Toqueland

Bocuse d’Or USA 2010: Hanging with the Big Dogs

Andrew Weiss Likes Flying Under the Radar

 

[Between now and the Bocuse d’Or USA team-selection finals on February 6, 2010, Toqueland will profile as many of the twelve candidates as possible. For profiles of the other candidates, click here.]

Nothing to Lose: Andrew Weiss is Ready for His Second Bocuse d'Or USA
(photo Courtesy Stacey Weiss)

 

A few weeks back, when the Bocuse d’Or USA committee announced a dozen finalists for the upcoming team-selection event at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, I found myself Googling around frantically for something, anything, about Andrew Weiss, the Las Vegas resident who had made the cut.  I came up empty, and the post I threw up that day featured an apology to Weiss for the complete lack of intel on him. 

Well, Weiss and I caught up by phone the other day, and it turns out that he has been down the Bocuse d’Or road before: he was a semifinalist for the Bocuse d'Or USA in 2006, and applied but was not chosen for, the 2008 competition at Epcot—the first time the event was staged under the auspices of the new guard of Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jerome Bocuse.  (Counting Weiss, about half of the field of Hyde Park finalists has competed—either as chef or commis—in a previous Bocuse d’Or USA, which is intriguing.)

There’s no point beating around the bush: If you judge chefs by their resumes and current place of employment, Weiss is a decided underdog, an unknown 28-year old native of Amherst, NY, who studied food service management instead of the culinary arts, whose first restaurant job was in a Wendy's, and who's spent much of his formative cooking years knocking around from one job to another along the East Coast, essentially learning on the job. 

But what Weiss lacks in Michelin-star credentials, he more than makes up for in chutzpa, determination, and success.  At just 28, he has owned and run his own catering company, overseen a $3 million restaurant, and staged with Charlie Trotter, as well as with Daniel Scannell, a Certified Master Chef and culinary competition veteran who designed the platters for Team USA 2009 and has competed in the International Culinary Olympics. 

I really enjoyed my chat with Weiss because I quickly got the impression that he was something of a maverick.  I hope if he's reading this that he'll take it as a compliment that he reminded me more of the cooks I've known than the chefs.  Part of this was his relative youth.  But more than that, he just seemed like a hardcore whisk to me, somebody who loves being in the weeds on a Saturday night and living to tell the tale.  He also boasts a cook's unmistakable sense of humor; for example, he describes the first restaurant where he worked as an executive chef, Gadsby's Tavern, as "a historical building in Alexandria, Virginia, where George Washington and his cronies had dinner."  George Washington and his cronies?  I can just hear the kitchen crew breaking up over that one as the front of the house gang somberly described the eatery's heritage to the touristas in the dining room.

Three weeks ago, Weiss took on his latest job, as executive chef of The Lake Club at Lake Las Vegas, a private social club comprising about 255 members, many of whom don’t actually live in Vegas.  So, despite having a new clientele to please, Weiss has the necessary time to plan for Hyde Park.

Weiss first became interested in the Bocuse d’Or when he saw one of Canadian Nick Versteeg’s documentaries about the competition on Food Network.  It appealed to what he describes as his perpetual hunt for "the next adventure.  I don't like to stop... I like to push myself, see what I can truly do with food.  I don’t like to settle. I try to push the boundaries, try something ... that most chefs are too busy or afraid to try.”

Since 2006, Weiss has been lying in the tall grass waiting for his next crack at Bocuse d'Or glory: he has been keeping notes and renderings of ideas, garnishes, and other preparations, both on his computer or in a notebook.   And he’ll take inspiration wherever he can find it; he’s even scribbled down concepts he’s seen on billboards.  As of last week, he was still tweaking one garnish for his salmon platter and one for his lamb, but otherwise had his recipes locked and loaded and was shopping for suitable platters to display his creations come February.

For whatever the reason, Weiss has decided to cut his own idiosyncratic path through the culinary jungle.  He hasn't gravitated toward the same kitchens that his peers would kill to get into, and he seems to relish his outsider status.  Of the coming challenge in Hyde Park, where he'll cook against sous chefs from Eleven Madison Park, The Modern, Charlie Trotter, and other top kitchens, he said that he wants to "prove I belong in the same realm as the other chefs competeing, that I can hang with the big dogs."

I’d never heard a chef use the phrase "hang with" before, but it comes up a lot in the other world I write about:  tennis.  Young players who find themselves on a court with a top player for the first time use it to describe whether or not they can keep up.  For example:  “I got to hit with Roger Federer the other day.  I was able to hang with him, but I always knew he had another gear where he could just put me away.”

I asked Weiss about this and, sure enough, he played high school tennis.  He started at a late age (around 12 or 13) and went up against some of the Mid Atlantic’s top juniors.  “I held my own,” he says proudly.  “I competed well with these tennis prodigies.” 

It’s the same pride that motivates him to go up against the thoroughbreds who he’ll be facing in Hyde Park:  “Of course I see myself as an underdog,” he says.  “Daniel Humm's [sous chef], the Gabriel Kreuther guy, Trotter’s …they have the availability to get these great ingredients, to have these restaurants lend their equipment, to give them a leg up over everybody else.  I’m in a small kitchen.  I have to go purchase my own items. I am an underdog.  It motivates me to show up everybody else, to show that a little guy from a little club [can make it there]…”

The Bocuse d’Or is one part cooking and one part sports, and by the time we were done talking, I saw Weiss as the classic sports protagonist: the Bocuse d’Or USA’s own Rocky Balboa.  I’ve never tasted the man’s food, so don’t know if he has the goods.  But it’s no small thing for an unknown from Vegas to step into the ring with fine dining’s Apollo Creeds.  In many ways, he’ll be attempting the same brand of improbable victory in Hyde Park that Team USA tries to pull off in Lyon every other year. 

Of course, that larger triumph has not yet come to pass.  But for Team USA, as for a young, unheralded chef from Las Vegas, hope springs eternal...

-Andrew

The Possibly Compromised Critic: Perilla Restaurant (New York City)

Harold Dieterle Hits His Stride

[Note: The Possibly Compromised Critic moniker indicates that I'm reviewing/profiling a place where I'm a friend of the house (i.e., known to the chef, owner, and/or assorted waiters).  It's a full-disclosure tag that lets you know that I wasn't there as an anonymous diner.  BUT, when I don the PCC cape, it is because I believe readers will enjoy a similar experience to mine, based on the professionalism of the people involved. - AF]

 

Harold Dieterle, Executive Chef-Co-Owner of Perilla

A few weeks back, I was watching one of those season-expanding episodes that Bravo always airlifts into Top Chef just before finale time.  It was the one in which Season 5 cheftestant Fabio invited a bunch of past competitors and winners to a house, then made them cook dinner, then almost goaded Season 2 veteran Marcel into a throwdown. 

Seated at the end of that tense dinner table, was a friend of mine, Harold Dieterle, the first-ever Top Chef winner.  I've only known Harold since 2004, but I have a bond with him that I don't have with very many other people: We've cooked together. 

Now, I've never worked in a professional kitchen, but five years ago, Jimmy Bradley and I were writing his The Red Cat Cookbook together and decided to test the recipes ourselves.  (There was no virtue in this; we were trying to save money by not hiring a tester.)  To help us out, Jimmy tapped Harold, who at the time was sous chef to Brian Bistrong at the Red Cat's sister restaurant The Harrison.  (Brian has since moved on to Braeburn.) 

It all began in a basement kitchen...

 
And so, every other Wednesday night, we'd convene in the basement prep kitchen of The Red Cat, armed with rough-draft recipes based on interviews, divvy them up, and cook. We knocked down about 8 to 10 recipes each session, tasting each other's dishes as they were done to determine whether or not a dreaded "retest" was called for.  At the end of the night, we'd gather in Jimmy's office and the guys would verbally share their notes with me as I furiously scribbled on the drafts. 

I became a big fan of Harold's in those sessions.  Unlike many chefs who have made the quantum leap to television, Harold is in life as he was on the screen: an unassuming, head-down, professional. He was also exceedingly generous: I'm a good enough home cook, but have no illusions about the limits of my ability.  Nonetheless, Harold went out of his way to compliment my cooking. Two weeks after I first made Jimmy's Linguine with Clams, Pancetta, Butternut Squash, and Wilted Greens (sounds nuts, came out great), Harold came bounding into the kitchen for our next session, shook my hand, and the first thing he said was, "I'm still thinking about that squash pasta!"  He was also a good and patient teacher; when testing in professional kitchens, I'm often loathe to ask a stranger-cook for advice on the rare occasion that I need to execute an unfamiliar technique, because I don't want to be ribbed about it for the next four months (what can I tell you, I have the thin skin of a non-professional). But that wall came right down with Harold.

One night, Jimmy and I were talking outisde The Red Cat (I lived on the block at the time so we often found ourselves spontaneously kibitzing out there), and he told me that he thought Harold was going to be leaving The Harrison soon.  It was just a vibe, but he had a well-honed instinct for such things. 

"Where's he going?" I asked.

"I don't know, but I'm sure he's going to open his own place," Jimmy said.  He looked off into the distance, thought for a moment, then nodded manfully as if recognizing that some cosmic justice was at hand.  "He's ready."

Jimmy was half right. 

Bocuse d'Or USA: The Next Generation

US Finalists Announced, and What We Learned at the Press Conference

(From time to time, Toqueland will opine on events and developments related to the Bocuse d'Or USA and the American drive toward the Bocuse d'Or 2011, based on my research for Knives at Dawn: The American Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d'Or Competition. - AF)

Keller, Bocuse, and Boulud will return to Lyon with a new team in 2011.

At a press conference held this afternoon in the private dining room at Restaurant Daniel, the finalists for the Bocuse d'Or USA--the upcoming event at which the American team for the world's most prestigious cooking competition will be selected--were announced.  Beyond providing factoids about the finalists, the presser was a window into where the Bocuse d'Or USA is in its evolution since the new guard of Daniel Boulud (Chairman), Thomas Keller (President), and Jerome Bocuse (Vice President) took over the cause in 2008.  Rather than just list the finalists (an analysis of whom follows after the break), here's what we learned from yesterday's event:

Show of Force

The Bocuse d'Or USA had an unmistakable message for the nation, and the world yesterday:  We are united, and everybody's coming to the party.  Up on the dais with Boulud, Jerome Bocuse, and (2007 candidate) Gavin Kaysen, were the Beard Foundation's Susan Ungaro, Culinary Institute of America President Dr. Tim Ryan (who will host the team selection event at the CIA at Hyde Park), and Bocuse d'Or USA Advisory Board members Alain Sailahc and Laurent Tourondel.  (Another Advisory Board member, Corton's Paul Liebrandt, just off a delayed flight from Chicago, arrived after the festivities had begun and politely took a seat at the back of the room.)  The message was unmistakable: all of these people made time to be here for for this; you can be sure they'll make the time to buttress the team with advice and support as it conceives and rehearses the cooking of its food and readies itself for battle.

Time is on Their Side

An undercurrent of the presentation was that, unlike in 2009, the US has plenty of time to prepare for the Bocuse d'Or 2011 and plans on using it with some good, ol' fashioned Obama-style deliberation.  Is there a coach in place?  Nope, they'll wait until a candidate is picked in February and involve that person in the decision.  (Good idea.)  Where will the candidate train?  Well, the CIA seems like an ideal spot, but they'll wait and see where the candidate comes from and evaluate the geographic and scheduling landscape then.  Who are the judges for the American finals?  We're taking this one step at a time.  Some might call this dithering; I call it prudent and patient.  Better to delay decisions than to make them prematurely and have to backtrack.

Thomas Keller Goes Out on a Limb

Just about everybody involved in the Bocuse d'Or USA, 2009 edition, casually referred to America "bringing home the gold," or "beating the French," or "touching the podium" (i.e., winning gold, silver or bronze).  Among a few notable exceptions to this was the exceedingly cautious and considered Thomas Keller, who never referred to bringing home the gold.  In fact, at a candidate briefing held at the French Culinary Institute in 2008, he very pointedly said, "I don't want to say winning the Bocuse d'Or [in 2009] but in our progression to win the Bocuse d'Or one day."  Well, Keller couldn't be in New York today, but he did send along a written statement which Boulud read.  A lot of it was by the numbers, but toward the end, Keller referred to "realizing our goal of being on the podium in 2011."  I wrote a word next to that segment in in my notebook:  "Woah!"  The importance of Keller's committing those words to paper cannot be overstated.  He simply doesn't say such things causally.  These guys mean business.

(Keep reading for the Candidate Breakdown...)

Bocuse d'Or USA 2010: Dear Candidates...

Unsolicited Advice for the Finalists on the Road to Hyde Park

(From time to time, Toqueland will opine on events and developments related to the Bocuse d'Or USA and the American drive toward the Bocuse d'Or 2011, based on my research for Knives at Dawn: The American Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d'Or Competition.  Today, some thoughts on how the candidates -- who will be announced later this afternoon -- should prepare for the Bocuse d'Or USA. - AF)

[Note: This post was revised at 8:30pm, 12/7/09, to reflect changes in format for the Hyde Park event that were announced in a Bocuse d'Or press conference this afternoon:  There will be just one round of competition in February, and it will involve both a fish and meat platter.]

Dear Chefs,

Congratulations!  You've made the first cut.  You and your commis will have a shot at representing the United States at the next Bocuse d'Or in January 2011.  What an opportunity!  Take a moment to savor the news, then start thinking about a plan of attack.  Here are 5 tips for how you might go about it:

1.  Get to Work!  The team that wins the American team selection event in February will have just under a year to train for the international Bocuse d'Or in Lyon in January 2011.  That's almost four times as long as Timothy Hollingsworth had to prepare for last year's competition, and he and his commis, Adina Guest, managed to place sixth, just three spots short of the podium.  The bad news is that you have a scant two months to get ready for the showdown at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park...less time than last year's contenders had to preapre for the team trials at Epcot.  The salt in this wound?  One of those months is December, the epicenter of the holiday season, the worst four weeks of the year for a chef to focus on anything other than his or her restaurant.

While this quirk of timing was almost certainly dictated by other factors and considerations (e.g, working things out with the CIA, finding a weekend when all of the players would be available), there's an inadvertent shrewdness to it: the candidates most driven to succeed will show up ready to play.  So, break out the Red Bull and skip that beer (or two or three) you enjoy after service every night.  Work late, overnight, on your day off, or first thing in the morning, but get going as soon as possible, and build momentum right through the New Year.  You simply can't make up for lost time, no matter how good the reasons may have been.

Action Item: Find a way to start training... now.  If you want this, don't give yourself the opportunity to makes excuses later.

Dynamite Boy

Char No 4's Chef Matt Greco Had to Come to NYC to Find His Inner Texan

Matt Greco at the Whiskey-Obsessed Bar at Char No 4 

At some level, menus are autobiographies.  Scan a chef's current offerings, and you'll find clues about where he's lived, who he's worked for, and the road he took to get where he is today.  Put another way: who chefs are on the plate reflects who they are in life.

Matt Greco has been the chef at Char No 4, the refined barbecue restaurant on Brooklyn, NY's burgeoning Smith Street strip, since the joint opened in fall 2008.  How he got there is a story of self-discovery that speaks to this fundamental truth.

Greco grew up living a double life in and around Houston, Texas, in the wildly different homes of his divorced parents. Living with his mother in the suburbs of Houston, in the affluent area near NASA, Greco discovered a Texas that non-Texans rarely key into, virtually indistinguishable from other American suburbs.  In Greco's community, the stereotypical Texan--the modern-day cowboy of pop culture and presidential politics--was a reviled stereotype.  When comedian Jeff Foxworthy came on the scene, he and his friends all hated him on sight.

But on weekends with his dad, Greco lived that "other" Texas life.  His father, a contractor by trade, was a weekend cowpoke who participated in small-circuit rodeos and pushed the same hobbies on his son, though young Matt didn't talk about his adventures when Monday rolled around. "My friends would have made fun of me if they knew on my weekends I was riding horses or roping," he says.  Another point of distinction between Greco's two homes: Where his mother was an accomplished home cook who favored sophisticated cookery (her apricot-glazed Cornish hen recipe was published in Martha Stewart Living), on Sundays, he and his dad built a big pit and barbecued. 

Comments? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Comments!

But We Would Love to Hear from You, and Will Publish the Best Thoughts, Feedback, and even Vitriol

 Don't get upset, just email your comments...

I've heard from a couple of people in the days since launching this site, and the bloggers among them had the same pressing question: Where are the freakin' comments?

For a number of reasons, I decided not to enable comments on this site.  First and foremost, my obsessive tendencies would have me checking them incessantly.  Secondly, and more importantly, most bloggers I know won't admit this, but they hate comments.  You spend a couple of hours chiseling away at an idea, throw it out there into the universe, and moments later some anonymous bomb thrower lobs a lit stick of dynamite your way. Of course, this can be diluted when enough devoted readers participate (a few Mad Men-obsessed sites ate up good chunks of my Mondays for the past several months),creating a virtual Algonquin Table of wit and wisdom. 

If such a following develops here, maybe I'll hang out the comments shingle.  Here's hoping that's sooner rather than later.

All of that said, I would actually love to hear your comments, and you can send them along to: andrew@toqueland.com.  (There's a link in the left-hand column that'll be there all the time.)  The most compelling will be published as posts of their own, with a response/comment from me.  It's the format adopted by one of my favorite political bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, and it makes for a fun component of the mix on his site.

So, please write, and write often.  I'll do my best to respond to all emails privately, and post the best ones publicly. 

The Bocuse d'Or USA announces its semifinalists on Monday afternoon--I'll be back with some related posts then, as well as the chef profile promised the other day. 

-Andrew

Bocuse d'Or USA: The Once and Future Candidate?

2008 Finalist Percy Whatley Wants Another Shot at the Title

Percy Whatley, looking fresh and rested ... for now.

[Update: Feb 4, 2010:  This piece was written prior to the finalist-selection announcement on December 7, 2009.  Whatley was selected and has been training intensely.  A summary of his ramp-up, with food pictures, can be found here.)

Applications for candidates who want to vie for the opportunity to represent the United States at the next Bocuse d'Or, in January 2011, were due yesterday, and the Bocuse d'Or USA committee will announce the sixteen semifinalist teams, each comprising a chef and a commis, or assistant, on Monday, December 7. (The teams will face off at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, NY, in February 2010, where the American team will be selected.) It's unlikely we'll learn more about the candidate pool until then, but there's one thing everybody already knows: Top Chef's Kevin Gillespie has been awarded direct entry to the American competition based on his winning a Bocuse d'Or-themed challenge on the show a few weeks back.  And here's a piece of news: At least one finalist from 2008 is looking to return to the field of battle, and his name is Percy Whatley.

Whatley, executive chef of the Ahwanhee in Yosemite, California, threw his toque into the ring of the Bocuse d'Or USA when it was held at Epcot in 2008. In preparation for that event, Whatley and his commis, Josh Johnson, trained mightily, executing daily five-plus hour practice sessions in the final weeks before the competition.

The result of that hard work and dedication?

Get Yer Knives Out

A New Blog, A New Book, and a Taste of Things to Come 

Welcome, fellow observers of chefs and kitchen culture, to the first post of a new, chef-focused blog, Toqueland. 

Launching a blog feels more momentous than it actually is--how much impact will a blog ultimately have on the world, really?   (Well, Drudge Report almost brought down a president, but that's another story.)

Nonetheless, putting together a blog feels like a big deal. Slapping this thing together, I kept thinking of that iconic moment when MTV went, as they like to say, "on the air for the last time..." 

One giant step for a blogger, one small step for mankind...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For those of you who don't recognize my name, I've spent the better part of the last decade collaborating on cookbooks and other projects with some of our finest chefs (Alfred Portale, Laurent Tourondel, Michelle Bernstein, and David Waltuck, among many others).  This week, my first solo, reported book makes its debut: It's called Knives at Dawn, and it's the exclusive, behind-the-scenes story of the team that competed for the United States at the 2009 Bocuse d'Or, commonly referred to as The Olympics of Food, and also the subject of a recent Top Chef episode.

 
What I hope to accomplish with this blog is to bring whatever insights I've amassed over years of collaborating on cookbooks and other food-related projects to bear in looking at chefs, both up-and-coming and established, and that's also what I've tried to do in Knives: in addition to recounting the story of how the Bocuse d'Or USA (2009 vintage) came together, the book offers intimate looks at chefs and cooks, from Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller to freshly minted French Laundry chef de cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth (who headed up Team USA) and his commis, Adina Guest, also from The French Laundry.  Knives at Dawn also offers some rare footage of Keller's mentor Roland Henin, who coached the US Team, and a non-chef who played a major role, Jerome Bocuse, son of the event's founder, French legend Paul Bocuse.

But the meat of the book is the in-depth tracking of how the food Team USA presented came together--from Hollingsworth's first ideas to the ones that ultimately made the cut--and then how the team rehearsed and refined their ability to cook those dishes under pressure.  Along the way, they receive feedback from chefs including Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Hollingsworth's predecessor, 2007 US candidate Gavin Kaysen, and those interatctions are presented in great detail.  For a writer who's spent a lot of time in a lot of kitchens, it was among the most fascinating cooking and thinking I've ever been privvy to, and I can only hope it's just as comeplling on the page.

Thomas Keller gives feedback to Timothy Hollingsworth and Adina Guest.

Along the road to the Bocuse d'Or, there are some diversions, most of them during the two weeks the team spent in Lyon, adjusting to jet lag in the days before the competition: like the impromptu dinner at Restaurant Paul Bocuse on America's Inauguration Day, and the first meal the team enjoyed on French soil, at the home of Daniel Boulud's parents, which also happens to be the site of the original Cafe Boulud, the homestead where Boulud himself grew up. 

Daniel Boulud's father, Julien Boulud, entertains Timothy Hollingsworth.

Of course, the book culiminates with the competition itself.  I'm guessing that if you're reading this, you already know the outcome, but I don't want to kick things off with a spoiler, so I'll leave it there.  Suffice it to say there are as many ups and downs possible during a five-hour contest as there are in an entire career.

 

 

Adina Guest, Timothy Hollingsworth, and Roland Henin,

moments after the competition in Lyon.

 

I'll be back soon with an interview with one of the applicants to the 2010 Bocuse d'Or USA competition, and follow that up in a day or two with a profile of one of my favorite chefs in New York City, who happens to ply his trade in Brooklyn.  From there ... well, we'll see where things take us.

 

So, thanks for visiting Toqueland.  I hope you enjoy it, and look forward to welcoming you back again soon. 

 

- Andrew

 

 

PS  I'll be talking about Knives at Dawn and signing books at 7pm tonight (Tuesday, December 1st) at Borders Books at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Cirlce.  Drop by if you have a chance.