Knives at Dawn (31 page)

Meanwhile, Guest was executing an interlocking series of smaller tasks: candying orange peel in successive changes of sugared water while trimming broccolini florets, peeling and slicing celery, cooking chestnuts, and setting just-baked potato mille-feuille into an ice bath to chill it.

Though they barely spoke to one another throughout the first four
hours, the final push once again presented complications that led to dialoguing. They composed the scallop tartare together, making it this time with overlapping scallop rounds instead of a puree, then pieces of grapefruit and strips of orange rind. It was pretty but it was decidedly
not
uniform; for example, different melbas had different numbers of grapefruit pieces on them.

When it was over, and the team had put up all their proteins and garnishes, altered according to the conversation and experimentation of the past several days, Henin offered his feedback. He had nothing but praise for the beef platter: He was pleased at the balance between artistry and good taste, and liked that the six components all had different shapes. He approved of the three different preparations of the protein (cured, braised, and roasted), and pronounced the sauce, made by infusing reduced beef cooking liquid with prune, “the best I've seen.” (One small tinker that he and Hollingsworth agreed on was that the fillet rectangle would be abandoned in favor of the two cylinders from the previous practices.)

His evaluation of the fish platter was more qualified. “The fish guys are going to feel cheated,” he said. “They're going to say, ‘Look at those guys [the meat judges] …' ”

Henin was stuck on the need for a big piece of protein on the fish plate. He took out a pillbox-sized, oval-shaped pastry he had procured from Bouchon Bakery that morning.

“What do you think of something like this?” he said. With his other hand, he dropped a prawn into the bain-marie.

Hollingsworth didn't say anything, just looked at it and considered. Henin mentioned that he felt a lack of urgency in the day's practice, especially during the final hour.

“We're still trying to work out each other's roles,” said Hollingsworth.

“Like the beginning, that was picture-perfect,” said Henin. He carved out a portion of the pastry, holding it in one hand, then extracted the prawn from the water and held it upside down, its head resting in the newly carved
cavity, a slightly different take on the artichoke-shrimp proposition he'd made the day before.

Hollingsworth considered it, but said nothing. Like Henin, he didn't want to threaten the bond that was being established, but the truth was that what the coach was proposing was hopelessly far from anything Hollings worth would do; it just didn't resonate with him at all. Henin let it go for the moment. No sense in pushing. Things were going too well.

Henin's suggestion assumed that the sponsor-provided shrimp would be of a certain size, but neither he nor Hollingsworth knew how big they'd actually be. Hollingsworth knew the total weight of product he'd be cooking with, but had been unsuccessful trying to ascertain the exact specs. This was especially important with the shrimp, which can vary more in size than the other proteins. At Pelka's request, Carey Snowden had actually gone so far as to try to order the Norwegian seafood and Angus beef from overseas, but they got stuck in customs and were eventually destroyed. (In truth, unbeknownst to the team, full details of the size of
all
proteins were available on the Bocuse d'Or Web site, but were difficult to find, located several “levels” down under a “Themes” tab that had to be double-clicked for its contents to be revealed, a detail that, according to Pelka, was never explained to the team.)

That afternoon, Hollingsworth, still feeling some residual tension between himself and his coach, suggested to Laughlin that they should cook together, and asked her to make the overture. “There had been a couple of hard points and we had a few issues,” he said later. “I really wanted to reach out and basically let him know that I
did
appreciate him, and I
do
have a lot of respect for him. It's just that I see things different. It's not that I don't respect his opinion or his history.… I felt that he might feel a little bit left out, therefore I wanted to make the extra effort to tie us all together.”

Henin would be leaving town for the weekend, but Laughlin set the dinner up for Monday night, three days before the team's departure for France.

T
O HELP
T
EAM
USA plan for their departure, Jennifer Pelka arrived in Yountville Saturday morning, January 10, and checked into Petit Logis, a five-room inn tucked behind Bouchon Bakery on Yount Street. When she met up with Hollingsworth, she was caught off guard by his garage-band look—the unshaven face, the ripped jeans, the knit cap. He gave her a tour of The French Laundry, then the Garden, but the sightseeing portion of the day was brief, because Practice Number Four was planned. In addition to Pelka, a number of special guests were expected: Hollingsworth's family— his parents and sisters—as well as two of Laughlin's cousins, close to fifteen people in all.
Step right up, folks
…

Though the competition was drawing closer, and practice time was scarce, Hollingsworth was only too happy to talk to his family as he rehearsed, to explain what he was doing at each turn. It was the first time any of them had seen him cook professionally. “They have no idea what I do, or what kind of work goes into what I do. To be able to see it, really was a very special thing for me,” he said.

His father's attention was especially gratifying to Hollingsworth. “For him to be there and to watch that and to really be so interested … and kind of really show a respect and an interest was really amazing for me. It was very special,” he said.

That day, Hollingsworth tried a new shrimp garnish, a shrimp and avocado tart. To make it, he cooked the shrimp sous vide with clarified butter, halved them, and tiled them in long strips, alternating the pieces with slices of avocado, like a long green, pink, and white caterpillar. This he set atop a piece of puff pastry spread with fennel compote, then brushed the shrimp and avocado with a yuzu (a tart Asian citrus) gelée and sprinkled it with a brunoise of red jalapeño. (Though he did not voice it, like many of the dishes to which Hollingsworth is drawn, this one was founded on the flavor profile of a classic of Americana: shrimp cocktail, with the red jalapeño standing in for the cocktail sauce.) On balance, he was happy with it,
although he found the yuzu overpowering and the crust crumbly. He and Guest also added a new element to the mille-feuille, topping the individual pieces with quenelles of leek puree made by mounting blanched leeks with crème fraîche.

On Sunday, the team had a planning session largely devoted to all the equipment that would be required in Lyon. Pelka typed a list, divided into three categories: Pack, Ship (that is, FedEx to Boulud's parents' home just outside Lyon), and Purchase There. Hollingsworth and Guest did some fine-tuning, such as reducing the amount of yuzu and changing the pastry for the new tart from a handmade dough to purchased puff pastry. Though most elements in the competition need to be prepared and produced from scratch, Bocuse d'Or rules allow many ready-made items into competition, such as puff pastry and stocks.

That night Pelka, Hollingsworth, Guest, and Laughlin went to dinner at Ubuntu, the Napa vegetarian restaurant with a yoga studio upstairs that the
New York Times
' Frank Bruni had ID'd as the best new restaurant in the United States. It was a relaxed evening that blended planning (for the near future) with enjoying food and wine (here and now).

When the moment was right, Pelka broached a delicate topic: she and the rest of the East Coast contingent were concerned about the modest character of the platter, barely three-dimensional, and with virtually no “old-school” flourishes to trumpet the food.

“If we win for that reason, I don't want to win,” Hollingsworth said flatly. After his extended exercise in self-discovery, feeling his way through the conception of his dishes, he had arrived at his own well-defined place. The food was as manipulated as he wanted it to be. If anything, he was considering going more modern by adding some edible flowers to the plate, a personal predilection of his. This was another violation of Viola's advice, but Hollingsworth was feeling real ownership of his platter, and he wanted to remain true to himself.

Pelka persisted. She took the simplicity of the new shrimp tart (“the new tiled shrimp thing” she called it) as an example: such a simple composition
would need to be beyond perfect to score; the lines would need to be so well-defined, the color so tantalizingly vivid that even the slightest flaw could prove fatal. Why not hedge their bets with some more razzmatazz?

“What can we do to add more height?” she asked.

Again, Hollingsworth and Guest pushed back. They had performed four practices in eight days and had a swelling sense of command. Didn't Pelka understand: they were on the verge of possibly beating the clock, of giving themselves a chance to actually breathe life into the fairy tale that had been constructed for them? There was no time for new challenges, let alone finding the kind of pieces she was describing. They were getting on an airplane in four days!

“We have a
ton
of time,” countered Pelka. If, say, Thomas Keller asked for something, they could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. As far as she was concerned, it would be the culinary equivalent of a request from the president of the United States. People in the industry didn't say no to Keller, or for that matter to her chef, Boulud.

Hollingsworth relented. The next day, he spent hours on the phone with Daniel Scannell. Scannell agreed to overnight him approximations of vessels—like little footed silver stands to hold the beef cheek stacks; long, half-cylinder vessels in which the pistachio-crusted cod might rest; small rectangular trays on which the bacon-wrapped rib-eye would sit—that could be produced in time to add to the tray, but would not be available until after the team departed for France. If they were lucky, they'd get to practice with them one time, which expanded the potential for the unknown to encroach upon their Bocuse d'Or performance. Culinary competitors don't just rehearse to get the conception and execution of their food down pat; they also fine tune the act of assembling the platters and plating the food so that every single pitfall can be identified and addressed. Throwing additional variables into the equation all but ensured that Team USA would have at least one surprise in Lyon, either in their final practice, or during the contest itself.

The phone call also produced a startling, though not fatal, revelation:
nobody had conveyed to Scannell that the fish platter was supposed to be porcelain, so his company was producing silver trays for both fish and meat. It was yet another sign of how quickly things were moving, as these kinds of details almost never fall through the cracks in the worlds of Boulud and Keller. (The team would likely have ended up with a silver tray anyway because Scannell later pointed out that the time and expense porcelain demands would have made it impossible in the given timeframe.)

Chef Henin returned to Yountville that day, and that evening, the team dinner took place. While Pelka went down the road to Ranch Market Too, an all-purpose grocery, sundries, and wine shop on Washington Street, Guest took to the Garden and procured some greens to accompany the roast chicken and root vegetables the coach would be preparing. There was no salad spinner at the house, so Henin taught her an old-school method for drying greens, instructing her to wrap them in a clean kitchen towel, take them out back on the deck, and swing them around like a mace.

As a gesture of solidarity with Henin, Hollingsworth put Gotan Project on the sound system, a mellow, lyric-free hybrid of tango and electronica. Also out of deference, Hollingsworth offered that he and Guest would function as Henin's sous chefs for the evening, executing his orders and his menu. When the time came to truss the chicken, Hollingsworth mentioned the story in
The French Laundry Cookbook
in which Keller recounts that at twenty-four he didn't know how to truss a chicken, a failing that drove a French chef to fling a knife at him.

Henin confirmed that this was no tall tale: “When Thomas came to me he didn't know how to truss a chicken,” he said. It's not easy to imagine Keller not knowing how to perform such a fundamental task, but we all have to start somewhere.

Hollingsworth asked Henin to demonstrate the technique to him.

“Oh, it's really very easy. There's nothing to it,” said Henin, as he took his kitchen twine to the bird. It was a fun, relaxed evening and with no discussion of the competition, Hollingsworth felt that he and Henin were connecting over a shared reverence for technique. The two men have more
in common than that, though. It had taken a while for them to connect, and the relationship was still far from perfect, but they both have an almost animal attraction to cooking. Both had found their vocation almost by accident, and like Henin, Hollingsworth was known—at least within the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group—as a phenomenal and patient teacher with a rare gift for tailoring his tone and his language to whomever he happens to be instructing at any given time.

Where as Hollingsworth once considered life as an EMT, Henin was supposed to have been an accountant. That's what his father had ordained, and when he grew up in his time in France, that was all there was to it. The problem was, when young Roland started college, he continued to hang out with his gang of friends in the evening, returning home and doing his homework until the wee hours.

His father didn't approve, and when the second year of school began, he put his foot down.

“When you live under my roof, you will do as I say,” said the father.

“I said, ‘I don't have to live under your roof. That is fine,' ” remembers Henin. He moved out. With nowhere to stay, his immediate concern was money. In the newspaper, he found an advertisement for a job as a pastry cook that included room and board. Bingo! He applied for the job, and his timing was lucky: it was the holidays and the shop was doing a brisk business and in need of another set of hands. He was hired immediately and put up in the house the owners kept across the street. “I had a room just below the roof so it was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer,” the chef recalls today.