Knives at Dawn (11 page)

—
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

K
EVIN
S
BRAGA RAN
.

It was minutes before 6:00 a.m. on the morning of Friday, September 26, the first day of the Bocuse d'Or USA competition, and Sbraga wanted to see his physical preparation through to its logical conclusion. Finding the exercise room at Disney's Beach Club Resort hotel (where all competitors were staying) locked and dark, he did what chefs do: he adapted, jogging along the footpath that encircled the resort complex, past the sandy shores of a lagoon, and along the deserted boardwalk on the other side.

Back in his room, Sbraga showered, then treated himself to a room-service breakfast and threw on a baggy white Nautica sweatshirt. He checked himself in the mirror, his face a reflection of all the work that had brought him to this day. Sbraga had shed almost twenty pounds during training. He was an athlete again, a competitor. He was also clean-shaven; he'd shorn off his beard before turning in last night, to surprise his opponents and make them wonder what this guy had up his sleeve.

By six fifty-five, the four two-person teams who were to square off that day had gathered in the lobby: Sbraga and Patel, Rosendale and Warren, Rotondo and Jennifer Petrusky, one of his sous chefs; Whatley and Johnson. The vast, garishly lit space was otherwise deserted save for the desk clerk, and it was dead silent. The teams kept their distance, yawning and pacing about under the seahorse-themed overhead lamp or walking circles around the potted palms on the fringes of the room. On the circular sofa under the seahorses, Jennifer Pelka pecked away on her laptop.

Three thunderclaps, in quick succession, rang out in the lobby, shattering the calm. It was Sbraga, smacking his hands together violently, then plunging them deep into the pockets of his sweatshirt. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he had earphones in, flooding his cranium with the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan's greatest hits. Sbraga's high-school wrestling team used to spark up the CD on a boom box before meets, but it was a strangely appropriate selection for this day as well; just as many rap and hip-hop songs are about the rhyming prowess of the singer, cooking competitions—certainly one with a visual component like the Bocuse d'Or— are about the chef's showing off his skills, making lyrics like “I be tossin', enforcin', my style is awesome,” the perfect underscoring of what was about to go down at the World Showplace. As others watched Sbraga, he again yanked his arms free of the sweatshirt and clapped his hands loudly, looking fierce, ready to rumble.

Just a few feet away stood Richard Rosendale. His overnight preparation was different from Sbraga's: after touring their kitchen the day before, he and Warren convened in Rosendale's hotel room. Working off a digital
photo he'd snapped at the Showplace, Rosendale sketched out how they were going to rearrange the equipment to create a more optimal layout. (He'd also taken the step of speaking to one of the electricians to be sure he wouldn't trip a circuit breaker and to see if there'd be enough cable, although he'd brought plenty of heavy-duty extension cords along, just in case.) Then Rosendale quizzed his assistant, quick-firing questions about the sequence of tasks he had to execute over the five-and-a-half-hour battle. If Rosendale noticed Sbraga's theatrics, he didn't let on. And even if he had noticed them, they would not have made an impact. Rosendale was in familiar territory, and his philosophy was that it's all about what you do in your own kitchen that wins the day. Any energy directed outside those four walls was wasted.

Minutes later, the teams had split into two chauffeur-driven vans and were rumbling along the back roads of suburbia to the World Showplace. In one of the vans, Pelka swiveled around in the passenger seat and asked Percy Whatley about his preparation.

“The garnishes took a long time,” said Whatley.

Pelka nodded. On the radio, The Romantics sang “That's What I Like About You.”

“Played around with the cod,” Whatley continued.

At the mention of the cod, Johnson, who had seemed dead set on
not
talking, interjected: “It sucks.”

“Water. No fat. Big challenge,” Whatley explained, summarizing the prevailing opinion about cod.

As morning broke over Lake Buena Vista, the vans arrived at the World Showplace and the teams, their moment of judgment at hand, filed into the facility with all the joie de vivre of prisoners on a death march.

A soaring, Western movie–like instrumental theme washed over the hall, which had been brought nearly to completion since the day prior. Gone were the cherry pickers, but one ladder remained, from which a stagehand was hanging long rectangular signs bearing the names of the candidates and their commis over each kitchen. Another member of Disney's
Entertainment crew was touching up the kitchen window frames with an odorless red paint.

The teams had fifty minutes to set up their kitchens and the time flew, in part because there were some surprises in store. In Kitchen 4, Whatley discovered that the All-Clad roasting pans didn't fit into the Convotherm oven, a problem because, to roast veal bones for stock “classically, culinarily, you need to use a roasting pan.” He opted for a shallower pan and hoped that the proctors wouldn't dock him for deviating from tradition.

As in Lyon, the teams would commence cooking in an empty stadium; audiences wouldn't wander in until the doors opened at eleven thirty. Henin gathered the hopefuls together in a line and reminded them that they'd start at ten-minute intervals, which would create the ten-minute window between each team's fish platter and five minutes between their meat platters.

Henin dispatched them to their kitchens: Rosendale in Kitchen 1, Sbraga in Kitchen 2, Rotondo in Kitchen 3, and Whatley on the end in Kitchen 4. Rosendale again exhibited his competition experience: he banished the hand sink to the corridor; commis Warren's task list was color coded; and photographs of the finished dishes—the ultimate in aided visualization—were taped to the wall for reference.

One by one, Henin visited the kitchens, counting down the staggered start times: “Five, four, three, two, one.
Go
!”

The chefs jumped right in: Rosendale began butchering his meat and fish, while in Kitchen 2, it was Sbraga's turn to be surprised: why were the veal bones and oxtail still frozen? He roasted the bones and prepared an ice bath to thaw the oxtail, then, scrambling to recapture lost time, he butchered his beef tenderloin too quickly and stabbed himself in the hand. Improvising for the second time that day, he taped a napkin over the wound and wedged it in place with a latex glove.

For Michael Rotondo, the drama had come the day before: because his shipment from Las Vegas had arrived several hours later than expected on Thursday, he was not able to organize his mise en place as thoroughly as the other competitors had during set-up time at the Showplace. But
the chef took it in stride. At a Charlie Trotter restaurant, where many VIP guests are treated to a new menu every time they come in, “We do a lot of spontaneous cooking … cooking on the fly … [so] are used to working in an environment that is pretty intense and under pressure.”

In Kitchen 4, Whatley and Johnson had misplaced one of the essential elements of their game plan: their rhythm. Whatley fell behind almost immediately. He had no idea why, but by one hour and twenty minutes into their time, he was still butterflying prawns that should have been finished more than a quarter hour earlier.

“I'm fifteen minutes behind and I don't know how I'm going to make it up,” he whispered to Johnson. He didn't have to say another word: his wingman immediately put the pedal to the metal, going into full-on octopus mode, doing three or four things at once instead of just one or two: chopping faster, stirring sautéing vegetables while setting peppers to roast, kneading a dough in between other tasks—all with the goal of freeing up time to receive whatever jobs Whatley needed to hand off.

Judges, in their whites, began filing in around nine o'clock. With coffee and Danishes in hand, they strolled around the kitchen, watching their young colleagues toil, often admiringly so. Georges Perrier took note of Rosendale's technique of soaking the cod for twenty minutes in cold salted water, which would cause the notoriously watery fish to firm up, making it easier to manipulate. “Very smart,” enthused Perrier.

As 10:00 a.m. approached, all of the kitchens were in full swing, with proteins being boned, liquids being stirred, vegetables being chopped, but to what end nobody knew. In this regard, the Bocuse d'Or resembles the American version of the television show
Iron Chef
in which narrator Alton Brown can often be heard attempting to deduce what the two competing teams are preparing, but usually fails to put it all together until the final minutes. So it is with the Bocuse d'Or. Through much of the five and a half hours, the chefs and commis are creating pieces for a puzzle known only to them. The end result isn't clear to the audience until the cooks are barreling down the homestretch.

“I
T'S HARD TO TELL
chefs who own empires to ‘Get over here,' ” said Gavin Kaysen as he marched around the Pavilion attempting to herd all the chef-judges together for a briefing in the back of the hall where café tables, couches, and a flat-screen television had been set up to serve as the VIP lounge when the doors opened to the public.

When he finally gathered them there, the sight was surreal: all those famous chefs—the group now included Patrick O'Connell from The Inn at Little Washington and from California, David Myers of Los Angeles' Sona restaurant and Traci Des Jardins, chef of three San Francisco restaurants—gathered in their whites in the back of a gargantuan black box amphitheater at Epcot at ten in the morning.

Coach Henin described what the technical judges, or kitchen proctors, would be looking for: efficiency of movement, logical procedure of steps (for example, butchering the fish first to get the bones simmering to make stock), whether or not the candidates work side by side or face each other to facilitate communication, and so on. Kitchen management would factor into the Bocuse d'Or USA tallies, but in Lyon those points—rendered by past winners who serve as technical judges—are only used in the event of a tie.

“Talk about your experience judging end product,” Keller asked Henin.

“Well,” Henin said, “Does the food say, ‘Eat me,' or does it sit there like a dog poop?” The chefs laughed. Henin went on to describe the desired visuals: Is everything accessible to the judge without having to move things around? Is the high point in the back of the plate [as it would be classically]? Regarding texture, Henin outlined the marks that the chefs have to hit in competition, offering the same commentary he had at the FCI briefing. And of course, the flavors had to mesh. “I like to taste meat with sauce and without sauce,” he said. “Then, I taste the pieces [main proteins and garnishes] together.”

He also warned everybody to be careful to not eat too much, lest they become sated before they'd tried all the food.

Boulud jumped in to describe the awards that would be handed out in Orlando: Gold, which came with a $15,000 cash prize (it also came with a three-month paid training sabbatical that had already received a fair amount of media interest); Silver ($10,000); and Bronze ($5,000). (The Bocuse d'Or itself also awarded cash prizes: €20,000 (euros) for Gold; €15,000 for Silver, and €10,000 for Bronze.) There would also be awards for Best Fish and Best Meat, which would be divided between the fourth and fifth finishers, Best Commis, and other “surprise prizes,” each of which would come with an attendant reward, such as time in a three-star Michelin restaurant in France, or a three-day tour of Brandt Beef's headquarters in California.

Boulud also asked the chefs to display poker faces as they tasted and made notes, in order to maintain maximum suspense until the winners were announced. He then turned to his friends and colleagues, all these chefs who had come down to Orlando at his behest, and—although it was only about half past ten—sent them forth with one final instruction: “Enjoy lunch!”

J
OHN
B
ESH
, N
EW
O
RLEANS
chef and former marine, opened the public portion of the Bocuse d'Or USA at eleven thirty that morning, functioning as emcee along with a male-female team provided by Disney. He oriented the audience, letting them know which judges would be evaluating fish (Kaysen, Des Jardins, Vongerichten, Sailhac, O'Connell, and Humm) and which would be on meat detail (Tourondel, Perrier, Handke, Bouit, Myers, and Soltner).

Besh introduced many of the Advisory Board's great transplanted French chefs (who were “guys I grew up reading about”) to the audience and held a microphone up to Soltner, who was plainly awestruck at the morning's demonstration.

“I am amazed,” he said. “I came here in 1966. When I see these guys, how they work and what they do … American chefs are the equal of European chefs. They are just as good.”

Sailhac was only too happy to keep the pro-American beach ball in the air: “When I came to this country forty-three years ago, there were no Americans in the kitchen,” he said. “What they are doing here is a great spectacle.”

Over the next few hours, as the chefs cooked in their pods, the proctors made notes, and the emcees explained the proceedings to the audience—all was as it would be in Lyon, minus the fervor of the international fans and their noisemakers, such as the cowbells wielded by the Swiss or the clackers smacked together by the Japanese.

At about 1:00 p.m., Rosendale, who would be the first to present his dishes, set a gleaming triangular silver platter on his workstation. He and Warren looked calm, even though things had been very tight; he'd gotten his tenderloin into the circulator (sous vide bath) just in the nick of time: fifty-five minutes before it had to go up in the window (fifty minutes for cooking, and five minutes to rest), and was still putting the finishing touches on the components of his fish platter, seasoning the sauce and assembling individual garnishes.