woman also in her early eighties with auburn hair. She dropped their coats on a bed in a guest room, and ushered them across the hall into the eat-in kitchen, where she proceeded to fuss over them, pouring them hot coffee, and gesturing for them to help themselves to the spread.

  Coach Henin, Hollingsworth, and Laughlin sat in a pew-like bench by the window, the lace curtains behind them depicting cherries and apples. Over the table, juxtaposed in a two-panel frame, was a photograph of the original Café Boulud, circa 1900, and below it one of a table of fashionably dressed Manhattanites sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside son Daniel’s decidedly fancier Café Boulud NYC in 2000.

  Having been in transit for close to twenty-four hours, the team ate the way soldiers eat, with unapologetic gusto. Dr. Guest, seated at the head of the table with the Bouluds, punctured the ensuing silence: “You’re all too late; I’ve already adopted them,” he said of the hospitable couple.

  As ever, Henin acted as translator for the team, relaying their questions and converting the answers:

  “Is Daniel their only child?” asked Laughlin.

  “No, they have three girls and two boys,” Henin told them. Mme. Boulud produced a family photo depicting twelve grandchildren. As she did, M. Boulud tossed in a sweet joke: “I’ve slept with four women in my life: a young woman, a mother, a grandmother, and a great grandmother.”

  “What was Daniel like as a boy?” asked Laughlin.

  At the question, Mme. Boulud put the back of her hand to her forehead, looked heavenward, and pretended to reel backwards. Everybody sighed dramatical
ly—“Ahhhhh”—as if something great must be coming. “He was very curious, very interested in so many things,” she said, via Henin. “So busy. We’d leave him somewhere, and he didn’t realize we were gone. He was always moving.”

  Everybody savored this image of the pint-sized Daniel, scurrying about these very rooms, busying himself around the property outside.

  M. Boulud removed the Café Boulud photographs from the wall and showed them to Adina Guest. He pointed out three men holding pipes in the 1900 picture. It was one of those classic abbreviated conversations between people who have no language in common: “En les Etats-Unis, ‘no smoking,’ ” he said pointing to the cigarette-free scene depicted in the Manhattan image. Then, pointing to the pipes in the older sepia-toned photograph, one at a time, he said, “La pipe, la pipe, la pipe.”

  Guest laughed. M. Boulud sighed. Conversation over.

  The Bouluds then provided verbal captions for the food the team was eating, virtually all of which the couple themselves had made: the ham had been aged for twenty-three weeks under M. Boulud’s watchful eye; the preserves prepared by Mme. Boulud; the bread, a dingy brown torpedo he referred to as pain maison (house bread), made with half white flour and half whole wheat. He bakes nine loaves at a time in his gargantuan outdoor oven, he explained, then freezes them individually. His biggest challenge is knowing a day ahead when he’ll want a loaf so he can take it out and give it a chance to revivify.

  Determined to dote on her guests to the absolute limit, Mme. Boulud offered little tubs of fromage blanc, then a cheese plate of Roquefort, caprice des dieux (a double-crème cheese), and Comté. Noting that several of her guests had jam smeared on the plates they were using for cheese, residue from the “first course,” she belatedly offered them clean plates. Of her delay, she said, “Le service est mauvais.” The service is bad.