Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (32 page)

The cooks had been going since 6:00 and had two and a half hours, so the first round of presentations would be in thirty minutes. They had to present a Scottish salmon dish and a lamb dish. I sat back, watching, but there was very little to watch. They bent over their counters or stoves, reaching for a tool, grabbing an ingredient. A few different camera crews trawled along the length of the kitchens. Sometimes they’d stop, and what they shot showed up on the video monitor. I looked up and saw the cooks chopping vegetables, whisking something in a pot, plucking leaves from stems of herbs. Right then, none of them seemed rushed or panicked. No one appeared rattled.

More spectators arrived; clusters of people gathered at either end of the kitchens and the bleachers started to fill. I saw some of my classmates. I saw Gabriel Kreuther, executive chef at the Modern, where I’d wanted to do my externship, standing off to the left of the room, arms folded, watching the cooks at work. I saw André Soltner, of Lutèce, right behind Kreuther. Charlie Trotter, one of whose employees was competing, strolled from one end of the kitchens to the other. The judges started arriving in twos and threes: Grant Achatz and Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Tim Hollingsworth, from the French Laundry, who competed a few years prior and had been written about in the book
Knives at Dawn
. Ziebold arrived. Tim Ryan. Jerome Bocuse.

The event was emceed by Gavin Kaysen, chef at Café Boulud, who competed in the Bocuse d’Or in 2007, and a woman named Kelly Choi, host of the television show
Top Chef Masters
. They discussed who the judges were and Kaysen riffed a little on the pressures of cooking under those conditions—“These are some of the most intense hours of your life,” he said. “You have no room for error. You can’t make mistakes. The judges pick up on everything.” I wondered how the cooks felt hearing this. No one seemed to be paying any attention, but I couldn’t believe they didn’t take it in.

It occurred to me that the exciting stuff might have happened way
before anyone was allowed into the gym, around six a.m., when the first set of cooks fired up their burners. At this point, they were just working steadily, honing things.

Because there was so little going on, Choi worked the room, picking her way along and up the bleachers, looking for young faces and inquiring, “Are you a culinary student?” She was on the money each time. She followed up by asking, “What do you think of the event so far?” And each time, the student underwent a mild freeze-up, looking up at Choi and at his or her face outsized on the monitor. For the four or so minutes Choi stalked the bleachers, every interviewee gave roughly the same answer, “I think this is just amazing.” I wasn’t sure what they were amazed by. She followed up with, “Do you think this is something you’d like to do someday?” She got an affirmative from each person. I saw Choi getting closer to where I was sitting. She’s incredibly slender and her dress was very purple. I worried that when she asked me—and she really looked as if she was coming my way—I’d go blank and respond with the word “amazing,” so I got up and clomped down the bleachers to the main floor and went off to stand by the doors.

I found a spot right by the table where the cooks would be plating their dishes for the judges. The weather around this table was full of coiled activity just about to spring. A small squadron of Certified Master Chefs stood expressionless with clipboards—I recognized them, I’d passed them in the hallways, and oftentimes, before I’d even seen their faces or read the CMC title embroidered on their chefs’ jackets, I could intuit their rank. They walked differently, with a degree more bearing. Something about passing that monster of a test must alter your genetics. Alongside them were a knot of senior chef-instructors, whom I also recognized from the day-to-day traffic in the hallways. A group of students stood there with the CMCs and instructors, dressed in white shirts and ties and black pants, idling with their hands clasped behind their backs. And off a ways, standing behind them, was Sitti with a large camera around his neck. When he eventually looked in my direction, I waved and he picked his way through the islands of people. We stood there with a velvet cordon between us.

“I’m assuming you’re taking photos here?” I asked. “Is this for the personal Sitti collection or is this a job?”

“I was asked to do this. The school paper asked me. I’ve taken 236 photos.”

“Of what?”

“Mostly people just standing around. It’s very boring so far. And people keep telling me I’m in their way, so I’m just trying to find a place to stand.”

“Hey, Sit—do you know how all these commis got the gig?”

“I don’t know. But I do think you have to know someone.”

“I wouldn’t want to do it.”

“I don’t think I’d want to either. Maybe too much pressure.”

Someone came and told Sitti “Fifteen minutes.” Sit nodded and said, “I’ll find you later and show you the pictures.”

Kaysen announced that in a very short time, the first platter of salmon, followed fifteen minutes later by a platter of lamb, would be presented to the judges. Only half the judges would taste the salmon, and the other half would taste the lamb. The first presenter was Jennifer Petrusky, from Charlie Trotter’s restaurant in Chicago. She was in the kitchen closest to where I stood, but from my angle, I couldn’t see inside or see the monitor. There was a small army of cameras trained on her, and Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller stood behind them, watching. After a few minutes, Boulud and Keller strolled back to their seats. Kaysen told the room that Petrusky would be presenting momentarily, and I wondered how she felt offering the debut platter—every eye on her, establishing the tone for the rest of the day, having to face not just the judges, but the snap judgment of everyone in the room, assessing just how high she’s setting the bar.

And then the platter came out, held by a pair of the instructors, gliding down and past the row of assembled judges, moving slowly, steadily, letting everyone take it in. The platter’s silver caught the lights of the room and it turned incandescent. It arrived at one of the tables near where I stood, descended upon by Petrusky and her commis,
surrounded by the CMCs and their clipboards, photographed by a dozen different people.

Petrusky, a twenty-three-year-old midwesterner with angled, pretty features, also looked subtly crazy right then. Her eyes were shiny and panicked, but it didn’t show in the purls of her movement, with a small offset spatula in one hand, poised to address the four salmon preparations on the platter: a roulade, confit, cured fillet, and tartar. The platter itself invited a small, momentary reverence; it had a flow and structure to it that made me think of a Japanese rock garden or piece of Buddhist calligraphy.

Then, she had to plate the food for evaluation. The students in their waiter uniforms would carry the plates to the judges’ table. I realized I was wrong: Things were beginning to show in Petrusky’s movements. Her hand trembled, and a very slight sheen of sweat materialized on her brow. She began lifting the first piece of salmon and placed it at a precise spot on a plate. One of the CMCs leaned in and told her she needed to wear gloves. She slumped for a second, bit her lip, and, without a word, reached for latex gloves from a nearby box. Her commis already had them on.

The remonstration broke her moment, and she began having difficulty arranging the plates. So did her commis. Both of their hands had wills of their own; hers seemed to have a temper, darting and snapping, and his were sullen and uncooperative. Carrying a piece of fish to a plate, Petrusky’s commis dropped the fillet awkwardly on the plate. He righted it, leaving a smudge on the pristine white of the china. Petrusky fixed it, murmured something, and the two kept on. When the last plate was done, she left the commis to clean up, and she dashed back to the kitchen to undertake the lamb.

It went like that for an hour. One team replaced by another. One platter of fish or lamb—and a number of the teams, from Petrusky on up, seemed to have been enticed by the idea of using Middle Eastern spices for the lamb—after another, and each of them a beautiful piece of architecture in miniature.

When the final chef presented, there was a break as the kitchens were scrubbed, refurbished, and stocked with the next team’s preparations from the previous night. I wanted to watch the process of its being put together, in all its excitement or mundanity, by a single team. I headed upstairs to the deck and staked out a position at the railing overlooking the kitchens. I could see everything inside them. I looked at the schedule to see who was up next and found that a team from Eleven Madison Park was competing. EMP is a Danny Meyer restaurant and shares space in the same building as Tabla. Not too long after Cardoz had gotten a shin kicking from Frank Bruni, EMP was given a four-star review, which caused a stir and some dismay among the staff at Tabla. But I remembered reading the review and the descriptions of the cuisine—a slow-poached egg with brown butter hollandaise and Parmesan foam, a tomato salad made of liquid spheres—thinking of the elegance, the boldness, and the cleverness, and thinking it was definitely a cut above.

James Kent, a sous-chef at EMP, and his sous-chef for the day, Tom Allan, also from the restaurant, were rifling through their supplies. Kent and Allan, I noticed and remarked to myself, are fucking
kids
. I’d been seeing it for almost two years on campus: When individuals have just tripped into their twenties, they have an energy that isn’t tamed, like a piece of charcoal before it waxes into an ember. These two had that. They weren’t talking, but they still came off as boisterous. Yet at the same time, anchoring that energy and that silent noise was something I remembered seeing in punk or hardcore musicians whose bands have just taken the stage in a club, when they know they’re really good and are about to unleash. It’s a calm, determined passion, married to confidence and competence. And what they’re about to do is for them as much as it is for you. This is a pretty charismatic blend, and it’s usually mesmerizing to see. Their commis was a guy named Viraj, who came to extern at Tabla just as I was leaving. We compared notes when we next saw each other on campus. He had had a rosier time of it than I did.

Kent had five different timers set up on his station, each programmed to a different countdown. Taped to the walls were photos of
each finished component of his platters, taken during one of his practice runs. He had an immersion circulator for sous-vide cooking bubbling and a mound of neatly folded towels close at hand. When he and Allan started cooking, it was like they’d already been cooking for two hours and I’d just happened onto it. There was no hesitation, no building up, just action—purposeful action—taken with an unconscious economy of movement and motion.

Kent’s knife moved over pieces of his salmon, which disintegrated into a pink hash. He picked up a tiny circular mold, like a makeup compact, and filled it with the fish. He made twelve of them. He piped something white and creamy over each mold and, with a tiny spatula smoothed it over. He had a tray of tiny green strips the color of zucchini skin and he wove them on top of the molds into a basket pattern.

The thing that kept my eyes trained was this: it did not have the feeling of a sequence of steps, each with a start and finish. He didn’t stop at any point to evaluate what he did. Each moment of this dish coming together was, instead, a continuum of reactions, a constant metamorphosis. Inevitability.

I had two thoughts: Even from where I stood, which was about twenty feet away and ten feet above the action, those little mounds of salmon look beautiful. I hated salmon, but I’d eat one of them. And then I thought,
I’ve never even attempted something like that
. But why not? Sure, there were practical considerations. These dishes take time. And, more—they take money. But that’s a load of horseshit.

Nelly once said to me that it wasn’t just failure I was afraid of, but succeeding, too. I didn’t understand it at the time she said it—and I’m not sure I understood it fully while remembering the exchange as I watched the EMP guys—but after she said it, the sentence lay there newly born, glistening with truth. To do something right carries with it a set of demands that you be able to do it again, that you irreversibly elevate your standards. I had no idea why that should be unnerving.

Sitti was suddenly at my elbow with his camera. He angled the camera down and clicked away. He stopped and lowered it slightly and stood watching the EMP team. He laughed to himself.

“I swear, Sit, these guys are going to win. I’ve never seen anything quite like this in a kitchen.”

“They are,” Sitti said slowly, “kind of incredible.” I noticed that the crowd out front had begun to form a knot in front of the EMP kitchen. And I started to notice a feeling of increased heat around me; people were gathering and pressing in up here, too. I looked off to my right and saw Speiss, too, hands in his pockets, glasses perched on his nose, looking down, expressionless but riveted.

Kent and Allan also looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Neither one was grinning, no high fives or anything, but—you could tell—they
knew
they were doing well, and their expressions and their postures spoke in a cant of confidence and competence. They’d worked for this moment for a long time, even before they ever knew they’d be here.

And in that small realization, that tiny truism, I started sensing something gigantic.

Their platter came together, element by element, exactly as all their work had progressed that day. And then activity just stopped; they stood for a moment, and they turned and looked at each other. It was their turn to present. A team of chefs took the platter from them and paraded it for the judges. I found out later exactly what was on it: roulade with Alaskan King Crab, relish of cucumber and Meyer lemon; chilled mousse with tartare and roe; pickled heirloom beets with crème fraîche, dill, and black pepper.

After a few minutes, they were back to arrange the lamb platter and present it: bacon-wrapped lamb saddle with piquillo peppers and provençale herbes; vol-au-vent of braised lamb with sweetbreads and preserved lemon; zucchini with goat cheese and mint; tart of tomato confit with basil, Niçoise olives, and fromage blanc.