Knives at Dawn (43 page)

I should have designed something a little more simple
, he scolded himself.
This is not the best application for something that will be paraded around for twenty minutes
.

There wasn't time to fix those toasts. He knew that. He had recaptured his sense of time and realized that it was dwindling.

Well, that was how the melbas would go out, be seen by the judges, photographed for posterity, and remembered. There wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. After all the preparation, time was finally coming to an end.

Henin turned toward the audience and up at the USA cheering section, bobbing his hands up and down to let them know that they needed to whoop it up, to offer encouragement and help propel the team over the finish line. In the stands, the American contingent—filled out now—hollered their support, some rolling up posters to use them as megaphones, trying to be heard over the still-deafening noise. Gavin Kaysen, a red, white, and blue scarf around his neck, shot a fist into the air and screamed, “Go, Timmy!”

Henin called out: “One minute!”

As it turned out,
the coach's reminders were almost superfluous because the emcees had been talking up the fish platter of Japan's Kitchen 5, so Hollingsworth knew his moment was coming up fast.

There was still plenty of work to be done. Having confited the mousse-enveloped cod cylinders, he got ready to coat them, one of the steps that he'd had problems with in practices: he spread the pistachio dust out on a sheet pan, set the cylinders on it, and agitated the pan gingerly to cause the cylinders to turn.
I hope this works, I hope this works, hope this comes out clean, no fingerprints or …

The cylinders lifted out cleanly—evenly coated in green dust. He sighed, reheated them in the oven, and set them on their stands. Set the caviar tower in the shrimp tart. Applied the bacon chips to the mille-feuille. Then he and the commis carefully lifted the platter up into the window.

There wasn't a second to dwell on the imperfections. He and Guest had to prepare the two plates, one for the judges to evaluate and the media to photograph, and one to act as a “how-to” for the servers, guiding them on plating the items from the platter after it made its rounds and was deposited on the carving station.

All of this, however, was just prologue to the last step of the fish stage of the competition: disassembling the platter and reallocating the components
to individual plates for the judges. Hollingsworth, who had never participated in a competition before, wasn't ready for the unique plating methodology. Having only worked in restaurants, he was accustomed to always plating from the guest's point of view, and to doing all plates for a given table at one time.

This was different: awaiting him at the carving station were three stacks of four plates each. When the platter finished its rounds and was set down before him like an ER patient, Hollingsworth went to work. The first thing he did was slice the cod and put one slice on each of the three plates that topped their respective stacks. As he prepared to put a piece of mille-feiulle on the plates, he was dealt a devastating surprise: The waiters began turning the plates, so suddenly Hollingsworth was working upside down, which was disorienting to say the least.

“They kept moving plates. You do two plates, one is for the judges to see … the second one is for the service staff to know how to plate the dish … so I don't understand why I needed to go over there and show them this is where this goes … they were waiting for me to tell them where to put it. Nobody was really taking initiative, once I put it on, they would follow. This guy would do this. You have one guy walking behind me. It was utter chaos. The worst part was, you get the fish on all four plates, then they rotate the plate. It kept moving around. I was, like, ‘Oh. My. God. This. Is. So. Hard. You have got to be kidding me.' That was the hardest moment of the competition.”

Just as soon as he'd begin to get his bearings, the three plates on top of the stacks were whisked away, and he'd start over again, working from the guest's point of view, only to have the plates spun again.

Laughlin, watching from the American section of the bleachers, could hardly look.
He is really struggling
, she thought.

Once again, Hollingsworth was angry with himself. He had noticed something unusual at the carving stations from his observing perch on Day One, but was so interested in the food that he didn't pay sufficient attention to it. “I missed an opportunity to be a little more successful,” he would
say later. By the time he was done, things were moving so quickly and so confusingly, that he cannot remember what language some waiters were speaking. When one of the servers began walking to the judges with a plate that didn't yet have caviar on it, the commis extra waved her back. “He said, ‘That plate needs caviar,' but maybe I just understood it [in French] at that point,” Hollings worth said.

H
OLLINGSWORTH RACED BACK INTO
Kitchen 6 and looked at his clock. There were about twenty minutes left until the beef platter was due in the window.

“Okay, Adina, where are we?” he called out.

Guest was assembling the deconstructed beef stew stacks. “She struggled a little with that,” Hollingsworth would say later, quickly adding, “No more than I was [at that point].”

Hollingsworth gathered himself. As Guest prepared the celery salad for the pommes dauphinoise, he seared the bacon-wrapped beef and transferred it to the oven. Fearful that his own internal alarm clock might fail to go off, he told Henin that he wasn't going to bother setting a timer for the beef, and that instead he wanted the coach to keep him on schedule by giving him a periodic countdown for the final minutes.

He then assembled the beef rosette, brushing it with the lemony truffle oil that had been infusing since Saturday night's practice and transferring it to the center of the platter.

The value of practice—even to a gifted cook—was revealed in these moments: he had the right amount of horseradish cream available because he had realized in Saturday's run-through that he needed two bags' worth. But he had never practiced with the little stands that had just been delivered to him on Monday. He put the pommes dauphinoise rectangles on the stands, then set the stands on C-folds (folded paper towels) on a sheet tray, before heating the pommes dauphinoise through in the oven. This was standard operating procedure back home at The French Laundry,
where the cooks never put anything directly on a piece of metal. But when he removed the tray from the oven, he got the surprise of his life: the rubber coating on the bottom, there to keep the stands from sliding around or scratching the surface on which they were set,
had melted onto the C-folds
.

“Adina, they all stuck!” he said. “I have to spend time doing this.”

Guest responded with a deadly serious, “Yes, Chef.”

And so, Hollingsworth spent the next several minutes peeling paper from the bottoms of the stands. To do this, he had to remove the potato dauphinoise from the stands, pick away at the paper, and then replace the dauphinoise. He quickly abandoned the idea of perfection, as he had had to abandon so much that day, leaving bits of paper fused to the very bottom of the stands if he was reasonably sure they would be out of view of the jury. It was a nerve-wracking exercise, and frustrating as well, because the time it consumed made the whole incident pointless: he might as well have not bothered heating the stands at all because by the time he was done peeling paper, the potato had cooled down. The tension compounded the difficulty of his next task: setting the little stands—the steel still hot from the oven—with the potato dauphinoise on top, between the delicate smoke glasses on the platter. He tried using a towel to protect his fingers, but the towel only got in the way, so he decided to go unprotected. He managed to land several rectangles without incident, but eventually the law of averages took hold and he toppled one of the smoke glasses. It didn't break, but desperately wanting to continue his forward movement, he assembled a new one using extra ingredients and one of the spare glasses.

They were down to the wire, inside that five-minute window between “time” and “too late.” Hemorrhaging minutes as they were, Hollings worth decided not to add the smoke to the smoke glasses until the carving station; they'd lose drama, but perhaps save their bacon by getting done before time was up.

On the dais, Jérôme Bocuse was unable to conceal his concern, and he
cheated a few steps away from the table to peer in at Kitchen 6, situated over his right shoulder. “Normally, in that five minutes, you see that everything is almost done and ready to go and they were still scrambling,” he said. He thought back to his impressions back in Yountville earlier in the month: “That reflects again on the routine.”

Not wanting to distract Hollingsworth, Henin decided that he'd issue reminders by holding up pieces of paper with the remaining time on it. But Hollingsworth, never one to be distracted by noise, expected the coach to just scream out, “Okay, Tim, pull the beef.” As a result, Henin had to wave his signs to get the candidate's attention. Those guys, they just never clicked.

Hollingsworth removed the bacon-wrapped beef from the oven and put the cylinders on the platter. Guest arranged the deconstructed beef stew stacks around them, and they lifted the platter up into the window, thinking they were perhaps late, but just making their allotted timeframe. The platter kept the team's secrets well: with the exception of the absent smoke, it looked every bit as spectacular as it ever had.

After the platter had made the rounds, and the time came to plate, Hollingsworth made an adjustment based on his experience on the fish platter, taking command of the carving station and arranging his plates around the platter. This time, things went easier, but even as the plates were whisked away to the judges, Hollingsworth knew that he had come up short. Minutes later, in the kitchen, with the curtains pulled shut, Hollingsworth was immediately overcome with a feeling of profound disappointment, in himself, and the job that he and his team did.

“I know we didn't win,” he said to Guest.

He and Guest broke down their kitchen and cleaned it, the cramp in his side lingering for a good fifteen minutes into the process. Once done, he walked along the corridor behind kitchens 7 through 12, past the reception and meeting rooms, and past the sentry posted at his velvet rope and stanchions, where Laughlin was waiting for him.

“That was the hardest thing I ever did,” he said to her.

Hollingsworth then returned to the holding area, where the wait was
excruciating—there was still about an hour to go before all of the platters had been served and the other kitchens cleaned, and then of course there was the tabulating of the scores.

Other countries had joined the fray: the Czech Republic, Canada, and Singapore, which bought the event to Kitchen 10 and France.

Out on stage, Ferniot and May didn't even try to conceal their obvious excitement, and that of the audience. (“We better do it, before we have a riot,” said May of the rabid French fans.) When the fish platter was finally marched out, it did not disappoint: the centerpiece was cod fillet with Biar-ritz flavors, a tribute to the seaside town in southwest France where Mille and his commis had practiced in order to escape the intense media scrutiny that always attaches to the French candidate. The cod's topping comprised many ingredients closely associated with Biarritz cuisine such as Espelette pepper, chorizo, piquillo peppers, and Bayonne ham. Garnishes included a tender shrimp dome and tawny crisps (shrimp arranged in a circle over a rounded brown pastry cup) with golden eggs, a delicate tart of scallops on a bed of baby spinach with a layer of caviar beads, and a cone of leeks and sea-flavored baby squid topped with urchin roe. Minutes later, for the beef platter, there were wood-grilled beef steak layered with foie gras and encased in a flaky pastry, braised beef cheeks with a carrot topiary, beef tenderloin with tiny garden vegetables, a miniature shrub of tender leeks, and the showstopper: oxtail and caramelized celery combined and formed into an enormous charcoal-colored “Black Diamond.”

When the competition was finally over and the judges found their way backstage, Keller patted Hollingsworth and Guest on the back and said, “Good job. I'm proud of you guys.” But he couldn't help but ask about the smoke bowls.

“Chef, I didn't think we had time,” said the candidate. This was actually one of the things he was ultimately least disappointed in because, “In the long run, I think it probably tasted a lot better.” That said, Hollingsworth will forever wonder whether or not he would have earned some more points had those glasses contained smoke when they were first paraded—would
the drama of the visuals have predisposed more judges to love his food?

As Hollingsworth and Guest hung out backstage, strangers—including many judges—came up to him and offered encouragement in a multitude of languages. All the positive vibes conspired to almost make him believe that he had a shot, but not really, “not in my heart.” Hollingsworth didn't even think about what place he deserved. By that point, he just wanted to do well enough to not be embarrassed.

Just as his spirits were lifting, however, he was met with some criticism. Judge René Redzepi of Denmark came up and told Hollingsworth that he didn't understand that the rosette was not supposed to be warm, and judge Lea Linster reinforced this by telling him that both the rosette and the smoke bowl garnish confused her. “Where I'm from, you would say it a different way on the menu, you would say it's meant to clean your palate or something,” she told him.

Hollingsworth received this with a mix of shock and disbelief. “To me that is crazy,” he thought. “There's freaking raw meat on it.” For all of the time and debate that had gone into the menu writing, had the failure to state an intended temperature cost Team USA?