Knives at Dawn (18 page)

He also had a partially formed idea for a garnish: sandwiching something (he wasn't sure what yet) between brioche melba toast rectangles and topping the sandwich-like stack with a rectangular custard and a piece of spring garlic (young, green garlic with a gentle, scallion-like flavor).

And that was where he was with little more than two months to go: a vague notion about riffing on his mother's beef stew, a decision to confit cod (probably), and a brioche-and-custard garnish—the most tenuous of beginnings for three of the eight components he'd need to come up with, then perfect, for his platters.

G
AVIN
K
AYSEN, THREE THOUSAND
miles away, monitored what was beginning to feel like snail's-pace progress from his small, sparse office overlooking the Café Boulud kitchen. There were no official systems of reporting established, so information from the West Coast was scarce, but Kaysen had been in touch with Hollingsworth sporadically by phone and e-mail. Having helped inspire Boulud, then Keller, to take on the Bocuse d'Or USA, Kaysen found the notion that not a single recipe had been finalized “nerve-wracking.” Perhaps more than anybody, more even than Hollingsworth himself, Kaysen wanted the United States to touch that podium, and wanted to be a part of the effort that got it done. He felt that he understood Hollingsworth's quandary better than the candidate himself: you get picked to go to Lyon, then reality settles in; you realize what you're up against and how well-funded and well-organized the competition is, and that they've been to the event before, and have past medalists consulting
them, and you mentally curl up in a fetal position—at least that's what Kaysen figured was going on. He'd done the same thing, but he'd had more time.

The situation wasn't lost on Boulud who, with hopes of jump-starting things, had planned an intensive week for the team in mid-November, reaching out to Joseph Viola, chef-owner of Daniel et Denise restaurant in Lyon and a former organizing committee member (the chefs who serve as technical judges, help parade the platters, and perform other essential tasks) for the Bocuse d'Or. The Bocuse d'Or USA paid Viola an undisclosed consulting fee to fly from France to California and impart his institutional knowledge of the competition to Hollingsworth. A working session was scheduled for Monday, November 17, with Chef Henin arriving that afternoon.

Kaysen had decided to join the group as well. Eager to get out west and light a fire under Hollingsworth, Kaysen arranged a Sunday arrival so the two of them could have a heart-to-heart, man-to-man, chef-to-chef confab before the others arrived. Kaysen also wanted to begin the process of downloading whatever intel he himself had to share, from a competitor's point of view. He was emerging as Team USA's recon guy, the one who had been behind enemy lines and lived to tell the tale, and he wanted to help Hollingsworth and Guest with little tricks such as laying carpet down in the competition kitchen to provide traction on the slick floors or draping a sheet of canvas over the open doorway at the back of the kitchen pod because Kitchen 6, where the team would be competing on Day 2 of the Bocuse d'Or, is right across the corridor from the door to the parking lot that swings open and closed all competition long; Kaysen still remembered well how powdery snow had accumulated in the doorway the day he competed.

Since Hollingsworth hadn't yet determined the food, former candidate Kaysen couldn't help but think about what
he
would do with the given proteins. One notion he had was bleaching the bones on the ribs of the côte de boeuf and making them the centerpiece of the beef platter: a manly celebration of the meat itself that he thought would resonate with other
chefs. He had also begun compiling a list of the food that was going to be available from The French Laundry's Garden in January. He read from it: “Lettuces, radicchio, frisée, kale, collards, chard, baby beets, baby carrots, baby turnips, baby radish, green [spring] garlic, baby onions, baby leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, Romanesco (a psychedelic, lime-green summer cauliflower), and Savoy cabbage. Awesome!” He grinned wide as he imagined the possibilities: “You know, Savoy cabbage would be a really fun garnish to do with the beef.”

Kaysen had also jotted down ideas for combinations and garnishes: “Cardoons and black truffles are always good with braised beef cheeks and shallot confit or shallot marmalade or a shallot tuile. Celery root, carrot cannelloni, stuffed cabbage. Smoked foie gras or poached foie gras with quince. Apples, celery leaves—one of the two.
Pommes dauphine
or
pommes
croquettes. Foie gras
cromesqui
[a savory croquette that retains heat very well] with port wine gelée or a port wine disk or black pepper tuile. A Lyonnaise-style potato cannelloni made with a
pommes cromesqui
on top of that.”

He had just as many ideas for the fish platter: “Cod: Stuffed baby artichokes with confit cod belly wrapped in artichoke with green zucchini. Stencil leaves out of green zucchini for the green. Cod with black truffles is always a great combination. Scallop mousse. Possibly a monkfish liver. Can you poach monkfish liver? In Riesling?
Whatever
. Cardoons are good with shrimp. Shrimp crêpes with cabbage styled like an Alsatian clam chowder.”

Kaysen was also taken with the idea of using candy dishes for serving that were produced by Austria's Lobmeyr and obtained in the United States from the design store Moss—individually hand-blown lidded orbs that stood on little stands that The French Laundry and Per Se sometimes used to smoke dishes à la minute: for example, a foie gras composition would be brought to a guest in the orb, the bowl full of freshly applied smoke, and when the lid was removed, the smoke would swirl around the food, dissipating as the diner dug in. At $245 each, these would be an expensive addition to the platters, but Kaysen thought they were worth
it. At the moment, he was thinking they should be used to serve foie gras.

As he rattled off the possibilities, Kaysen spontaneously gave voice to the endgame in his mind: “We have got to figure out exactly what it is going to take to have him win,” Kaysen said. “
We gotta hit that podium
. That would be huge.”

Listening to Kaysen imagine all the possibilities, one could be forgiven for forgetting that he wouldn't actually be competing in 2009. And here's the funny thing about Kaysen: there are guys like him all over the world, chefs for whom the Bocuse d'Or is a sort of idée fixe: they competed once, didn't win, and are now on a mission to succeed, even vicariously. The more extreme cases suit up for a second go at the gold: Rasmus Kofoed of Denmark nabbed the bronze in 2005, then competed again in 2007, winning silver, but had decided against returning again in 2009. But there was one return contestant on the way: Australian candidate Luke Croston had been the commis on the 2003 team, then competed for his country in 2007, coming in twelfth. He would be there again in January 2009. Croston had been hooked on the Bocuse d'Or from his debut as a commis, which he called “a mind-blowing experience.” Then twenty years old, he “had never seen anything that big.… I wanted to have a go at it myself and … see how close I could get to the top of the world,” he said. When he placed twelfth, he decided to go for it again, because he was disappointed and felt he could do better. With Serge Vieira advising him, he had stopped working in late summer and begun training about five days a week.

Kaysen's mood swung from excitement to exasperation. Fueled by a personal passion for success at the Bocuse d'Or, Kaysen wanted to be as supportive as possible, but he also didn't want to waste time. For the coming week, Keller's precise, hospitality-minded team had arranged a thoughtful visit for their guests, with no detail left to chance—the schedule indicated where lunch was going to come from and when (for example, “12:30 p.m., Sandwiches from [Bouchon] Bakery”), and group dinners planned each night. Though he imagined one of those dinners might be
scrapped in favor of him and Hollingsworth getting in the kitchen and actually
cooking
, Kaysen was okay with them. But when he saw that a tour of the West Coast outpost of The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, just up Highway 29 from Yountville, had been planned for Tuesday morning, he e-mailed the schedule back with one word added in red next to the field trip: “Why?”

The CIA excursion was promptly canceled.

W
ITH THOUGHTS OF TOUGH
love in mind, Kaysen arrived in Yountville late Sunday morning, November 16. Northern California was summery then, with squint-inducing sunlight, temperatures in the high sixties, and not a trace of humidity. Kaysen ducked into Bouchon for lunch, then met Hollingsworth outside the restaurant and the two of them walked along Washington Street to the Bocuse House, as people had taken to referring to the former home of Edward Keller, where a Marine Corps flag still flew over the porch.

Hollingsworth wasn't thrilled about the coming week. He felt the need to work on his platters and didn't know what to do with all these people around. He ran the question by Keller, who—according to Hollingsworth—told him, “This is your thing, Tim. If you want to meet with these guys for an hour and then you want to leave afterward and go do your own thing, you can do that. This is your deal. You can do whatever you want.”

Kaysen was immediately struck, as most visitors were, that the structure that housed Team USA's much publicized training center was, unmistakably, a
house
. Up a few steps from the sidewalk to the porch and through the front door, one entered a living room with wainscoted walls and a built-in entertainment center on the right. To the left was a modest living room outfitted with a brown leather couch, a low-lying coffee table, and behind that was a little office nook with a desk, a computer, and a printer. In a corner were large corrugated cardboard boxes filled with smaller All-Clad
white boxes containing brand-new mixing bowls, pots, and pans—a good indicator of where the team was, or wasn't, in its development.

Just past the living room was the kitchen, with two rolling prep tables in the center of the room, and all that equipment that matched what was to be provided in Lyon organized around its perimeter: a Convotherm combi oven (capable of producing dry heat, steam, and a combination), a Garland salamander (an industrial strength broiler) and electric range, a Delfield refrigerator, undercounter refrigerator, and freezer, a microwave oven, blast chiller, heat lamp—about $100,000 in equipment. But even with all this top-of-the-line machinery, it felt more like a home kitchen than Kaysen had expected, with a skylight in the ceiling and a back door that led out to a small deck. A few details personalized the space even further, like the Mickey Mouse trophy from Orlando that rested on the window ledge, and the round Obama magnet stuck to the side of the freezer, put there by Keller himself. Adina Guest, between homes and taking full advantage of her invitation to live there as a member of the team, also had some personal food items, such as cereal, stored in glass canisters.

The House had been somewhat hurriedly renovated, which led to a few idiosyncrasies: the ventilation system for the stove was positioned several feet away from the cooking surface rather than directly above it, and the area under the sink was not a finished cabinet but rather an open space that housed cleaning supplies and a garbage can behind a drab curtain. (This detail, above all others, nagged at Keller. “It really bothers me,” he said. Keller's assistant Molly Ireland said that she knew when she and her colleagues put that curtain up that “it definitely was not French Laundry standard. How did we let that go?” Perfect food might be unattainable, but there clearly was a perfect curtain out there somewhere.)

Hollingsworth and Kaysen—the present and most recent Bocuse d'Or USA candidates—sat down in the living room and got right down to business. They discussed the week on tap and the planning that would have to be done for Lyon. Rather than pushing Hollingsworth as he had anticipated doing, Kaysen adjusted his strategy and took the commiseration
route; when Hollingsworth joked that second place in Orlando is the real winner (you get a cash prize and are
done
), Kaysen nodded: “It's a problem. You feel like you won [but are just getting started].”

They talked over the plan for January. Recently, a decision had been made that the team would spend two weeks in Lyon prior to the competition, envisioned as a period of settling in and performing two practices, a few days apart.

“So the second practice and then what else do we do?” asked Hollings-worth.

“That's it. Otherwise we are in Lyon.”

“Can we go and eat?”

Kaysen nodded. “Go and eat. It's really more to get your body adjusted to the time change because it's going to take your body about eight days to be fully ready to go and feel comfortable. It's funny: you walk around and all you see is Bocuse d'Or posters.” This was a reference to the promotional posters that each team was required to produce; Team USA's poster had already been conceived and designed by Level, a five-person design firm that worked with Keller's restaurants and on his books. The poster depicted Hollingsworth in the colors and style of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster that had become a fixture of the just-concluded campaign, from which the senator from Illinois had emerged victorious.

“It's crazy,” Kaysen continued. “You bring posters with you and you drop them off at restaurants. You go out to eat, when you pay your bill you say, ‘Oh, by the way, can you put my poster up?' It's a campaign.”

Hollingsworth, not exactly an exhibitionist, received this information with a look of something less than enthusiasm.

“Don't worry, I will help you campaign. If you are too shy, I will take care of it. It's fun. We had our posters all over.”

Having finished her day at The French Laundry, Adina Guest arrived and the three of them walked across the street to the Garden, completely open to the public, without so much as a picket fence to keep locals and tourists from traipsing among the produce or plucking souvenir vegetables,
which just doesn't seem to happen. In the northwest corner of the field was a just-completed hoop house (similar to a greenhouse, but with no heaters), where The French Laundry's Culinary Gardener Tucker Taylor and his team gave ingredients a head start during the winter, keeping them clear of the seasonal rains. Beyond that were the mountains that separate Napa and Santa Rosa. Two flag posts flying an American flag and a Relais & Châteaux flag stood tall in the middle of the field, between the first and second rows of beds.