Knives at Dawn Page 6

  Lee and Secviar commented that they thought Hollingsworth should do it.

  “We can get it done,” said Keller. “If we want to do it, we can get it done.”

  For all the respect that Hollingsworth had for Lee, his contemporary and friend, as well as his superior at The French Laundry, hearing this virtually identical statement coming from Keller meant just a hair more. Tell-ingly, when Hollingsworth saw Lee on the streets of Yountville, or went golfing with him, he’d call him by his first name, but when he saw Keller outside “the office,” he still called him Chef, and referred to him in the third person as The Chef. Even after almost a decade, he found the prospect of calling him Thomas “strange.”

  “If he says we can get it done,” said Hollingsworth, “then we can get it done.”

  Moreover, Keller’s involvement with the Bocuse d’Or and his personal interest, evident to Hollingsworth for the first time in that meeting, caused him to reevaluate on the spot. “He means a lot to me, so to support him in any way that I could, you know, I would do anything,” he said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  ALL OF THE COMPETITORS and their commis were in attendance at the reception in the American Adventure Parlor, and they got a nice surprise after Bouit turned the stage over to Daniel Boulud, who invited them up to have their pictures taken with Paul Bocuse.

  As the impromptu photo session took place behind him, Boulud thanked the sponsors. It seemed perfectly fitting that Keller’s remarks had been about chefs, and Boulud’s about business. Over the course of the just-completed summer, the two chefs’ different personalities had manifested themselves in other ways as well.

  Very close friends, the two men are opposites in many respects, although some facts of their lives and careers are similar. They were both born in 1955, and have what Keller describes as “this constant drive. We continue to modify and continue to make our lives better and the lives of our staff better. We hold the same values very dear.” Of the pair, Per Se’s Benno said that where Daniel is a social animal, “Thomas is that guy that stands off to the side and observes.” But in the kitchen, they are kindred spirits: “You put an apron on those two guys and there is an intensity and an integrity and a focus and a desire to push themselves and everyone around them to the breaking point.”

  About Boulud, Keller said, “His career was far more advanced than mine was when we first met at the Polo restaurant. He was the sous chef and I was the chef de partie and we became friends shortly after I left and we have been in constant contact ever since. Our careers have kind of mirrored one another’s. He was on the cover of New York magazine one year and I was on the cover the next. He would win this one year, I would win it the next. We were always on a parallel path.”

  But there are just as many differences between the two chefs, most ironically what Keller sees as the accident of their nationality: “He is French and I am American,” says Keller, adding that, “I have always wanted to be French, and he has always wanted to be American.” Boulud, who has called New York City home for decades, agrees with this observation wholeheartedly.

  Getting together was an idea as irresistible to the chefs as it would be to the dining public, like the All-Stars game or a fantasy football league come to life. Eight years before the Bocuse d’Or entered their lives, they had conceived a joint project in Las Vegas that hadn’t panned out, and as recently as February 2008 they’d made a speculative visit to Dubai for another project that ultimately fizzled.

  Now that they were together, the differences in their personalities came into heightened relief, not least of which was Boulud’s impulsiveness versus Keller’s studied caution; Boulud, a fan of Formula One racing and a notoriously adventurous driver (“Don’t ever get into a car with Daniel,” warns Roland Henin), likes to fling himself and his team headlong into things. Keller likes to look at all the angles, ask questions, reflect, reflect some more, sleep on it, then make up his mind.

  “He commits himself 100 percent, sometimes too early,” says Keller of his friend. But Keller understands the impulse; it’s the same one that led him to say, “Oui, Chef ” to Paul Bocuse. “That is what chefs do. We are not in the industry that says no. We always say yes to people.”

  This yin/yang dynamic was on display when Boulud discussed the Bocuse d’Or with Diane Nabatoff, executive producer of his HDTV show, After Hours. According to Boulud, on hearing about the Bocuse d’Or, Nabatoff said, “Do you want to do a show?” and the two of them began discussing a limited documentary series tracking the Bocuse d’Or USA.

  From that conversation, things progressed rapidly. Pelka recalls being on a ten-day cruise with her family at the beginning of July 2008, during which time she was uncharacteristically out of touch with her e-mail. When she returned, she went through her in-box and found a raft of messages from Nabatoff about an upcoming meeting at the Food Network, the Monday of her return at twelve noon.

  “I didn’t know anything about the presentation, what we were pitching and where we were going,” said Pelka. Boulud was out of town that week, so Pelka wandered into the meeting cold. The show wasn’t green-lit, but Nabatoff managed to interest Bravo network, home of Top Chef, in a documentary series of eight or twelve episodes (the number would be determined at a later date) for which they were prepared to finance one on a speculative basis.

  To satisfy the sudden need for filmable activity, Pelka suggested taping a planned press conference to announce the candidates at db Bistro Moderne, Boulud’s casual restaurant on West Forty-fourth Street. She also came up with another camera-ready idea: an orientation session for the candidates to be held on Thursday, July 24, at The French Culinary Institute (FCI) in downtown Manhattan, a briefing followed by an abbreviated cook-off of sorts, but with no winners or losers; rather it would be a chance for the organizers to offer constructive criticism prior to the Epcot event. Arrangements were made with the FCI, the idea being to sit the candidates down and give them a taste of what they’d gotten themselves into.

  There was just one problem: Boulud hadn’t run the idea of the series by Keller or Jérôme Bocuse, and neither was on board: “I didn’t think that it was appropriate,” said Keller. “It was our first time. I didn’t know how things were going to go. I didn’t know how the house was going to turn out. I didn’t want cameras in our face at The French Laundry … even in Orlando I didn’t think it was appropriate. These are young kids that haven’t had the opportunity to get the exposure to that kind of environment. Let alone this is their first time in any competition and you are going to throw this in on top of them. Are we trying to sell a documentary on the Bocuse d’Or or are we trying to send a team there?”

  Sports-fan Jérôme Bocuse circulated an e-mail making an analogy to the Olympics: “You don’t send a TV crew to the training camp before they go to the world championships … that kind of stays secret.” Like Keller, Bocuse was also concerned about unwanted distractions: “They [TV people] always tell you that they will be a fly on the wall but then they impose their schedule.”

  Outnumbered by his colleagues, Boulud pulled the plug on the program, and by all accounts did so quickly and graciously, even though a production team was already in New York and in preproduction mode. As a result, the Bocuse d’Or USA ended up reimbursing the producers about $10,000.

  Boulud freely cops to his full-steam-ahead modus operandi. Regarding the entire incident, he said, rather cheerily, “That was again me going into overdrive with these things and full throttle trying to really get as much attention as possible.” But Boulud hastened to add that he had other reasons: “I was worried [about] what am I going to give to the sponsor. What kind of return can I give besides saying, ‘Oh, thank you very much for participating in this Bocuse d’Or competition.’ So TV was one way for me to create some good return to the sponsor.”

  Of l’affaire du documentaire, Pelka commented, “That right there is why they [Boulud and Keller] are such a good pair … we occasionally jump in a lit
tle too deep and then there is the reminder that someone like Chef Keller is there who is more choosy.”

  THE APPLICATIONS WERE REVIEWED on Monday, July 14, in the private dining room at Daniel. Boulud met with several New York–based members of the Advisory Board and the final eight were chosen from a pool of … well, the committee won’t say exactly how many. “Fewer than twenty,” is all that Pelka will allow, though Henin, who was not present, believes the number must have been much lower.

  The eight were set: Hollingsworth, Hyunh, Powell, Rosendale, Rotondo, Spraga, Whatley, and Damon Wise, executive chef of Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group.

  As planned, the candidates were announced in a press conference at db Bistro Moderne on Thursday, July 17. The night before the press conference, Damon Wise sent Pelka an e-mail withdrawing his candidacy: “After discussion with Tom, and much thinking,” he wrote, “it is not going to be possible for me to devote the amount of time needed to compete.” John Rellah was slotted in as a substitute just in time for the conference, and the planned visual presentation was updated accordingly. Thank god for PowerPoint.

  Though the television project was scrapped, the French Culinary Institute orientation went forward, largely due to Kaysen’s support. In one of the increasingly frequent conference calls taking place in the summer of 2008, Kaysen pointed out to the group that when the competition was under the auspices of Michel Bouit, there were three regional semifinals prior to the final selection event, which were useful because they gave the candidates practice for not just the American finals but also the big show in Lyon.

  In a poetic bit of misspeak, Kaysen, reflecting on his endorsement of the FCI orientation, explained that the semifinals “let us know if we were going in the right direction or shitting up a creek.”

  Kaysen also felt it was important that the candidates get used to being around chefs like Boulud and Keller, who might make some of them quake in their clogs when the time came to “bring it” in Orlando, and his colleagues took his recommendation. In a twist on reality TV, an event created for television had become reality. (In a sign of how quickly things were moving and how much Keller was deferring to Boulud and his team, this rationale was never shared with Keller, who couldn’t be on the conference call in which it was first floated, and privately wondered if the candidates needed this extra pressure with Orlando shimmering on the horizon.)

  And so on Thursday, July 24, the candidates (but not their commis), many of whom had been flown in for the event, filed into one of the demonstration rooms at the FCI and took their seats in the stands. Boulud’s team, ever mindful of the value of media attention, had corralled a few journalists to attend: Florence Fabricant of The New York Times, Andrew Knowlton of Bon Appétit, and (at the urging of Keller’s public relations agency) Allison Adato from People magazine.

  Thomas Keller welcomed the chefs to the Bocuse d’Or USA. As he spoke, Chef Roland Henin stood behind him in a white chef coat with a dress shirt and tie showing between the lapels. Keller explained that the goal of the Bocuse d’Or USA this year was to “establish a strong base to continue to compete in the Bocuse d’Or in the coming years, so we’re really establishing that foundation.” He thanked the candidates for all their hard work getting ready for Orlando and launched into an impassioned introduction of Chef Henin who, famously, mentored Keller, who makes a point of acknowledging Henin whenever he can, in his books and even in the foreword to other people’s books, such as the one he penned for the English language edition of Fernand Point’s Ma Gastronomie.

  “Chef Henin was my mentor,” said Keller. “Up until we met, cooking for me was a physical thing. I really enjoyed the physical aspects of cooking, the camaraderie of the kitchen, the high intensity. Chef Henin made me realize what cooking was all about, and that was a connection to another person, nurturing, an emotional connection that really resonated with me and really began my career as a true culinarian.”

  Ever cautious, Keller said that Henin’s role as coach would be crucial in “I don’t want to say winning the Bocuse d’Or, but in our progression to win the Bocuse d’Or someday.”

  “Thank you, Chef,” said Henin as he took the dais.

  For all of the dignity on display, these two men’s initial meeting, in 1977, on the beach of Narragansett, Rhode Island, was anything but high minded. Henin was the chef of the Dunes Club then, and he and his crew took a break most afternoons to play Frisbee on the beach before dinner service. On some days, he noticed a young, handsome stranger always in the company of one—sometimes two—beautiful women.

  “I said, ‘Look at this guy: He is tall; I am tall. He is skinny; I am skinny. He doesn’t have an accent; I do.’ And here he was walking the beach with these beautiful women, and it was, like, How does he do it?”

  One late afternoon, with the sun waning on the horizon and the surf breaking on the shore, Henin saw the stranger with two leggy companions and, unable to stand it any longer (and presumably hoping that maybe he could take one of the women off the young man’s hands), “accidentally” flung a Frisbee in his direction. When he went to retrieve it, the two men got to talking. The young, skinny stranger was Thomas Keller, and he identified himself as a chef.

  “So am I,” said Henin and, forgetting his original motives, offered his young colleague a tour of his kitchen, a large, old-fashioned warhorse, with a gigantic rotisserie and an actual office for the chef.

  “He was pretty impressed with the size of the kitchen,” remembers Henin. “I don’t think that he was ever exposed to a kitchen that was like this.”

  “How does a guy get a job like this?” asked Keller. “This might be your lucky day,” said Henin, whose staff chef had just abruptly quit. The staff meals were a constant thorn in Henin’s side because many of the club’s employees were children of locals and club members, “brats” who constantly complained about the quality of their meals.

  “There is only one rule,” Henin warned. “Get them off my back!”

  Keller took over as staff chef at the Dunes Club. “Within two or three days, he shut them up,” said Henin. “I don’t know what he did, but that was it.” “The most challenging and amazing part of that job,” Keller recalls today, “was my contact with the individuals I was cooking for. I had never experienced that previously and it truly motivated me to be a better cook. There is no substitute for personal contact with individuals you are cooking for. You truly feel that you have nourished them.”

  Later that summer, Henin’s p.m. saucier left his job, and it was too late in the season to make a new hire, so he offered Keller the position.

  “I am not too knowledgeable with classical sauces,” said the young cook.

  “ ‘Don’t worry,’ ” said Henin. “ ‘I will work with you.’ And I did. I helped him to produce a sauce or whatnot for the rest of the summer … I would put him on the track and then he would do the service.”

  Even then, Henin remembers, Keller “was always very organized, clean and neat.”

  The two men didn’t really hang out together that much outside of the kitchen, maybe just an occasional beer, but Henin became a sort of spiritual and professional adviser to Keller, recommending him to friends in Florida, where they both migrated after the northeastern summer, and eventually pointing him to the right kitchens in France for stages and such. When Keller became the chef at La Rive in Catskill, New York, Henin was teaching at The Culinary Institute of America, and Keller—who decided against culinary school, opting instead for the artisanal route—would occasionally visit and observe a class. By the same token, Henin who was a long-distance runner, sometimes spent weekends at La Rive in order to train on the hills.

  Keller remembers Henin as the man he would turn to for advice, saving up questions—such as how to roast a leg of lamb or make pâte à choux—for when they next saw each other. Keller has memorialized these moments in his writings, such as the essay on the importance of knowing how to truss a chicken in The French Laundry Cookbook. He also reme
mbers a formative moment when they were together at a restaurant in Lake Park, Florida. “I had the book, The Great Chefs of France, and I was going through that and I said, ‘What makes these chefs so great?’ He told me it was dedication, their love for what they do. Their pure dedication and determination. It is a lifestyle and not a job, and that resonated with me a lot.”

  Turning his attention to the Bocuse d’Or USA candidates before him at The French Culinary Institute, Henin commended them for putting themselves out there in an “almost naked” way. “Either you’re nuts,” he said, “or you have a lot of guts.”

  Then he assumed the persona of a drill sergeant, launching into a crash course on culinary competition and what it demands of participants, a decidedly opinionated view of how to train for the Bocuse d’Or. He described his “three prerequisites” for competition: getting into physical, mental, and culinary condition. The physical preparation would ensure that they would survive the marathon of the competition, which is challenging even to chefs accustomed to working long hours on their feet. Mental preparation, achieved by proper focus and practice, would keep their minds from playing tricks on them—strange things happen under pressure; they might believe that a judge has it in for them, or be unable to shrug off a mistake. Culinary preparation means showing up on top of your game.

  “It’s not what you cooked five, ten years ago. It’s what you’re cooking today, for the judge. It’s not where you been. It’s not who you know. It’s what you do today under those circumstances,” said the coach.

  Henin briefed the candidates on what to demonstrate in Orlando: solid foundation and proper technique, from butchering to knife skills to sautéing. He admonished them to have an action plan, on paper, preferably with timing indicated. “It’s like a trip on the road,” he said. “You need a map.”