Knives at Dawn (26 page)

As his sous chef turned all this over in his head, Keller shrugged and shifted into his aw-shucks informality: “Okay, I mean, that's just some ideas.”

Next up was the pommes dauphinoise. Guest browned a few potato
wedges, presenting them to Hollingsworth on the prep table. Hollings-worth built a stack: pommes Maxim, topped with the pommes dauphi-noise, on one end he set a chestnut, on the other a celery salad, then he drizzled a little chestnut-infused clarified butter over the chestnut.

Keller asked if it would be possible to slice the potato thinner and use it as a wrapping for other components. He asked Guest for plastic wrap, cut a narrow sheet and laid it on the table before him. He then cut a thin sheet of pommes dauphinoise from the pan, set a broccolini spear across the potato, and used the plastic like a sushi mat to roll it up. Then he twisted the ends of the plastic over and over, squeezing the contents into a cylindrical shape.

“You can make it as big as you like and put the chestnut in the center,” he said.

Next Hollingsworth assembled the deconstructed beef stew. Atop a punched-out circle of turnip, he set a punched-out circle of black truffle, a stewed beef cheek cube, and a baby beet wedge (inspired by his tour of the hoop house that morning), and topped them with broccolini florets and three small punched carrots speared on a stripped thyme sprig—an all-American composition singing with Northern California produce.

Keller's response was instantaneous: “It's beautiful.”

He studied it for a moment. “Why do you put the truffle on the bottom?”

“It keeps the sauce off the turnip.”

“Do you want to do truffle twice?” There it was, that French Laundry bias against repeating major flavors on the same plate.

“Not necessarily. We're still working that stuff out.”

Keller popped the little tower into his mouth.

“Mmmmm. It's really good. I think the flavor of the turnip, carrot, and beef cheek is exceptional.”

“What do you think of the size?”

“Perfect. I wouldn't get any bigger.”

Keller continued to taste and think.

“I like it,” he said. “It's natural. It's not manipulated. You don't want
everything
to be manipulated.”

The comment was a relief to Hollingsworth who not only had a personal preference for simple elegance, but with so little time in which to work, didn't want to create platters with more places to fail than to succeed. Hollingsworth also took great pride in what happened next, or more precisely what
didn't
happen next. As he and Guest prepared the first of the fish garnishes, Keller lowered himself to his knees. He rested his hands on the stainless table and stared at the empty plate that had held the deconstructed beef stew. He tilted his head from side to side, leaned back, thought some more.

But he didn't say a word.

Hollingsworth took the silence to mean that The Chef couldn't come up with a way to improve the garnish, and it was a good feeling.

Keller popped a baby turnip from the table into his mouth and stood up.

“So that's the garnishes for the beef?”

“Yes”

“Is the fillet like we did it before?”

“Yes.” (He hadn't actually decided to use the bacon-wrapped tenderloin for sure, but didn't want to worry The Chef with his lack of finality.) “Cod will be en persillade, with scallop mousse. Maybe diced shrimp.”

Hollingsworth paused, sighed. “The côte de boeuf, I'm having a hard time with,” he said. “Anything beautiful I can think to do, like a showpiece, it won't carve.”

Keller nodded, but didn't have an immediate suggestion to share.

Hollingsworth next made the potato garnish for the fish platter: topping a rectangle of mille-feuille with caviar, a crème fraîche quenelle, and chive. The crème fraîche benefited from a subtle employment of molecular gastronomy: Hollingsworth whipped a little gellan gum into it, which kept it from melting on the hot potato.

Keller took a bite. Then another.

“That's excellent,” he said. “Where's the bacon from?”

“Hobbs,” said Hollingsworth, which was French Laundry shorthand for Hobbs Shore, a Marshall, California charcutier who had just passed away on December 15.

“Are you going to take this bacon with you?” asked Keller.

“Yes.”

“Good. The bacon over there is smokier.” Hollingsworth had heard this before, one of many references to the multitude of details that would have to be adjusted to on the ground in Lyon.

“Maybe a bacon chip on top,” said The Chef. “Something that gives it some crunch.” The bacon chip was on Keller's mind because Grant Achatz had just been in town to do a joint cookbook promotion with Keller, and had done a bacon chip as part of his meal. The chip is featured in his
Alinea
book, hanging dramatically from a wire.

Hollingsworth put some scallop carpaccio on a melba. He set this on top of a glass featuring the custard and lobster glace. Keller asked him about the glass. Hollingsworth said he was thinking of using a clear glass.

Keller tasted and made a so-so gesture with his hand.

“The sauce is a little intense,” he said, then after a few more seconds, added, “and the shrimp are overcooked. You need to just drop them in.”

Because he used to work at The Chef's side at The Laundry, Hollings-worth understood what he meant by “intense.” The sauce wasn't burnt-tasting, it was too strong, and the reference to just dropping the shrimp in meant they could go into the broth at the last second and would be cooked by the liquid.

“Can we do anything else with the scallop? Like a mousse?” asked Keller.

Again, Hollingsworth knew what The Chef meant. “He was referring to the scallops being sliced like that. And eating the whole thing when the scallops are kind of sliced so … if I were to just puree it and add a little bit of crème fraîche or acid or whatever it is and spread it out; when you eat it you can take as much or as little as you want.”

“We've done it raw,” said Hollingsworth. “We've done it cooked. I'm thinking about putting something between the scallop and the melba to keep it from breaking down.”

“Nuts,” said Keller, all but snapping his fingers at the thought. “Toasted, chopped nuts. I'm thinking about ease of eating. How are they going to get all that in their mouth at one time?”

Keller asked what was in the custard and Hollingsworth told him it was clarified butter, eggs, Champagne vinegar, and xanthan gum. He was also thinking of simplifying the custard recipe, using a more conventional and easier-to-make blend of eggs, milk, and cream, flavoring it with agrumato oil, a lemony oil made by pressing lemons and olives together.

“You need something on top of the scallop. Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“What about kumquats?” said Keller. “Kumquats are in season. Or just the skin. You can brunoise the skin.”

They discussed the bowl. “It's going to be on the fish platter, which is porcelain,” said Hollingsworth. “Silver and porcelain might be nice.”

“We can have it made,” said Keller, who again pulled out his notebook and wrote in it.

Keller and Hollingsworth walked over to the kitchen counter next to the sink and opened
The French Laundry Cookbook
to page 252: a picture of a Roquefort trifle in a funneled glass (like a martini glass minus the stem) that sat in a heavy, steel base. Keller said he would get in touch with Scan-nell to see if these other pieces could be created in time.

Before he wrapped up his feedback, Keller again mentioned the idea of coating the smoke glass. “Parsley would be too strong,” he said. “It could be watercress or coriander.” Hollingsworth didn't say anything, but he was leaning toward not following that particular piece of advice. The technique, he felt, didn't suit his strengths and could not be mastered in time.

And that was that. The Chef had dispensed his advice, and the candidate had received it.

Keller shook hands with Hollingsworth and Guest, slipped on his
clogs, and disappeared into the December night. Though he had put on a good face during the tasting, he felt that Hollingsworth still had a lot of ground to cover before the competition, both conceptually and in execution. For the chef, it was also a powerful reminder of how quickly things were moving and how little time he'd been able to carve out to help his longtime associate: “Running into the house one day in December and tasting Timmy's garnishes after I have had ten meetings that day is not really productive,” Keller commented later. “I think I came up with some good ideas for him but were we able to sit down and drill down into what we wanted to do? No.”

Despite this lament, Keller didn't want to impose his vision on Hollingsworth too much; he believed that the sous chef had to make his own decisions, like the chefs de partie in The French Laundry kitchen, so that he could feel comfortable and confident in what he would cook in Lyon.

Inside the house, Hollingsworth wasn't where he wanted to be, even by his own somewhat flexible internal schedule. By night's end, he'd be freely admitting to himself that he wished he had more time, and right then, after the session with Keller, he felt like he could use a few weeks of just brainstorming. But the interaction with The Chef did him good. Though he'd been around him for years, he still felt “shocked” at how supportive he was, but at the same time, he felt more nervous because after weeks of going it on his own, he suddenly had the feeling that he had somebody to report to, which upped the sensation of pressure. Being a cook, this all had the net effect of getting him excited, putting some spring back in his step.

“I am almost ready to go again,” he said.

O
N
F
RIDAY
, D
ECEMBER
19, Hollingsworth and Guest deep-cleaned the Bocuse House kitchen and brainstormed. He tried three different adjustments to the beef platter's potato dauphinoise, infusing the cream with chestnut; truffle and chestnut; and chestnut cream. He liked the last variation the best, but found the cream too intense for the potato, and to his
eye, the colors marred the pure white hue that Hollingsworth found so lovely. He was leaning toward a black-and-white composition of potato and cream layered with black truffles—three distinct layers of potato with perfect black lines of truffle pressed in between, similar to the mille-feuille he had served in Orlando.

He also devoted some time to thinking about the custard cup garnish, the one that would be served in the little glasses he now had on order, but for which he still needed to secure a silver base. He and Keller had talked about adding kumquat to it and he found himself thinking of a dish they occasionally serve at The French Laundry, a citrus salad, sometimes made with olive, and sometimes with tarragon. Since Guest was jonesing to do a brunoise, he thought about topping the scallop with a brunoised citrus salad, maybe made with blood orange, or with candied citrus zest, julienned, with perhaps some cilantro shoots on top and Niçoise olive on the custard.

For all of the progress he'd made over the past few days, Hollingsworth still didn't know what he was going to do with the central proteins. He didn't have any ideas for the côte de boeuf, and although he'd been telling everybody he knew what the cod would be, he privately felt that that persillade crust was just too damn plain for competition. He might have known what a centerpiece was, but he didn't know what
his
centerpieces would be, and until he did, those garnishes would be conceptually unmoored, like rogue planets with no sun to orbit.

And then out of the blue, during his weekend at The French Laundry, he had a major breakthrough on the cod when he had the idea of enveloping it with a scallop mousse, then sealing it not in breadcrumbs, but with a crust of brilliantly green Sicilian pistachio nut crumbs. He played with the dish Saturday morning, and again Sunday afternoon, both times working at the pass. To make the nuts as fine as possible, he chopped them to a powder, then passed them through a tamis (a strainer-like tool comprising a meshed screen stretched across a frame), pushing them through with a scraper to knock the dust off. He spread the nuts out on his work surface,
then set the cod cylinder at one end and gently pushed it along. As it turned, it was transformed, no longer just a mass of white but a beautiful, beguiling green object d'art.

He shared the moment of creation with the kitchen. It's a phenomenon that sometimes occurs at The French Laundry. In a cooking monastery where new dishes—or at least new variations on existing dishes—are conceived and realized daily, there are still moments when something new turns heads. And so, as Hollingsworth put the finishing touches on his centerpiece, turning the cod in that almost glitteringly green pistachio dust, the cooks around him stopped working, craning their heads to get a good look at what he was doing. This wasn't an easy crew to impress, and their attention confirmed for Hollingsworth that he had a winner on his hands.

He was psyched, not only at the outcome, but because he had never, even in all of his cookbooks, seen anybody else confit a piece of fish with a scallop mousse attached to it. All aspects of the moment—the inspiration, the location, and the silent approbation of his colleagues—he took as a confirmation of his belief that working through much of his training was the right thing to do.

“I don't think I would have come up with the cod if I hadn't been in the restaurant,” he said. And he felt the same way about the citrus salad. “Working in that kitchen [at the Bocuse House], it's kind of hard to in some ways to be creative. It's nice to kind of step away and be in that same kind of place where you're being creative on a daily basis.”

There was still fine tuning to be done: the Sicilian pistachios, not a crunchy nut to begin with, were a bit gummy, so he wanted to cut them with toasted, chopped brioche or regular pistachios. He was also considering a nougatine of pistachios, but worried that might be too crunchy and sweet.