Knives at Dawn

by Andrew Friedman

  They were down to the wire, inside that five-minute window between “time” and “too late.” Hemorrhaging minutes as they were, Hollings worth decided not to add the smoke to the smoke glasses until the carving station; they’d lose drama, but perhaps save their bacon by getting done before time was up.

  On the dais, Jérôme Bocuse was unable to conceal his concern, and he cheated a few steps away from the table to peer in at Kitchen 6, situated over his right shoulder. “Normally, in that five minutes, you see that everything is almost done and ready to go and they were still scrambling,” he said. He thought back to his impressions back in Yountville earlier in the month: “That reflects again on the routine.”

  Not wanting to distract Hollingsworth, Henin decided that he’d issue reminders by holding up pieces of paper with the remaining time on it. But Hollingsworth, never one to be distracted by noise, expected the coach to just scream out, “Okay, Tim, pull the beef.” As a result, Henin had to wave his signs to get the candidate’s attention. Those guys, they just never clicked.

  Hollingsworth removed the bacon-wrapped beef from the oven and put the cylinders on the platter. Guest arranged the deconstructed beef stew stacks around them, and they lifted the platter up into the window, thinking they were perhaps late, but just making their allotted timeframe. The platter kept the team’s secrets well: with the exception of the absent smoke, it looked every bit as spectacular as it ever had.

  After the platter had made the rounds, and the time came to plate, Hollingsworth made an adjustment based on his experience on the fish platter, taking command of the carving station and arranging his plates around the platter. This time, things went easier, but even as the plates were whisked away to the judges, Hollingsworth knew that he had come up short. Minutes later, in the kitchen, with the curtains pulled shut, Hollingsworth was immediately overcome with a feeling of profound disappointment, in himself, and the job that he and his team did.

  “I know we didn’t win,” he said to Guest.

  He and Guest broke down their kitchen and cleaned it, the cramp in his side lingering for a good fifteen minutes into the process. Once done, he walked along the corridor behind kitchens 7 through 12, past the reception and meeting rooms, and past the sentry posted at his velvet rope and stanchions, where Laughlin was waiting for him.

  “That was the hardest thing I ever did,” he said to her.

  Hollingsworth then returned to the holding area, where the wait was excruciating—there was still about an hour to go before all of the platters had been served and the other kitchens cleaned, and then of course there was the tabulating of the scores.

  Other countries had joined the fray: the Czech Republic, Canada, and Singapore, which bought the event to Kitchen 10 and France.

  Out on stage, Ferniot and May didn’t even try to conceal their obvious excitement, and that of the audience. (“We better do it, before we have a riot,” said May of the rabid French fans.) When the fish platter was finally marched out, it did not disappoint: the centerpiece was cod fillet with Biar-ritz flavors, a tribute to the seaside town in southwest France where Mille and his commis had practiced in order to escape the intense media scrutiny that always attaches to the French candidate. The cod’s topping comprised many ingredients closely associated with Biarritz cuisine such as Espelette pepper, chorizo, piquillo peppers, and Bayonne ham. Garnishes included a tender shrimp dome and tawny crisps (shrimp arranged in a circle over a rounded brown pastry cup) with golden eggs, a delicate tart of scallops on a bed of baby spinach with a layer of caviar beads, and a cone of leeks and sea-flavored baby squid topped with urchin roe. Minutes later, for the beef platter, there were wood-grilled beef steak layered with foie gras and encased in a flaky pastry, braised beef cheeks with a carrot topiary, beef tenderloin with tiny garden vegetables, a miniature shrub of tender leeks, and the showstopper: oxtail and caramelized celery combined and formed into an enormous charcoal-colored “Black Diamond.”

  When the competition was finally over and the judges found their way backstage, Keller patted Hollingsworth and Guest on the back and said, “Good job. I’m proud of you guys.” But he couldn’t help but ask about the smoke bowls.

  “Chef, I didn’t think we had time,” said the candidate. This was actually one of the things he was ultimately least disappointed in because, “In the long run, I think it probably tasted a lot better.” That said, Hollingsworth will forever wonder whether or not he would have earned some more points had those glasses contained smoke when they were first paraded—would the drama of the visuals have predisposed more judges to love his food?

  As Hollingsworth and Guest hung out backstage, strangers—including many judges—came up to him and offered encouragement in a multitude of languages. All the positive vibes conspired to almost make him believe that he had a shot, but not really, “not in my heart.” Hollingsworth didn’t even think about what place he deserved. By that point, he just wanted to do well enough to not be embarrassed.

  Just as his spirits were lifting, however, he was met with some criticism. Judge René Redzepi of Denmark came up and told Hollingsworth that he didn’t understand that the rosette was not supposed to be warm, and judge Lea Linster reinforced this by telling him that both the rosette and the smoke bowl garnish confused her. “Where I’m from, you would say it a different way on the menu, you would say it’s meant to clean your palate or something,” she told him.

  Hollingsworth received this with a mix of shock and disbelief. “To me that is crazy,” he thought. “There’s freaking raw meat on it.” For all of the time and debate that had gone into the menu writing, had the failure to state an intended temperature cost Team USA?

  FINALLY, AT A BOUT A quarter past six, the pomp of the awards ceremony commenced. Hall 33 was by then packed quite beyond its capacity; the media pit was a zoo, and the stairway that led to the media center was crawling with spectators watching the action from outside the hall itself.

  Three circular podiums had been hauled out on stage, the winners’ circle, or circles. After all the necessary introductions, the various teams emerged from the wings, along with their presidents, with each group hoisting its flag. Some teams exuded confidence in the moment, like Skeie, who held his aloft as though charging into battle. Hollingsworth, on the other hand, held the Stars and Stripes at his side.

  In the audience, Pelka and Laughlin held hands, their seriousness undercut by Pelka’s attire: the 2009 red, white, and blue sunglasses and a flag draped cape-like over her shoulders. Desperate for information, she made eye contact with Jérôme Bocuse. She assumed that Paul Bocuse knew who the winner was, and that one would think that if he knew then Jérôme would find out.

  This led her to wonder about who knew what down there on the stage. Daniel Boulud would not make eye contact with her—was he hiding something? Keller seemed impassive, maybe blue. “I don’t think Thomas knows,” she thought. “Or he knows and it’s not what he wants.”

  When she finally locked eyes with Jérôme Bocuse, he nodded in her direction. She shrugged and he looked away. When he looked back, she surreptitiously held up one finger. First place?

  He shook his head, “No,” and looked down.

  “Oh, man,” she thought, believing that first place had been within reach.

  She held up two fingers.

  At this, Bocuse nodded slightly, which she took to mean “Yes.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said to Laughlin. “Jérôme just told me that we came in second.”

  “Do you really think so?” said Laughlin. “Second is amazing.”

  After consolation prizes were handed out for Best Promotional Poster (Brazil) and Best Promotion (Czech Republic), it was time for the award for Best Fish, which was presented to Jasper Kure of Denmark. He accepted his little goldfish statue with obvious disappointment, which was even more evident when it was announced moments later that he had also won Best Meat and had to hold up a little cow and pose for pictures with those sponsors. A ripple of confu
sion went through the media section—had there been a rule change? How could one country win both those prizes and not take the gold? (The answer is that those awards are for the best fish and meat outside the top three finishers.)

  Then came the top prizes. When it was announced that France won the bronze, the first time it had failed to win gold or silver, anything seemed possible.

  “Holy shit,” thought Pelka. “We won.” She squeezed Laughlin’s hand even tighter.

  There was just one thing: on the dais, Hollingsworth and Guest looked scared to her, almost miserable, which pretty much summed up Hollingsworth’s feeling at the moment, standing up there for an extended time, sure that he hadn’t placed.

  Pelka’s feeling was magnified when Jonas Lundgren won the silver and took up his place on the podium. By the time Paul Bocuse emerged to read out the name of the winner of the Bocuse d’Or, nobody knew what to expect. But as it turned out, it would be an anticlimactic resolution as a familiar victor was announced: Norway!

  Pelka let go of Laughlin’s hand and almost instantly began sobbing into her cape, but as Skeie and his commis dashed up to the highest pedestal, attaining his lifelong ambition, it was difficult to begrudge him his victory. He had wanted this since the age of twelve, and had devoted much of the past two years to attaining it. As confetti rained down on him and the Norwegian national anthem began to play, he held the trophy aloft and howled.

  Later, when the score sheets were distributed, Hollingsworth would learn his fate: a sixth place finish, the same as Hartmut Handke had pulled off in 2003. Where the three top medalists had earned scores of 1,020, 994, and 993, Hollingsworth had amassed 911 points. For all of the problems in the kitchen, he wound up in rarefied air, among the half-dozen who had crossed the 900-point threshold: the remaining eighteen candidates scored between 669 (South Korea) and 891 (Iceland).

  When Pelka reunited with Jérôme Bocuse in the competition area, he informed her that nobody, not even Paul Bocuse, knew the results before they were announced; he had merely been telling her what his best guess was with his head shakes and nods.

  In their own way, others had a more painful ending: Jasper Kure, who placed fourth, missed the podium by an excruciating seven points, even though he had the top meat score of any team, including the medalists. France, meanwhile, had been one minute late with its fish platter, earning a twelve-point penalty, which ended up making the difference between second and third place. There are those, Gavin Kaysen among them, who believe that Mille was crucified for the sins of the past, for other times—like the one depicted in the 2007 documentary—when late finishers were not punished for much more severe infractions. Asked for comment, Mille refused to complain. “I have to respect the rules,” was all he said of the matter.

  As for Luke Croston of Australia, who had come back to the Bocuse d’Or to better his twelfth place finish of 2007 … he once again came in twelfth, perhaps due to that disintegrating cod; he would never know exactly.

  For his part, Roland Henin was at peace with the outcome for Team USA: “Even if we were to do a bronze, it would have been somewhat pushed,” he said later. “It would have been fabricated. It would have been almost unfair and just unreal and I was in a sense—I don’t want to say happy— I was fine with the fact that we didn’t do a bronze, simply because we didn’t deserve a bronze. We got what we deserved, and I want to be clear about that. We got what we deserved. We were not at the bronze level. Period. Had we had a bronze I would have definitely lost faith in the judging process.”

  Similarly, Laughlin, while sad for her boyfriend, was, “a little bit relieved. Just in that I thought if the U.S. team can come in here, and if Tim can come in with limited practice and exposure to this type of competition and get on the podium, then what does that say for the whole Bocuse d’Or organization? I had never really questioned the integrity … but we had kind of formed this bond with Paul Bocuse and his staff.… I was almost relieved that at the end of the day that it just comes down to these numbers.… The general feeling was not relief, of course, but sadness for Tim because I know he would feel that he disappointed people and that was what was hardest for me, that he would feel that he let people down.”

  She wasn’t far off: Hollingsworth felt stung by the already-nagging feeling that he knew he had been capable of doing better. For a guy who had been raised by his father to abhor shoddy workmanship, who had spent seven years questing for perfection on a daily basis, who relentlessly pushed himself to do his best and to bring out the best in those around him, and who was the go-to guy at The French Laundry, the realization that he didn’t fulfill his potential was a bitter pill to swallow.

  There was another argument to be made, and it was an obvious one with a much less punitive message: with just three and a half months to do everything, with just five full practices under their belt, while still basically working their regular jobs, Hollingsworth and Guest had matched the best-ever result by an American team headed up by a veteran competitor who had trained more than a year. They had come in eight spots higher than Kaysen, who had logged more than fifty practice runs. Kaysen insisted that the sixth-place finish, while short of the podium, was a resounding validation of Hollingsworth’s talent. “It’s technique. He knows how to season. He knows how to cook,” said Kaysen. “All of the other stuff is the fluff that gets you on the podium. That is the foundation of the competition. The competition was built for that.”

  But that logic only went so far with Hollingsworth, who knew he was being evaluated by a different yardstick: “Everybody thinks you had three months off, paid,” he said, referring to media coverage of the team’s preparation. “Therefore it’s like, yeah, you can kind of feel that way, but you can’t because that’s not what other people think.”

  Keller, who had the prescience, way back at The French Culinary Institute briefing the prior July, to indicate that he didn’t necessarily expect a win for the USA in 2009, again took the long view, putting the result in perspective: “What happens to a chef that wins or loses a cooking competition?” he reflected at a later date. “It doesn’t really define who that chef is or who that chef is going to become. I think it’s a moment, an experience in each one of our lives that we could appreciate and enjoy. Because we were chosen for this. We were asked to do this and we agreed to do this. We do that for the experience of it and you try to do the best you can. Is it ultimately going to define who I am or who Timmy is or [who Geir Skeie] is? No.

  “We are defined every day by what we do and redefined every day by what we do. It is a day-to-day thing. Cooking is a day-to-day thing and it is a commitment that you make. So if you win the Bocuse d’Or yesterday, that was yesterday. What are you going to do today? It’s not a piece of art that lasts forever. You could paint a piece of art, it becomes a masterpiece, and you may never paint another masterpiece as long as you live but at least that masterpiece is still there and it lasts forever. Food is not like that … you win the whatever—Bocuse d’Or, James Beard, whatever accolades you win—once you win it, it’s over. You won it for the work that you did the day before.

  “So what are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked.

  THE NEXT MORNING, DANIEL Boulud drove to his parents’ home. Jennifer Pelka was in the car with him. On his cellular phone was Georgette Farkas, his publicity director back in New York, asking for direction on how to spin the U.S. result.

  “You can’t jump into the pool and compete with Michael Phelps,” Boulud told her. He and Keller and Jérôme Bocuse, they had all taken this on with little time and long odds against them, that was the spin.

  Once he was done with the call, he continued to drive along the highways, the same ones he’d navigated as a young cook. He squinted into the sunlight.

  “Disappointment in life can be motivating,” he said. “When I opened my first restaurant that was Restaurant Daniel on Seventy-sixth Street, it was after I spent six years at Le Cirque and I was twice four-star review. I was expecting maybe my first re
staurant to get three stars because I wasn’t trying to be fancy or anything, but very good. The review was two stars and the staff was devastated. For me, I felt, you know, this is not going to knock me off my horse. We gonna show them the best fucking two-star they have ever seen if that is going to be the verdict. And eight months later, we had four stars again. So in a way I think that it is a motivation. I think this should not knock us off.”

  He continued: “What I think is that Timothy did an amazing job,” he said. “And I tell you in my own notes of tasting the food and taking notes on the food I really felt that the people who were on the podium weren’t the one that impressed me most with taste. When you have twelve different judges and all of them are judging very unevenly how can you just guess right?”

  “But, Chef, what do we have to do better?” asked Pelka.

  “We have to have time to train!” Boulud shouted. “The Norwegian [chef] had a year to think about his dish and a year and a half to train! … It is a very hard game to play and I think we played very well.”