Knives at Dawn (21 page)

“I understand what a centerpiece is,” said Hollingsworth, again taking some offense at the presumption of ignorance.

Viola spoke. Henin translated: “By the end of the month, have all the platters conceptualized, would be ideal.”

Hollingsworth just smiled, but said nothing.

Viola looked at him, imploringly: “
Tim-oh-see
?”

Hollingsworth's frustration with the crowd of observers bubbled over again: “That's obvious, come on.”

Viola spoke, and Henin again translated: “Again, I want to clarify, by the end of the month, have both platters conceptualized.”

Hollingsworth didn't even bother replying this time.

Viola also had another point to make, a more abstract one, but a crucial one. He pointed to the Italian platter from 2005: “
Ça n'as pas de vie
.” He waved his hands to animate his words. This does not have life.

Then he pointed to the 2007 French platter. “
Cela a la vie
.” This has life. “
Il a le mouvement
.” It has movement.

And having conveyed all that he could convey in twenty-four hours, Viola changed back into his traveling clothes, took his rolling cart in hand, and left the House.

The next time they saw him would be in Lyon, at the Bocuse d'Or.

A
FTER
V
IOLA DEPARTED
, K
AYSEN
read Hollingsworth an e-mail from Boulud saying that Viola's counsel was no problem, because he had committed to making the trip before he was approached about helping out at the Bocuse d'Or.

Later Henin, Kaysen, and Hollingsworth reviewed the schedule for December. Hollingsworth was off from December 16 to December 19, but Henin was planning to be in Yountville on the twenty-eighth.

“Okay,” said Hollingsworth. “I'm working the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, thirtieth, thirty-first, and first. Then I'm off the whole month of January.”

Henin explained that he couldn't change his schedule to be there the week of the sixteenth. Hollingsworth didn't know what to tell him.

Henin made a theatrically flustered face, and looked at Kaysen, who didn't offer anything. What could
he
do? Henin shrugged, and looked away.

It would be Henin's last stand on the scheduling issue. Having made his case to anybody who would listen, he resigned himself to the situation. “They didn't know [what they were up against],” he said. “You can't blame them. I didn't want to fight it. I said, ‘Well, that is what you want to do, that is what you want to do.' ”

With nothing more to say on the subject, Henin moved on.

“Since Adina's not here, I can be the commis and peel shallots,” he said. He took a paring knife in hand, and got to work.

And so the cooking began, at last.

Hollingsworth was eager to try out the equipment, so he seared some beef cheeks in a sauté pan, basting them with butter. With that melba-custard garnish in mind, he also made an unflavored custard base and cooked it in the oven. And it was a good thing he did: it was faster than he thought it would be, instant validation of the importance of training on the same equipment that would be waiting for him in Lyon.

Meanwhile, Kaysen suited up in an apron and began cooking as well. He turned a potato into ribbons on the turning vegetable slicer, cooked them with a little butter and salt, then transferred them to a mixing bowl with a few thyme sprigs. Then he made a caramelized onion paste with onions, garlic, and water. He laid some ribbons across the width of his station, spooned little blobs of the paste on it, and spread them out. Then he rolled up the potato. He put the potato roll in a pan with some butter and basted it to a dark, amber brown, and transferred it to a paper towel to drain. Then he transferred it to a cutting board, and cut it into one-inch-thick pinwheels.

“What do you think of that?” he asked Hollingsworth.

The candidate nodded politely, but the truth was that he could not have been less interested in what Gavin Kaysen wanted to cook. He understood that his predecessor was trying to rub some sticks together and get a fire started, but Hollingsworth continued to feel strongly that he had to
create his own food. He knew that it was taking him a while to get there, but for him, it had to be an organic process that blossomed on its own natural timeframe. Moreover, one and a half days into his allotted Bocuse d'Or time for the week, Hollingsworth felt that he was burning precious hours, that for all of the good intentions behind the visit, a lot of people were going through the motions but not accomplishing anything.

The day didn't get better. When Hollingsworth found himself alone with Coach Henin, he decided to share one of his garnish ideas, that melba-custard–spring garlic stack. Henin, meanwhile, had the côte de boeuf on his mind, and interrupted to ask him what he planned to do with it. The seemingly minor exchange took less than fifteen seconds, but Hollingsworth found the change of subject unsupportive and it put him off.

Combined with his frustration at the passing time and the strangers in his midst, his reaction was extreme; he almost immediately began keeping Henin at arm's length. It was an awkward dynamic: Henin was his own chef's mentor and a man for whom he had a great deal of respect, and so getting off on the wrong foot with him made him uncomfortable, to say the least. (When discussing the tension between them in interviews for this book, Hollingsworth almost always made a point of reinforcing that he bore Henin, the person, not a whit of animosity.)

For his part, Henin was baffled by Hollingsworth's cold shoulder. He speculated that perhaps it was the displaced expression of a young American cook's inferiority complex at being shepherded by an accomplished French chef he barely knew, or perhaps some feeling of inadequacy related to competition.

Neither man discussed his feelings with the other. And the truth was that it hardly mattered since Henin would not return to Yountville in December. In the meantime, the emerging irony was that while Kaysen had made that red-faced proclamation to Eric Brandt in Lyon—that no American team would ever be undersupported again—Timothy Hollingsworth, at least until he had a working draft of his platter to share, might have been happier going it alone.

H
OLLINGSWORTH HAD TAKEN UP
surfing in the past few years, and wanted desperately to hit the beach that Friday to clear his head, but couldn't find the time. Instead, that Friday and Saturday, he tried out one of his possible garnishes at The French Laundry: that brioche with custard, which at this stage in its ideation housed tomato marmalade in its center. Henin had left town early Friday morning, so Hollingsworth was on his own to evaluate, and determined that it needed a little more—he wanted to incorporate spring garlic, which was not available in November, but would be (in Yountville) by the time of the competition in Lyon.

Then Hollingsworth spent a rare Thanksgiving away from his family. Though homesick for his parents and siblings, he embraced the mental break, finding a special sanctuary in the sound of the water splashing against the Maine shore, and sleeping an unheard-of eight or nine hours per night.

He also stole away to Rabelais bookstore, which he had read about in
Saveur
magazine as one of the top ten cookbook destinations in the world. Strolling the stacks, he was able to enjoy the store as he hadn't been able to enjoy very much the past few weeks, with the Bocuse d'Or hovering over him like a storm cloud. Cookbooks were his domain, something he felt an intimacy with, and he took his time browsing, getting reacquainted with books that had helped teach him about food in the first place, long before he was even a commis at The French Laundry.

He looked at book after book, buying up some to take back to Yountville. In particular, he found inspiration in the pages of
At the Crillon and At Home: Recipes by Jean-François Piège
, which had that tightness he so revered. He also looked at a number of books that described, in first person or third, some of the most celebrated Michelin-starred chefs of France, such as Alain Chapel. And he picked up a first edition of the classic that had inspired Keller himself,
Great Chefs of France
, for its photographs of platters, to help him in his continuing quest to get a handle on that style of service and its history.

He also treated himself to a copy of the new work by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page,
The Flavor Bible
, which brought back memories for Hollingsworth. When he first moved up from commis to cook at The French Laundry, John Fraser (today the executive chef of Dovetail in New York City) had recommended that he read one of the authors' earlier collaborations,
Culinary Artistry
. The book features extensive lists of ingredients and other foods they get along with. Hollingsworth, who was then starting to participate in those nightly menu meetings, spent his wee hours studying those lists so that he'd look like he knew what he was doing in the meetings when fellow cooks with finely honed palates and improvisational talent turned to him and said, “What do
you
want to run?”

Hollingsworth had had a bumpy adjustment from the rustic style of Zachary Jacques to the ultrafine dining of The French Laundry, but also had a fast, deft pair of hands, and a hunger to learn—French Laundry veterans recall the quiet cook lingering on the margins of the kitchen after his shift to observe or ask to be tasked with further assignments. “He was the commis that stayed late to watch service so we would clear some space on the line so that he could see what was going on,” remembers Corey Lee. “He was the commis that, when everyone was done, checked in with every one to make sure that they didn't need anything.”

But for all his motivation, Hollingsworth struggled with the “detail work.” He had turned artichokes, blanched tomatoes, butchered fish, but had never been shown “100 percent the proper way to do it.” He was also somewhat awed by the overwhelming respect everybody demonstrated for the food, from Keller and Lee to the men and women who shuttled the finished dishes out to the guests.

Sheer determination and raw talent had gotten him through: Hollingsworth would often be the first one on the property, arriving ahead of the official schedule, queasy with nervousness. To this day, when Hollingsworth glides in before sunrise, parking his Toyota 4Runner along Washington
Street and walking to the restaurant, the earthy bouquet of dewy grass and wet leaves trigger a Pavlovian sensation of nausea for him.

It was his determination, evidenced even in his stalker-like follow-up after trailing at the restaurant, that drew Keller to him in the first place: “When I think about what it is you look for in somebody, it is not necessarily their talent or their resumé. It is their determination and desire. Somebody who really has a strong desire. People talk about passion all of the time and passion is a great thing, but we all know that passion ebbs and flows. You can't be passionate every day. I look for someone who has desire because for me
it
is always there … that was something that I recognized in Timmy early on.”

The dedication paid off: Hollingsworth was promoted from commis to cheese, which he worked for seven and a half months, then to garde manger for more than two years, during which time he was dispatched to New York City as part of the team that helped open Per Se. Back in Yountville, he was steadily moved up the line, working every station on his way to sous chef.

Remembrances of those days put Hollingsworth in a more receptive frame of mind, a student's frame of mind, and the shift in perspective produced a change of heart. By the time he returned to the West Coast late Friday night, November 28, he had opened up to the possibility of some conventional competition plating.

“It's hard not to do some [of that],” he said. “I think that's what might win.” Hollingsworth's conversion also came from reflecting on the chain of titans that had led to this year's American team—Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller. You don't mix in that company selfishly, he reckoned, and you don't take for granted the amount of money that had been raised, either. Though the conventional wisdom is that one should—
must
, even—cook from the heart, Hollingsworth was recognizing the inherent dilemma unique to his situation. “I think it's very different from when Gavin went,” he said. “I think the pressure was more on himself. Now
it's like all these people are doing these things for me, so I want to win
for them
… if you step back and look at it, it's like all this support has been raised for me.… Maybe I can't do what I want. Maybe I want to compromise a little bit.”

He had even found a way to relate this to his day-to-day work: “If you're the chef of a restaurant,” he said, “You have to do what the guests want—that's who pays your bills.”

Back in Yountville, refreshed from his time away, a set of cookbooks under his arm, and a new peace with the unique demands of cooking for the Bocuse d'Or, his one and only short-term goal was to have something,
anything
, conceptualized. After weeks of agonizing over what would be good enough, and ending up with nothing, he decided that, “I just have to sit down and write this dish.” It almost didn't matter what the composition was; he could always change it later.

Hollingsworth also undertook a training regimen called CrossFit, a Web-based program that a member of Laughlin's family had recommended to him over Thanksgiving. The site provides users with a different high-intensity twenty-minute workout each day; for example, do as many push-ups as possible in twenty seconds. Repeat eight times. Then do the same things with sit-ups. One day, the three exercises were lifting a bar over his head, rowing on a machine, and jumping up and off a platform. He enjoyed the workouts, and found them useful, as opposed to Rosetta Stone, which he dropped about this time because its lessons weren't specific enough to what his needs would be in Lyon.