Knives at Dawn (17 page)

Besides, after they'd won in Orlando, they were back home, and weren't spending much time together. Though the Bocuse d'Or USA had publicized a paid three-month sabbatical for the chef-candidate, Hollings-worth wasn't ready to jump off The French Laundry ship just yet. First he wanted to spend some time getting his head around the competition. And while he was prepared to train mightily, he wasn't ready to abandon his job. It might have been different if he'd known back in, say, January, that he was going to audition for the part—then Lee could have taken the necessary steps to prepare for his absence. “If I said, ‘Tomorrow I am going to quit my job, I want to give my notice,' my notice is not a month. It's not three months, either. It's
six
months. It's a year. It's a very respectful time that you give to leave your job and your position,” he said. Hollingsworth had given this topic some thought about this time because he had privately
considered leaving The French Laundry, most likely for an extended stay in Thailand to chill out and recharge, but had decided against it.

About the sabbatical, Thomas Keller said the idea was born out of an abundance of excitement, and because he and other committee members had heard about how intensely some Europeans trained. “We weren't thinking of it practically, realistically … we didn't think it out very well,” he said. Echoing this sentiment, Corey Lee said, “I think that the Bocuse d'Or organizers highly publicized that there would be this time given to this candidate was a little bit unrealistic and very poorly planned … there's no fine-dining restaurant in the world who can replace a significant sous chef in two months. When that came out I think everyone knew that was an unrealistic thing.… I don't think there was a question in anyone's mind that he wouldn't have that opportunity to take a full three-and-a-half months off … the American selection process was way too close to the actual competition.”

For Hollingsworth, staying on was an unspoken expectation. His commitment to his job had always been unflagging; in seven years, he had only asked for an extra day off once, to attend his brother's wedding. So after Hollingsworth won in Orlando, he and Lee hashed out an arrangement for an extra four days off per month for him and Guest in October, November, and December. Conveniently, The French Laundry would be closed for most of January, as it is every year, so the three weeks leading up to the competition were wide open.

The shift in plans was essentially concealed from the public and the competition. “I've been helping out,” was how Hollingsworth was directed to answer media inquiries about his schedule. But members of the Bocuse d'Or committee said they were fine with it. “We were thinking like that [having a three-month sabbatical] because we were having a candidate coming from who-knows-where and we had to put him somewhere in a boot camp, but he [Hollingsworth] was already in the camp there,” said Boulud.

Moreover, Hollingsworth
wanted
to conceive his Bocuse d'Or food
where he'd done just about everything else related to cooking for the past seven years, not just where he honed his craft, but also where he'd helped shape and execute new menus on a daily basis. As a manager-level staff member, he was confident he'd be able to carve out time in his day to devote to the Bocuse d'Or. “Every day that you are in that kitchen cooking, you are training,” he said. “I am thinking about the menu when I am turning carrots. I am thinking about the menu when I have free time to try to do something that I want to work on.” Hollingsworth also planned to incorporate ideas for his competition food into the restaurant's menu when possible, trying them out in a real-world context.

Hollingsworth also needed time—
a lot
of time—to think about his menu. The style of cooking that wins the Bocuse d'Or and other competitions, with very few exceptions, was almost antithetical to the mindset he'd been honing at The French Laundry, where the daily menu comprises a series of compositions that are elegant but rarely elaborate: the quality of the ingredients and the finesse of the staff are such that a few perfectly cooked vegetables, a piece of protein, and a
jus
, unfussily arranged, are one possible equation for a meat course.

“He knows how to execute
our
food,” said Devin Knell, executive sous chef of The French Laundry. “It is a big challenge to learn how to cook [competition food].… Our food is: one, ingredients; two, flavor composition; and three, execution.… We don't try putting so many cooking techniques into one dish to show off. We are trying to do the best we can with a piece of striped bass.”

Translation: Thomas Keller might just want to make people happy, but when those people happened to be the Bocuse d'Or judges, there would only be one way to achieve that:
perfection
.

R
OLAND
H
ENIN, VETERAN CULINARY
competitor and coach, understood this only too well. He also believed that Hollingsworth's learning curve would be steep. Henin hadn't tasted Hollingsworth's winning dishes in
Orlando, but he had seen them: “The presentation in Orlando was pretty simplistic, to be nice,” he said later. “The taste of the food is what carried them in Orlando and I believe strongly that it is the taste of the food that will carry them [in Lyon]. Whether or not it will carry them all the way to the top it is difficult to call. I am not sure.”

With all of that in mind, Henin was fashioning a month-at-a-glance training schedule that assumed Hollingsworth and Guest would be available full time. It was an aggressive plan that called for developing “tentative menus with first and second options” the week of Monday, November 3, then spending the following week honing the fish platter in the kitchen and the week after that doing the same with the meat platter. According to Henin's vision, the team would actually serve guests in January, to provide them essential practice plating from the platters.

Henin made two unproductive visits to Yountville in early November, finding Hollingsworth largely unavailable because, in addition to his working schedule, he was down with the flu for several days. But the two did engage in some tense conversations over the calendar. In addition to the schedule, Henin tried to convince Hollingsworth to employ a grid that would ensure they hit all the necessary marks on both platters: flavors, textures, colors, and so on. Hollingsworth wasn't interested; those were obvious concerns, he said, and ones that he considered on a daily basis when he shepherded a new menu to fruition at The French Laundry. Hollingsworth would later acknowledge that he took the grid suggestion personally, a sign that even though he might have been ignorant of the ways of competition, Henin didn't give him credit for all that he
did
know.

Despite the tension, Henin—who is nothing if not a realist—tried to keep an open mind about Hollingsworth's fidelity to his job, especially if he could weave proteins and garnishes from his platter into the daily menu at The French Laundry, as he planned to. “I am all for it,” said Henin. “
If
it can be done. If you can incorporate [the food into the restaurant menu], so much the better, as a practical issue and an economical one, too, because you don't waste the food. You get feedback from the customer and you
can pay for the food that you used.” But the coach quickly developed the opinion that Hollingsworth was “in limbo … neither at work, neither in practice, he was always in between.” He also had the feeling that the candidate didn't understand what he was up against. Hadn't Hollingsworth taken those words from The French Culinary Institute to heart, the ones about it not mattering what you've done before, where you work, or who you know? Even to a sous chef from The French Laundry, a culinary competition, especially a five-hour-plus labor of love like the Bocuse d'Or, was something to be respected—the difference between basic training and actual combat, or in Henin's preferred long-distance-running analogy, a sprint and a marathon.

In an attempt to accommodate everybody's needs, a revised monthly calendar was fashioned that included the coach's goals while also showing the days Hollingsworth was committed to working his regular job. One glance revealed a daunting void at the end of November, when Hollings-worth was set to work at The French Laundry Saturday the twenty-second and Sunday the twenty-third, then decamp for Maine and girlfriend Kate Laughlin's family for the Thanksgiving holiday—a week of non-Bocuse time after which he'd be plunked down in December, just six weeks from the departure to Lyon.

Henin couldn't have disagreed more with
that
decision. “Not when you have the Bocuse d'Or in six weeks!” he said.

B
EYOND THE SCHEDULING KERFUFFLE
, the truth was that Hollingsworth just plain didn't want company yet, not from Henin, not from anybody. He might have been working, but by early November, feeling ready to try his hand at competition platters, he had also been conceptualizing his cuisine and he felt he had to do it on his own, that his dishes needed to flow naturally from him and be given the time and oxygen to grow.

There's no one path to conceiving a dish. But for many chefs, the creative moment—the instant when an idea emerges from the primordial
mental swamp, either fully formed or requiring further evolution—often does not involve a protein. The average diner might be surprised to know that the fish, poultry, or meat is frequently the last tumbler to fall into place; as often as not, inspiration offers up a notion for a fresh variation on a familiar theme, a new sauce, or a combination of accompaniments. Even for those chefs who begin the thought process with a protein, it's almost unheard of that they would begin with three or four of them in mind.

This is one of the distinct challenges of the Bocuse d'Or: the proteins are the
only
parameters dictated by the organizers, and both the fish and meat platter demand the harmonizing of several of them. In 2009, it would be Norwegian fresh cod, Norwegian king scallops, and Norwegian wild prawns on the fish platter, and Scotch Beef Aberdeen Angus oxtail, beef cheeks,
côte de boeuf
(bone-in rib-eye, of which each candidate would be receiving three on a “carvery cut forerib”), and fillet (tenderloin) on the meat.

In addition to the assigned proteins, Hollingsworth had imposed some other parameters on himself. Because time was short, he had decided to incorporate preparations that Guest already had expertise in from her work at The French Laundry. Chive chips weren't the only thing she already knew how to do: she also did a lot of Silpat work, such as making melba toasts and
pommes Maxim
(potato rounds tossed in clarified butter and baked together in an overlapping pattern), and adored brunoise for the precision it demanded. To give her a head start, or to help her make up lost time, Hollingsworth wanted to work those elements and techniques into his Bocuse d'Or food as well.

Beyond the hours he devoted at The French Laundry, Hollingsworth began spending personal time on his Bocuse d'Or menu. He'd sit in the living room of his Napa apartment, cookbooks surrounding him on shelves high and low, a steady blend of rap and hip-hop blaring out open windows, and, with the California breeze ruffling its pages, make preliminary drawings in a sketch pad, occasionally flying an idea by Laughlin, both for her feedback and because hearing the ideas out loud made them seem more “real” to him.

There's no point denying the obvious: it had been more than a month since Orlando, and Hollingsworth was struggling, experiencing the cook's equivalent of writer's block. The meat selections practically tormented him. There might have been four different cuts, but when you got right down to it, they were all
beef
, and making your mark on beef is a distinct challenge. Because beef is such a powerful presence on the plate and the palate, it's often the least creative offering on even the most progressive menus.

Nevertheless, in fits and starts, ideas began to trickle forth. Building on his desire to present something distinctly American at the Bocuse d'Or, something identifiable and straightforward, he began to think of his mother. Hollingsworth often said that he cooked for his mother, tried to make food that, if she were to dine at The French Laundry, she would enjoy eating. His memories of her home cooking are so strong that foie gras at the restaurant is occasionally served atop a slice of Mrs. Hollingsworth's Banana Bread, so identified on the menu and made with her original recipe. This train of thought led him to the oxtail—a tough cut that requires braising or stewing to break down its connective tissues—and it occurred to him that maybe he'd cook it in a way that referenced his mom's beef stew.

It was a start, but the truth was that nothing he thought of or sketched out felt good enough, exciting enough, with enough bells and whistles for a competition. And did he even want those bells and whistles? A tension was emerging between who he was as a cook and what the Bocuse d'Or demanded of its competitors: he did not want his food to look like quintessential competition fare, with what he called “those funny circles.” Twenty-eight-years-young, sitting there in his preferred personal-time ensemble of tattered jeans, a T-shirt, and black knit cap, he wasn't interested in cooking
old
food.

As crumpled pages flowed from his pad into the wastebasket, frustration mounted. But he stuck with it, and additional ideas began to come into focus. It dawned on him that he should confit the cod—slowly, gently cooking it in an olive oil bath—because that was the most foolproof way of dealing with the quirk of timing presented by the competition—the notorious
lag time between food leaving the window and actually being tasted: “If I were to take a sautéed piece of fish and parade it around for twenty minutes, it's not going to be good,” he said. “If I take a confit piece of fish, [it] can be piping hot or it can be ice cold and it is still going to be very good. It puts all the moisture inside of it.” That moistness would also provide leeway; the fish could be slightly over-or undercooked and nobody would be the wiser.