Knives at Dawn: America's Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d'Or Competition

by Andrew Friedman

Overview

Sizzling sauté pans. Screaming spectators. Television cameras. A ticking clock.

Fasten your seatbelt for the Bocuse d'Or, the world's most challenging and prestigious cooking competition, where the pressure and the stakes could not be higher. At this real-life Top Chef, twenty-four culinary teams, each representing its home nation, cook for five and a half grueling hours. There are no elimination rounds, no time to ease into the rigors of competition. The teams have just one precious chance to cook and present two spectacular platters of food, then plate them for tasting by a jury of chefs -- the ultimate test of their ability to execute their craft, with prize money, international acclaim, and national pride on the line.

Surprisingly, although American cuisine now rates among the best in the world, a U.S. team has never finished among the top three at this "Olympics of Food." In 2008, a triumvirate of culinary figures -- Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jérôme Bocuse -- raised unprecedented support and awareness for the American effort. This is their story, and the story of the team that competed for the United States at the 2009 Bocuse d'Or -- what they did, how they did it, and what they learned.

Knives at Dawn chronicles the formation and training of the 2009 American team. Chef Timothy Hollingsworth and his assistant, or commis, Adina Guest, both from The French Laundry in Yountville, California, are the stars of this chefs-as-athletes story. After winning a national team selection event, the pair trained in a specially outfitted facility, while twenty-three competitors -- including a Norwegian who'd been hell-bent to win the Bocuse d'Or since the age of twelve -- rehearsed around the globe. The days of the competition, when they all come together in an arena in Lyon, France, are recounted in riveting detail -- putting you right alongside the action -- as the months of toil and aspiration come to a head in the final hours of fierce cooking, when technical and mental fortitude, split-second decision-making, or a few too many seconds of heat can make all the difference in the world.

Beyond the American team itself, unparalleled behind-the-scenes access allows sports journalist and food writer Andrew Friedman to paint intimate portraits of Boulud and Keller, two of the most influential culinary figures of their generation, as well as of French icon Paul Bocuse, who created the competition more than two decades ago. With its revealing look at chefs and cooks of different generations and nationalities, Knives at Dawn delivers fascinating insights into what drives chefs to cook and compete, both in the Bocuse d'Or and in their own kitchens every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439156841
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	12/01/2009
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	24,075
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Andrew Friedman has made a career of getting to know the heads and hearts of professional cooks and athletes. For more than ten years, Friedman has collaborated with many of the nation’s best and most revered chefs on cookbooks and other writing projects. His writing career began in 1997, when Alfred Portale, asked him to collaborate on the Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. The book received wide acclaim and since then he has worked as a cookbook collaborator on more than twenty projects, helping a number of the nation’s best chefs (Alfred Portale, David Waltuck, Tom Valenti, and many others) share their unique culinary viewpoints with readers.  As coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Breaking Back, the memoir of American tennis star James Blake, he took readers inside an athlete’s mind during training and competition, and he does the same as a frequent contributor to Tennis Magazine. In KNIVES AT DAWN: The American Team and the Bocuse d’Or 2009, Friedman combines these two personal passions to tell the story of the premier cooking competition in the world. Friedman has contributed articles to O—The Oprah Magazine and other publications and websites. He has been profiled in The New York Daily News and New York Magazine, and interviewed for, or featured in articles in, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR’s Taste of the Nation and WOR Radio’s Food Talk. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s “La Technique” cooking program. He lives in New York City with his family.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

ONE OF THE HARSH REALITIES OF EVERY CHEF’S LIFE IS THAT, AT the end of each day, he will be judged.

In many respects this is unfair, because the food in most restaurants, even the most eye-popping, palate-dazzling, wallet-busting cuisine, is more complex than all but the most knowledgeable diners can realize or appreciate. Just about anything served in high-caliber establishments is the product of hours—if not days—of effort, the culmination of the strivings of at least a handful of people, and up to dozens: fish, meats, and produce selected in consultation with farmers, fishermen, and artisans; long-simmered stocks, peeled and shaped vegetables, and minced herbs generated by the unsung morning crew; sauces, condiments, purees, and garnishes fashioned by the cooks themselves in the hours before lunch or dinner

Members of a kitchen brigade bring years of hard-won knowledge to bear every time they strap on an apron. But there’s no telling what might happen in those dizzying, adrenaline-fueled afternoons and evenings when the components of a dish are fired (cooked or reheated), seasoned, and brought together. Much has to go right for success; much less need go awry to qualify as failure. It’s like that old saw about the Central Intelligence Agency: their daily triumphs are unknown; only their miscues draw criticism. Chefs and their colleagues spend every moment of their working lives swinging from one precarious task to the next: a surfeit of salt and a sauce will diminish rather than enhance all that it touches; a minute too little in the sizzle of a sautÉ pan and a breast of chicken will be worse than imperfect—it will be a health hazard.

And yet, to those who keep chefs in business, none of that matters. From neighborhood eateries to Michelin-ordained destinations, the moment of truth is brutally simple: the final product is presented, a few ounces framed within the confines of a plate or bowl. Fork or spoon is lifted. Food meets palate. Judgment is rendered.

IN LIGHT OF THIS inescapable truth, one might wonder why a chef would throw his toque into the ring of the Bocuse d’Or, the most prestigious cooking competition in the world, and invite the ultimate moment of judgment. In preparation for this literal trial by fire, which has been staged in Lyon, France, every other year since its founding in 1987, candidates devote months and sometimes years to rehearsing an elaborate culinary routine in order to meet the contest’s Everest-like challenge: transform a set of assigned proteins (chef-speak for fish and meats), plus whatever supporting ingredients the chefs like, into intricate, impeccably cooked compositions in five and a half grueling hours. Just before time is up, they arrange their creations on two enormous platters—one showcasing their fish and shellfish handiwork, the other their mastery of meat. An international panel of judges scores the visual presentations, then the chefs plate the food and the jury digs in for the most important evaluation: taste. There are no elimination rounds, no time to ease into the rigors of competition: the candidates get one shot to cook and present their creations, and the judges who determine their fate have roughly five minutes to taste and consider it. In the Bocuse d’Or’s current form, twenty-four teams (each comprising a chef and a commis, or assistant) compete; the only thing they know for certain when they begin is that three of them will emerge with precious medals, while the others will slink home empty-handed.

Despite those odds, the Bocuse d’Or draws professionals, many from top kitchens who already toil in pressure-cooker environments, subsist on precious little sleep, and subject themselves to dozens, even hundreds, of verdicts every working day. Any number of clichÉs may explain the appeal of the Bocuse d’Or: Chefs love a challenge! Chefs are competitive! Chefs are masochists! All are appealing, but none fits the entire field. Just as people get into cooking for different reasons, there’s no single motive for pursuing this culinary Holy Grail.

Candidates are philosophically unified, however, when they come out on the other side. “I learned a lot about myself” is perhaps the most common sentence uttered by those who have vied for the Bocuse d’Or when asked to evaluate their experience. This doesn’t surprise Roland Henin, who coached Team USA at the 2009 edition. “Competition doesn’t form character,” Henin is fond of saying. “Competition reveals character.”

An American team has competed at every Bocuse d’Or, but the United States has not yet reached the elusive podium where gold, silver, and bronze medalists are bathed in a light storm of glitter and flashbulbs. In 2008, a triumvirate of culinary figures—Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and JÉrÔme Bocuse—raised unprecedented support and awareness for the American enterprise. This is their story, and the story of the team that competed for the United States at the 2009 Bocuse d’Or: what they did, how they did it, and what they learned.

TIMOTHY HOLLINGSWORTH, CHEF DE cuisine at Thomas Keller’s landmark restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, calls the highest state of kitchen being The Dance. It’s a phrase he learned from Keller himself, described in the restaurant’s employee manual as “the way each of us interacts with the other … crucial in the flow of a great kitchen.”

The Dance, as Hollingsworth interprets it, can take many forms: there’s the synchronicity of a kitchen brigade firing on all cylinders, the cooks complementing—if not actually completing—each other’s tasks: picking up food, plating food, sometimes even cooking food for the person next to them; it can, and should, look like a naturally occurring phenomenon, but is achieved only with great and sustained effort.

There’s also an individual Dance, in which a cook experiences the exhilaration of peak performance, operating on pure instinct, all of his senses integrated seemingly without the middleman of a brain: preparations are stirred, sniffed, adjusted, tossed, approved, plated, and then forgotten as he undertakes the next order. Hollingsworth likens this iteration of The Dance to the quintessential image of a football running back, the ball clutched tightly to his chest, charging past linesmen, spinning and weaving his way around or through an onslaught of defenders. In movies, that moment is often depicted in slow motion—the way it may feel to the athlete, and the only way for an outsider to fully appreciate its intricacies—but time is actually moving faster, as the running back makes a series of nanosecond decisions and infinitesimal adjustments.

Hollingsworth regularly attains The Dance at The French Laundry. But on January 28, 2009, at the Bocuse d’Or, the most pressure-filled day of his young life, Hollingsworth wasn’t dancing. He moved with assurance, grace even, but any co-worker would recognize that he wasn’t swaying, or ever so slightly swaggering, as he moved from one side of the kitchen to the other, the way he did when he was in the zone. He wasn’t quite lost in his work, wasn’t flowing naturally from one movement to the next. Instead, he seemed to be thinking about the long list of tasks before him, whether alternating avocado and diced-shrimp shingles atop a rectangle of puff pastry or overlaying a sheet of poached cod mousse with pureed scallop roe.

Hollingsworth was cooking in a box—a three by six-meter kitchen, one of a dozen such culinary cubicles erected in a row, like laboratory pods, for the Bocuse d’Or. He and his commis (assistant), Adina Guest, a fellow employee from TheFrench Laundry, were cooking in front of several hundred frenzied spectators and the noise was deafening, the crowd separated into cheering sections for each of the twelve nations competing on this day; the one he couldn’t shut out was the melodic chant of the Spanish contingent—“OlÉ. OlÉ. OlÉ. OlÉ.”—which he misheard as a taunt meant just for him: “No Way. No Way. No Way. No Way.”

Hollingsworth had managed to contend well enough with all of this until four hours into the five-hour-and-thirty-five-minute marathon. That was about the time that he realized he was in the midst of what he would, by day’s end, describe as the “hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

His fish platter—which would display his cod centerpiece and three elaborately composed garnishes—was due in the window in just a few minutes, whereupon it would be whisked away and paraded before, then tasted by, a dozen judges from around the world; then he’d have thirty-five minutes to get his other platter ready for the twelve chefs charged with appraising the meat dishes.

“Are the custards ready?” he asked Guest.

“No, Chef.”

On the other side of the window, the team’s coach, Roland Henin—in his mid-sixties, a veteran culinary competitor and coach, and mentor of Hollingsworth’s chef, Thomas Keller—looked on, hoping for the best, but keenly aware that the team, which had been looking pretty good up until then, was teetering on the brink between triumph and, if not disaster, at least disappointment.

Hollingsworth stopped for a moment to administer an internal pep talk. The phrase that came to mind had great meaning for him. It was the one he used when he found himself in the weeds at The French Laundry, the one that had spurred him to success on any number of previous occasions. But he didn’t think about the past. He didn’t think about anything, really. He just said to himself, instinctively, “Okay, Tim, let’s go.”

© 2009 Andrew Friedman

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The book is infused with the muscular, meticulous gusto of a sportswriter covering the Olympics. Edge-of-your-seat food writing of the highest caliber." —-Kirkus Starred Review

Editorial Reviews

Every two years, chefs from around the world gather to compete in the Bocuse d'Or, a grueling cooking competition that gives participants just five and a half hours to prepare a full menu of elaborate fish and meat dishes (with their own choice of supporting ingredients). As the 2009 contest drew near, restaurateurs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller were determined the U.S. would send a team that could finally bring back a medal; Friedman (Breaking Back) follows the quest through the selection of two cooks from Keller's French Laundry and stays with them until the final showdown. It's great fly-on-the-wall reporting that captures both the obsessive, perfectionist mindset of great chefs and their creative spontaneity under pressure—as small a matter as the sudden, intuitive selection of celeriac as an ingredient in a tart becomes a moment of high drama. The pace is relentless, but Friedman's observations of Timothy Hollingworth and his assistant, Adina Guest, as they struggle to rise to the challenge will have foodies riveted all the way through. Even those who don't care about the intricate details of a nine-course meal could learn something about entrepreneurship and project management from this story. (Dec. 1)

Publishers Weekly

A vibrant portrait of the world's most significant cooking competition, the Bocuse d'Or, in Lyon, France. Food and tennis writer Friedman (co-author, with Pino Luongo: Dirty Dishes: A Restaurateur's Story of Passion, Pain, and Pasta, 2008, etc.) dynamically illustrates the colorful personalities, ego-battering conflicts, career-defining aspirations, politicking, precision planning, naked missteps and the final judges' decisions regarding the 2009 U.S. team's shot for the culinary gold medal. "Competition doesn't form character . . . Competition reveals character," says Roland Henin, the U.S. coach, and the characters exposed beneath the stress of the 2009 competition are, in Friedman's hands, considerable. Henin chose a triumvirate of legendary chefs as his leadership-Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud and Jerome Bocuse, son of Paul Bocuse, founder of the Bocuse d'Or-and trained his team in a stage kitchen mock-up in California. The author follows Keller, Boulud and Bocuse as they assemble and obsessively train the strongest team of American chefs the 22-year-old competition has seen. Timothy Hollingsworth and Adina Guest, both veterans of Keller's restaurant The French Laundry, prepared painstakingly for what Hollingsworth would later describe as "the hardest thing he's ever done." Friedman expertly builds the dramatic tension to the surprising conclusion. Like the raucous Bocuse d'Or itself, the writing is simultaneously athletic and infused with a gastronome's passion. Snappy, well-timed dialogue keeps the narrative simmering briskly. Precisely rendered portrayals of ingredients, dishes, kitchen jargon, exotic foreign locales and the politics of international cuisine are aptlybalanced with plenty of insider detail and mainstream accessibility. The book is infused with the muscular, meticulous gusto of a sportswriter covering the Olympics. Edge-of-your-seat food writing of the highest caliber.

Kirkus Reviews

"The book is infused with the muscular, meticulous gusto of a sportswriter covering the Olympics. Edge-of-your-seat food writing of the highest caliber." —Kirkus Starred Review

From the Publisher