Knives at Dawn (35 page)

Bocuse reminded Hollingsworth and Guest of some key points of the competition (e.g., be ready for the noise), then turned to Chef Henin and spoke in French. Henin broke out in a broad smile and relayed the message to Hollingsworth and Guest: “Monsieur Bocuse would like to invite you and your friends to a dinner tonight in honor of Obama.”

Hollingsworth and Guest could scarcely contain their excitement at this invitation. Instead of another meal in another bouchon, they'd be guests of honor at Bocuse's own restaurant, on Inauguration Day. For young American cooks representing their country overseas, it didn't get much better than that. They returned to the city center and Hotel Beaux-Arts where most of them watched the inauguration in their rooms as they gussied up for dinner. For most of the group except Kaysen, it was their first dinner at the restaurant, and so when they returned, they were given a tour of the kitchen, where they stood behind the stoves and were photographed with Chef Bocuse.

Minutes later, in the dining room, they were presented with menus
for the evening that—
voilà
—already had the photograph from the kitchen printed on the front, a souvenir before the first course was even served. The old man hadn't lost his touch for the unforgettable flourish.

The meal was, like much of the menu at the restaurant, composed of Paul Bocuse's Greatest Hits—the famous black truffle V.G.E. soup (created in honor of former president Giscard d' Estaing), a beehive of puff pastry towering out of the bowls; rouget crusted with potato “scales” and swimming in an addictively rich white wine and vermouth reduction, finished with cream and decorated with a squiggle of reduced veal jus,
Volaille de Bresse en Vessie “Mère Fillioux,
” a classic of Lyonnaise cuisine, a truffle-stuffed chicken cooked in a pig's bladder (think of it as the original sous vide), which is presented like a veiny balloon at the table, punctured, deflated, carved, and served with rice and vegetables. And all of it followed by a selection of cheese from local celebrity
fromagère
, “Mère Richard” (Renée Richard), and a comprehensive selection of desserts, everything from babas and cakes to ice creams and sorbets, all presented on an array of tables that were carted around with impressive grace.

Throughout the meal, in addition to the food itself, the depths of Bocuse's marketing prowess were on full display—there wasn't a piece of silverware that didn't have the initials PB engraved at the base of their handles, not a plate that didn't have the chef's full moniker spelled out on its rim; even the soup bowl had the name of its contents emblazoned in calligraphic script around its equator.

After a pleasing eternity, the team rose as one, filed back into their SUV and back into Lyon in silence, each ruminating on the experience before it faded into memory. “It was like being able to travel back in time,” said Hollingsworth of the evening. “You read about places like Paul Bocuse and Alain Chapel and Pic and Michel Guérard and all these people who are two generations out. You can't really experience what it was like. How was that food? Was it really that good? You don't know. You don't really know. You read about it. Some of the dishes, you're like, wow, that was amazing. To actually be able to travel back in time and experience a three-star Michelin
restaurant as close to what it was actually like thirty years ago, forty years ago, that's really, really priceless.… The food and the service is so old-school French. It's amazing to have a place still like that. To have that food that you've read about. That soup and the history behind it. Or the fish with the escalloped scales.
Bresse en vessie
. It's amazing.”

Later that night, as Team USA slumbered in Lyon, Daniel Boulud, en route back to New York from an inauguration event in Washington, D.C., and stuck in traffic with two of his sous chefs on the New Jersey Turnpike, learned that Daniel had, once again, had a four-star review bestowed upon it by
The New York Times
.

“At restaurants considered much less exclusive,”
wrote critic Frank Bruni, “you could spend only $30 less on a similar amount of food, and you wouldn't get anything approaching Daniel's bells and whistles. These flourishes make you feel that you've slipped into a monarch's robes, if only for a night, and turn an evening into an event.”

As congratulatory text messages and e-mails shook his Blackberry like a maraca, Boulud cranked up Led Zeppelin on the sound system, uncorked some Champagne, and celebrated. After service, the party would continue back at Daniel, and it would not stop until morning, and with good reason: the Bocuse d'Or was one thing, but a review in the
Times
, especially in the current economy, was life and death.

He had survived the most important judgment of all.

A
T BREAKFAST
W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, the team met Roger Gural and Isabel Daniels, the candidate and commis who would be competing for the United States at the Mondial du Pain, the bread competition hosted by the Sirha, the gargantuan trade show that was also home to the Bocuse d'Or. (The Sirha also hosts a dessert contest and a cheese competition.) For reasons having nothing to do with the competition, Gural, who bears many resemblances to the actor Steve Buscemi—wide eyes and a nasal accent—was in a bit of discomfort.

“Man, the food here is killing me,” he said to the Bocuse d'Or team, referencing the local restaurant diet of protein, fat, and starch. He had a point: unless you were in a position to cook for yourself, the only three sources of green vegetables, if you were lucky, seemed to be
salade Lyonnaise
and certain
soupes du jour
or vegetable side dishes.

In the streets of Lyon, the inauguration was still reverberating. As the team made its way through the Les Halles marketplace that morning, asking purveyors to hang the team poster in their windows, they were welcomed with open arms that made the Bush era seem as ancient as the local architecture. Many vendors gestured the team behind their counters, stuffed them with slices of sausage and cheese, and posed for pictures. When they walked into Brasserie Les Halles around the corner for lunch that afternoon, a lone middle-aged Lyonnaise woman slid down the length of a banquette in the middle of her meal to enable the growing squad to have a seat.

“
Merci beaucoup
,” said various members of the team.

“No prollem,” came her accented reply.

“Oh, you speak English?” said Coach Henin.

“Yes,” she said with a smile, then expanded her answer with an Obama-inspired flourish, “Yes, I can!”

Feeling the effects of the local diet, and still sated from their dinner at Paul Bocuse, many of the team members ordered a salade Lyonnaise. Dr. Guest forewent his menu, handing it to the server and telling her to just bring him whatever dish had the “maximum vegetables.”

They ate, they drank some wine, Kaysen pocketed a spoon, and the team left.

When they returned to the hotel, Jennifer Pelka had arrived, bearing, among other crucial items, black Team USA jackets and T-shirts emblazoned with
Je t'aime USA
. These were to be worn at all times to show a united front, she explained, as she distributed them to the group.

That evening at Léon de Lyon, a well-regarded bistro, the team received its first taste of anti-American sentiment when Chef Henin tried to
convince the manager to display one of its posters in the window. When Henin teasingly refused to take no for answer, the manager snidely offered to hang it in the bathroom. But things were different later that night when, on their way into a local bar, a Swiss gentlemen heard Pelka and Kaysen speaking English and called out, “Are you two American?”

“Yes,” they replied.

The man lifted his smoldering cigarette in the air like a glass of Champagne, nodded regally, and said, “Congratulations.”

T
HE NEXT TWO DAYS
were consumed with planning, planning, and more planning. Pelka established the hotel's bar as her office, working on team paperwork, orchestrating events and hotel accommodations for expected VIPs and spectators, and keeping track of the budget. Her constant presence, and that of the other team members and adjuncts who came and went, was met with wildly varying reception by the different staff members of the Beaux-Arts; the women who oversaw the registration desk by day and doubled as barkeeps by night were accommodating, even offering espressos and wine outside the operating hours of the bar. On the other hand, the night man, a bestubbled shaggy dog, could not have been less enchanted, glaring at the team as they came and went. But at least he was consistent: Kaysen remembered him from two years earlier and found that he hadn't changed a bit.

Thursday afternoon, Hollingsworth and Guest met in the salon adjacent to the bar for three hours, a sacred session to which not even Coach Henin was invited. Hollingsworth believed that, because only he and Guest would be in the competition kitchen, they had to spend time alone reviewing their timeline and talking through the specific mental and logistical challenges before them.

Guest found the meeting essential. “That was the single most important thing we did there,” she said. “I have to know his mind and he needs to know my mind. And there's no other way of doing that unless you're sitting
there alone spilling out your mind.… Cooking is not only a technical thing, it's an emotional thing. So I'm getting his emotion of how he wants me to carry out this action, and while I'm talking about a certain doubt or worry I have with this certain technique, he's getting that emotion so he can help me deal with it.”

T
HE WEEK ENDED WITH
a bit of melodrama: the team's platters, on the way from Scannell in Rhode Island via FedEx, were held up in customs in Paris, so the team would not be able to practice on them. The larger concern, of course, was whether or not they'd show up in time for the actual competition. Pelka, troubleshooting from her perch at the Beaux-Arts bar, had asked Vincent Le Roux to try to unclog the bureaucracy.

That evening, the team again took over the salon for a lengthy planning meeting that covered all aspects of the remaining days. Everybody was there: Coach Henin, Hollingsworth and Guest, Kaysen and Pelka, and John Guest and Kate Laughlin. Laughlin and Pelka had already spent hours that afternoon working on the menu—the printed list of proteins and garnishes that would be provided to the judges. (It would be inserted into a bound booklet that had been produced by Level, the same design company that created the team poster. The booklet featured a statement by Hollings-worth, photos and portraits of the team, and montages of the Hollings-worth dish sketches, serving pieces, and platter renderings from Tihany's company.) Also, there was another newly arrived member of the growing posse: Allison Wagner, who handles public relations for Thomas Keller Restaurant Group out of the company PR Consulting in New York, was on hand to field media relations concerns. As the team met, she worked at a makeshift desk in the corner, typing and printing.

There was also a potentially ominous sign: Hollingsworth and Kaysen were both drinking bottles of water sudsy with Airborne, a cold-prevention remedy. Hollingsworth had felt a cold coming on for the past twenty-four hours, and was trying to stave it off.

The team discussed the needs for the practice session the next day, as Hollingsworth ran down the long list of items that would need to be executed before practice could commence: slice bresaola, slice bacon, make chestnut puree, make pistachio puree, clean black truffles, make pistachio crumbs. “We could use a lot of help. We have a lot we need to accomplish,” he said. “If we could have help from, uh, people who are experienced in the culinary field.” This was his polite way of making sure that, in addition to himself and Guest, only Kaysen and Henin would be working with the food.

The to-do list for the day was insanely long: Measure out stocks (veal stock, shrimp base for the foam, the shrimp stock that would be ladled over the custard); determine which smoke (hickory or applewood) to use in the bowls; test the caviar tube, and so on. There was also a growing list of nonkitchen tasks; for example, somebody needed to buy a screw gun for opening and resealing the crates the platters would arrive in. Oh, and they'd need to
make
a surrogate platter out of cardboard and/or Styrofoam for use in the practice. About this last issue, there was some much-needed good news. During the meeting, both Pelka and Laughlin received e-mails informing them that the platters had cleared customs and would arrive at L'Abbaye on Monday.

Forty-five minutes into the meeting, Kaysen's cellular phone rang. He answered it.

“Hello?”

“Gavin!” It was Boulud.

“Hello, Chef.”

All other conversation stopped. Kaysen put Boulud on speaker phone and set it in the middle of the table.

“Congratulations, Chef,” said Hollingsworth, referring to the four-star review.

“Timothy!” hollered Boulud from New York, quickly establishing an aural presence nearly as vivid as a hologram. “Are you good? Are you comfortable?”

“I'm loose. I'm ready to go.”

“Adina, how about you?”

“Yes, Chef. I'm good.”

“Don't eat too much
saucisson
, or you gonna get thirsty.”

Everybody laughed.

“No charcuterie for twenty-four hours before you go! You have all the equipment, you're fine?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“You're going to be able to do a full run tomorrow?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Where are you going for dinner?”

“I think we're ordering pizza,” said Gavin. “I don't think we're getting out of this meeting any time soon.”

“Okay,” said Boulud. “Make sure you tighten up all the little screws so we can fly to the moon!”

Everybody burst out laughing, again.

They disengaged the call and got back to making the list that would guide them in the coming days: when they finished on Saturday, they would have to pack all their boxes in the order they would be unpacked the day of the competition. Because each hand-crafted smoke glass needed to be kept paired with its lid, Laughlin suggested rigging a box with Styrofoam compartments to hold them, but they resolved to keep them in their original boxes and use plastic containers in their stead for the practice.