Knives at Dawn (9 page)

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 remembers 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.”

His list of tips was extensive: watch your sanitation, don't taste with your finger (“Use a spoon!”), show good time management, and coach your commis well; if you don't, “they make mistakes and then their mistakes become your mistakes.” To that end, work side by side or front to front “so that you are one.” Be efficient: if you go to put something away, bring something back with you. And maximize ingredients—use the trimmings of
everything
, from chickens to mushrooms.

As for the food, in competition a combination of textures is essential:
the three primary ones being “crisp/crunchy, meaty, and soft.” By way of illustration, Henin pointed out that apple pie à la mode, which he described as the most popular dessert in the world, has all three: the crust is crunchy, the apple is meaty, and the ice cream is soft.

Proper seasoning is also important, as is being distinctly American. Henin didn't buy into the notion that you had to cook French to win the Bocuse d'Or. He believed that you need to celebrate where you come from. “Maple syrup, wow!” he said. “They don't have that anywhere else in the world.” This particular subject is the source of much debate among those who organize, participate in, and observe the Bocuse d'Or USA. To this day, Kaysen, for one, is convinced that a reason he didn't do better at the Bocuse d'Or is that his food was too American.

Kaysen himself followed Henin, joined by his commis from 2007, Brandon Rodgers, who was then working at Daniel. The two talked about their experience, and how important the timing was, and about the noise in the competition hall, specifically the cowbells from the Swiss fans. This aspect of the Bocuse d'Or has attained near mythic status; past competitors and observers alike warn of the earsplitting, rafter-shaking volume of the audience, which is so overwhelming that many participants and observers (including many reporters) routinely refer to “thousands” of spectators when the true number is in the high hundreds. Some even wear earplugs to shut out the noise, though this can impede communication between chef and commis. (In 2007, when coaches were not allowed near the kitchens or to communicate with their team in any way—a rule that was changed for 2009—Kaysen considered using earpiece walkie-talkie setups to shut out the audience while still allowing him to communicate with Rodgers, but he was warned that it might appear he was cheating.)

The candidates were divided into groups of four and given two hours to prepare a fish course. They wouldn't have to present it on a platter, but they would have to serve five plates, to Boulud, Keller, Henin, Kaysen, and Rodgers. As they cooked, Kaysen and Rodgers observed them and Henin roamed the floor taking the kind of notes the technical judges might take
in Lyon, about how sound their butchering technique was, and how clean they kept their stations.

When the cooking was done, the judges tasted the food and conferred in private, concluding that it was a mixed bag. To avoid embarrassing or discouraging any candidates, rather than critiquing individual dishes, they offered their commentary en masse, though some opinions were delivered rather bluntly, as when Kaysen told the group that only two chefs' fish were cooked correctly, an especially significant note because proper doneness is a crucial consideration in the Bocuse d'Or; the French have a word for it:
cuisson
.

I
N THE WEEKS AFTER
the orientation and group-cook at The French Culinary Institute, Kevin Sbraga took Coach Henin's advice to heart—including the part about preparing physically. Sbraga, whose combination Italian and African American heritage lends him a hard-to-place swarthiness, didn't have a regular workout routine, but as a former athlete who always enjoyed training, he rediscovered his inner jock, rising at five thirty every morning and biking between fifteen and twenty miles. He also stopped shaving his beard, a not-unusual tradition for athletes preparing for a big occasion.

For a solid month, Sbraga—who had tapped Aimee Patel, a cook from Amada restaurant, as his commis—spent four or five hours a day, four or five days a week, developing his dishes. The rest of the candidates prepared in their own ways, but with the exception of Rosendale, each of them had to go through a learning process because he wasn't a competition cook. For example, Rellah focused his research on past winners of the Bocuse d'Or, which made him question Henin's go-American advice. “I trained in two French restaurants and have looked at a lot of menus and information about what other teams have done in the past … I don't think [acclaimed Swiss chef and judge] Philippe Rochat wants to taste maple syrup,” he said.

Jérôme Bocuse agreed: “For me, [maple syrup] is comfort food,” he said. “Maple syrup is for the pancakes in the morning for breakfast. Barbecue
is for Sunday with your friends … I know it is part of the [American] heritage and the culture … but can we bring it to a gourmet level? I am not sure. Maybe by tweaking it. Maybe we can bring some barbecue
flavor
into it. But are you going to do real barbecue at the Bocuse d'Or? Certainly not.”

Rellah, Sbraga, and Whatley ended up in about the same place, deciding to call on American terminology and reference points, delivering them via classic French technique. Rellah, for example, devised a meat platter he dubbed the Blackboard Special. One component was a tenderloin of beef, split open, filled with a farce or forcemeat (finely chopped, seasoned meat) comprising the scrap and mushrooms (“almost like meatloaf”), wrapped in Swiss chard and sealed with the help of transglutaminase, essentially a “meat glue” that binds proteins together. Rellah planned to
sous vide
(cook in a vacuum pack) the entire composition before presenting it.

Similarly, Whatley planned a deconstructed cod chowder theme for his fish platter, and a Southwestern “Texas ranchers” theme for the beef, including wrapping the tenderloin with chorizo he made himself, roasting it, and saucing it with a “sort-of barbecue sauce reduction.” He also planned chiles rellenos stuffed with beef cheeks, and oxtail timbales with pinto beans. Having lived in Georgia, Sbraga eventually settled on a Southern Hospitality theme—his meat platter came complete with candied yams and a maple-bourbon jus that paid homage to red-eye gravy—drawing on his personal history.

Meanwhile, in Yountville, Hollingsworth, who had spent most of his adult life working at The French Laundry, decided to forgo competition style in favor of the understated elegance he lived daily. He drew heavily from The French Laundry's Garden for inspiration, and planned to bring all of his produce from Yountville, leaving nothing to chance.

Hollingsworth found preparing for the Bocuse d'Or USA to be a revelatory experience. “It has made me learn a lot about myself and who I am,” he said. “If you come to work and you cook every day, you learn by working with the product. But if you cook with the same product every day and you're doing these different techniques and you're really analyzing the
food that you do, then you learn more about the style that you prefer and what better represents you and how you work and how you handle different kinds of stress.”

Sbraga reached out to the community of chefs to help with his preparation, starting with George McFadden, a certified master chef he had kept in touch with back in Naples, Florida, borrowing a kitchen at a Philadelphia restaurant school to train in, and even driving up to Johnson & Wales University in Providence to do a tasting for some chefs he knew there, videotaping the practice for his own review.

By Labor Day, Rellah had his themes all set (his fish platter was titled “An Indian Summer in Cape Cod”) and he began to consider his platters and other ancillary concerns. He started doing timed trials fives times a week after work, beginning at 10:30 p.m., and going for five hours. That might sound like a lot, but Rellah had no trouble slipping into his old work habits. “I worked in two four-star restaurants in Manhattan for a total of seven years,” he said. “That is, like, the pinnacle of pressure.”