Knives at Dawn (41 page)

Hollingsworth kept his cool. “How bad is it? Is it bad?”

“No.”

“What do we need? A Band-Aid?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have any? Did you bring them.”

“No.”

Guest was to have brought some first-aid supplies, per a suggestion Henin had made, but had forgotten. Hollingsworth knew this wasn't the time for scolding, and the cost seemed minimal as Guest told him she felt fine and that it wasn't a bad cut; it just wouldn't stop bleeding. Besides, she already seemed frustrated with herself, as was her wont.

“I consciously didn't make a big deal of it so as not to raise her anxiety level,” Hollingsworth said.

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

That was all either of them had to say. Guest excused herself out the back of the kitchen into the bustling corridor, asking an attendant to send for a bandage. Instead, he sent for the
medic
. In the heat of the moment, Guest's normally referential attitude crumbled. “I don't need a medic, I need a fricking Band-Aid,” she said, but nobody heeded her words. Two or three precious minutes later, as Hollingsworth and the commis extra moved about the kitchen without her, the medic hustled over and took several minutes attending to her minor injury that was taking on major proportions of time.

In the kitchen, even though he was using the same make and model of stove he had practiced on, the stock in which the oxtail and beef cheeks were submerged took longer to boil than it had back in Yountville. When he finally found it bubbling, he wasn't sure how long it had been at a simmer. This was one of those moments that make the Bocuse d'Or such a challenge: cooking is almost never the same from day to day. Just as ingredients will vary in quality on the day, you never know what might go down with your equipment. Experience matters at moments like this, and Hollingsworth's told him that it couldn't have been simmering much longer than he'd practiced and that rather than trying in vain to determine the actual time, the best thing was to stick to the plan: one hour with the burner at setting number 3.

This was about the time that Vincent Ferniot and Angela May arrived center stage and kicked off their Day Two coverage, emceeing for the audience and broadcast on Sirha TV. On Day One, the pair had established themselves as something of an odd couple. If you didn't know that Ferniot was actually French, you might think he was doing a cynical impression of a Frenchman, leaning into every accented syllable and mugging shamelessly.

“
Bonjour à vous tous, à la France, et au monde entier
,” Ferniot intoned into the camera.

But at least he was a seasoned broadcast professional, intimately familiar with world cuisine in general and the Bocuse d'Or in particular. May, on the other hand, seemed a bit at sea, and wasn't aided in her efforts by the condescending attitude Ferniot adopted toward her, publicly schooling her on the fine points of the competition, acting a bit like an overbearing father or emotionally abusive boyfriend.

“Good morning, eh-vah-rie-one,” said May, overenunciating. “And welcome to the Bocuse d'Or 2009.”

Hall 33 had only been open to the public for about an hour, but the noise was already significantly greater than the day prior. This was in part because France was competing this day, and the stadium seats across from Kitchen 10, where Philippe Mille had started cooking, were packed almost to the ceiling, pressing up against the windows of the media center, with a few fans waving enormous French flags at the ends of posts. Those not burdened with such weighty props were jumping up and down and shouting encouragement at a chef they could barely see or discern what he was doing.

“They are crazy, I'm telling you,” said Ferniot of the French fans, speaking in English. (He freely switched back and forth between the two languages, either to “throw it” to May or to explain a fine point of the proceedings in both languages.) He was allowed to say that; these were his people.

Outside Kitchen 6, a number of the cast of characters from the past few days had reemerged: Bill Buford was on hand in an all-
noir
ensemble, while Owen Franken was snapping pictures for
The New York Times
.

Hollingsworth shut it all out: emcees, the fact that his commis was momentarily off the field of battle, the photographs being taken. He just focused on the work at hand, which was trimming the silverskin from the fillet, putting the meat on a sheet tray and flash freezing it, which would allow him to slice it cleanly and punch out circles for the tart.

In the corridor, Guest, pleaded with the medic: “Sir, I have to go. Can you give me a glove?” The medic handed her a latex glove. She didn't even thank him, just stuck her head in the kitchen and called out to Hollings-worth: “Chef, scissors!”

Hollingsworth handed her a pair of scissors and she cut a finger off the glove, slipped it over the cut, tied it tightly around the knuckle like a tour-niquet, and went back to work.

“Is everything fine?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Yes, Chef. I got a Band-Aid.”

Hollingsworth kept going; he butchered the rib rack, split it, rounded it, and seasoned it with salt and pepper.

The team was back in business. Next up on Hollingsworth's list was to shuck and clean the scallops, which didn't go as smoothly this time as it had in the practice. Hollingsworth wasn't catching them in the right place with his shucking implement, so they weren't opening as easily for him, and when they did, the fact that some had dirt inside and emitted an unpleasant odor led him to believe that he hadn't wound up with the best specimens. He was keying in to what he realized was going to be a theme of the day: “With everything there's going to be a little problem,” he thought.

The commis from the Institut Paul Bocuse asked Hollingsworth if there was anything he could do, and—first checking to be sure the cook knew how to do it—the American asked him to clean the shrimp. The commis set about doing this, working at the station just inside the kitchen door.

Over in Kitchen 1, Geir Skeie was operating in the back area of the kitchen, positioning his commis in the window. Some veterans think this is a wise move for competition because it takes the focus of photographers and spectators off the chef. As Ferniot and May made their way to Norway's kitchen and began a long tour of the windows in ascending order, this conventional wisdom was validated as Skeie could barely be seen on the large-screen television, and he didn't bother to look up or acknowledge the emcees in any way. He wasn't there for publicity; he was there to cook.

As if the noise weren't sufficient, Ferniot and May did what they could to foment even more, like pointing out the noisemakers of choice for the various fans. This sometimes lapsed into derogatory comments as when Ferniot noted the wooden spoons being banged together by chef coat–clad Denmark supporters (“It's not so noisy though. It gives a little click sound.
Click, click, click
.”) or when he said, of the pom pom–shaking Spanish fans, “The best noisemaker in España is the voice; they use it pretty well.” At this, Spain's candidate, Angel Palacios, busy cutting batons of potato, was caught on camera looking annoyed.

Not everybody had as much support as the European countries; when May introduced Farouk Othman of Malaysia, the first-ever chef from that country to compete at the Bocuse d'Or, the auditorium fell silent. Miraculously, she spotted a lone fan applauding amidst a sea of adversaries. Singapore, which had actually made the podium in 1989, only fared marginally better in the support department with three young men in baseball caps cheering from the nosebleed zone of the bleachers.

Arriving at the United States kitchen, Ferniot and May cajoled the U.S. fan base. Though Pelka and company had commandeered the entire section across from Kitchen 6, the attendance at that relatively early hour was sparse: many expected guests were still breakfasting at their hotels or strolling the endless aisles of the Sirha. May described Hollingsworth's backstory, how he'd begun as a dishwasher and “worked his way up,” but he scarcely noticed her, his eyes trained on the cod he was butchering. As Australia's Corton had the day before, Hollingsworth found the fish less
than ideal, but he didn't realize that it was a different variety from the one they'd expected; instead he just chalked it up to the fact that some cod are flakier than others.

As Guest composed the mille-feuille and dauphinoise, Hollingsworth put the filleted cod in a bowl with salted ice water to quick-cure it and set a timer for five minutes. But he wasn't really relying on the timer. He was relying on his cook's instincts, the subconscious ability seasoned kitchen professionals have to let their brain keep track of time. The act of setting the timer doubled as setting his
mind
to remember, five minutes later, that time was up. In the meantime, he pureed the sacs containing the scallop roe and added salt to them. Following the revised plan hatched out with Boulud on Saturday night, he spread out the roe on an acetate sheet and set it in the freezer to blast-chill it.

Hollingsworth next turned his attention to the mousse that would envelop the cod: whipping the scallop and crème fraîche mixture in the Robot Coupe, then folding in the preserved Meyer lemon dice. The only problem was that the Cryovac bags provided at the competition were larger than the ones he'd practiced with, and there were no sheet trays large enough to accommodate them. Hollingsworth, whose ability to cook intuitively had served him well since his days at Zachary Jacques, had never measured exactly how wide the sheet would have to be to wrap snugly around the cod, so he had to improvise, poaching one portion of the mousse, then the other, then trimming the whole piece to make it smooth. To allow himself time to figure all of this out, Hollingsworth scrapped making the test quenelle of the mousse he would normally have executed. So much for those extra five points Henin had forecasted at Saturday's practice.

Hollingsworth pulled the acetate sheet holding the pureed roe out of the freezer, the puree having hardened to a frosty,
granité
-like sheet. As he walked it over to his station, it dawned on him that—duh!—he wouldn't be able to roll the frozen sheet; it had no pliability, so would break when turned inward on itself.
Aw, this is stupid
, he thought.
It won't roll. You're kidding me. This sucks. What do I do now?
The few-yards walk suddenly felt like
a quarter-mile slog. At his station, he set the tray down to allow the roe to come up to room temperature.

He turned his attention to the rib-eye on his station. For the first time since their first practice, Hollingsworth did not consolidate the Activa steps because the cod was not ready to go. He dusted the beef with the glue, rolled it in bacon and handed it to Guest, who put the pan in the refrigerator.

Hollingsworth kicked himself, hard. If he'd only thought about it properly on Saturday, or in the breathless days since then, he'd have realized that
OF COURSE
a frozen sheet of roe wouldn't roll. You didn't need to be a sous chef at The French Laundry to know that. “But with all the pressure and stuff I didn't really realize it,” he said. Profound as it was, Hollingsworth's personal disappointment was self-contained, a fringe benefit to the wordless working method he and Guest had established in their practices. In fact, they were about an hour and twenty minutes in when Hollingsworth spoke to Guest for just the second time since they had begun cooking:

“Do you have the mandoline?”

“Yeah, here.”

“You have the punch?”

“Yeah, here.”

Hollingsworth pushed the fish aside, cleaned his board, scrubbed it, tossed his dirty towels in the bin, washed the stinky fish smell off his hands, then set his station back up. The act of cleaning, as always, was therapeutic for him, bringing him back to himself, to The French Laundry. With no ability to finish the cod for the moment, he took hold of the celeriac, waved it back and forth on the mandoline to produce slices, then punched out circles while Guest set punched circles of turnips and carrots to cooking in Cryovac bags while also blanching onions, dicing bresaola, brunoising Granny Smith apple, and so on. Though her chef was having a hiccup, Guest was working at her accelerated best. Viewed on the large-screen television overhead, the video seemed to be fast-forwarding as a close-up of
her cutting board showed her taking a section of orange mercilessly apart, splaying the peel on the board as her paring knife eliminated the flesh, then shaved off the pith. Just as impressive was Obed Ladrón of Mexico, who cut a green vegetable—perhaps zucchini, but impossible to decipher under the onslaught of his knife blade—into julienne, then the julienne into dice. Watching these two cooks work was a reminder of how impressive it is that more digits aren't sacrificed in the world's kitchens every day.

Meanwhile, the noise in Hall 33 had been steadily mounting to a non-stop, pulsating thunder, lopsided toward the French end of the auditorium, but deafening throughout. The attention paid to the kitchen pods was lopsided as well: seen from a distance, it looked as though Kitchen 10, where Philippe Mille was hoisting an enormous stockpot from stove to sink, was the last kitchen in the hall: a crush of photographers and journalists had gathered to watch him, while just the coach and a single shutterbug were looking in on lonely Kitchen 11.

The excitement and noise in the hall were starting to take their toll, turning things downright nutty: after Vincent Ferniot interviewed representatives of Champagne Thiénot, a sponsor, one of the cameras made its way along the judging tables, a bottle of the bubbly held aloft before it by a techie—what 1980s-era David Letterman would have dubbed a Bottle-Cam shot. Ferniot threw it over to May, who—never having experienced the Bocuse d'Or before—seemed dazed and confused. Like some of the competitors, even having been there for Day One, she was unprepared for the fury of the most impassioned European fans who turn out on Day Two.