Toqueland

Top Chef's Kevin Gillespie Out of Bocuse d'Or USA Competition

Replaced with Jim Burke of James Restaurant in Philadelphia?

I was making a routine visit to the Bocuse d'Or USA website and noticed that while there are still a dozen candidates listed there, Kevin Gillespie, the recent Top Chef finalist who won his berth in the US finals on the show, has disappeared from the list while Jim Burke, executive chef/owner of James restaurant in Philadelphia--who was not on the original roster--has been added.  I've confirmed with a rep for the Bocuse d'Or USA that GIllespie is out, but am awaiting further details.

To be honest -- although I have no idea what the circumstances are yet -- I don't find this to be terribly shocking news as I always wondered how Gillespie, who basically had to earn his spot to avoid elimination in another contest, was going to find the time and motivation to properly compete at this event.  If he dropped out to make room for a more Bocuse-passionate candidate, it might have actually been a noble gesture, as strange as that may sound.

Update (1:03 pm/Jan 22) - A rep for the Bocuse d'Or USA committee says that Gillespie withdrew due to a conflict with Bravo.  (Obviously Bravo airs Top Chef, on which Gillespie won the spot, but the rep says it's a matter of a time conflict. No further comment/information was offered.)

Update #2 (1:20pm)  Gillespie's spokesperson Melissa Libby just got in touch to give me the story from Gillespie.  "You are one-hundred-percent correct in your suspicion," she said of my theory for the withdrawl (above).  "He didn't have time to prepare, and didn't want to let the country down.  He felt like there was somebody else who deserved that spot. He's a perfectionist and didn't feel like he could do his best with everything going on."  Libby says that Gillespie wrote to the committee, who were gracious, and even offered to let him defer his place until 2013 [by which she meant the 2013 competition in Lyon, the US trials for which would be in 2012].  So will he take them up on the offer, or defer again?  "Absolutely [he'll compete in 2012]!" said Libby.  "He wants to do this.  It's a huge goal of his.  But he didn't want to go in unprepared."

- Andrew

Update (2/7/10):  Read about the winner of the Bocuse d'Or USA, James Kent, here, and see profiles of all twelve candidates here.

Bocuse d'Or USA 2010: "The Stress is a Wonderful Experience"

Luke Bergman Just Wants to Put a Smile on the Judges' Faces

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

Luke Bergman ... doing what he loves most.

(photo courtesy Luke Bergman)

 

There's no shortage of chefs who began cooking in their family's home, but there aren't many who started for reasons as downright noble as those that first pulled The Modern's Luke Bergman into the kitchen.  The Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, native has two younger brothers, one of whom was born with Down's Syndrome.  To help his single, working mother pick up the slack around the house, he learned how to cook for the family.  "The day I turned sixteen," Bergman recounts today, "I had my car, had a credit card to go to grocery store, and right away I was shopping for whole family."

Though it was pragmatism that motivated him initially, Bergman wasn't lacking for kitchen mentors.  His mother was a good cook, and as a young boy he studied her moves around the stovetop.  His grandmother was a culinary Francophile who would go Gallic when she visited from Washington, DC, and he fondly remembers thir housekeeper, Dorris Williams, a Jamaican who schooled him in the flavors and techniques of her homeland, such as how to make jerked meats. 

Bergman wasn't terribly interested in college.  After winning a contest sponsored by the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, he matriculated there.  He attended for four months, while working at La Veranda restaurant in Pompano Beach full time.  His home schooling had served him well--he liked his work more than his classes, but didn't immediately think to become a chef.  (He remembers watching Food Network personalities like Emeril Lagasse, but "nobody knew it was going to be as big as it is now.")

During a family vacation in Colorado, Bergman's mother picked up an air of malaise about her son. 

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Mom, I love cooking," he told her.  "I didn't know I was going to like it so much."  He felt he was learning more at La Veranda than he was in school. 

"I want to go to the best cooking school in America," he told her, referring to the Culinary Institute of America.  (Telling the story today, he says that he "had a vision that I needed to go there.")  She was fully supportive and when they got back to Florida, he withdrew from the Art Institute.  His mother brought him up to New York City and then up to Hyde Park.  A month later, he was enrolled.  "Then it was on," he says.

Bocuse d'Or USA 2010: A Rite of Passage

Eleven Madison Park's James Kent On the Value of Preparing for the Bocuse d'Or

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

  

A Process of Self-Discovery: James Kent in the Kitchen

(photo courtesy James Kent)

I don't have hard numbers to back this up, but I feel confident stating, based on the research for my book Knives at Dawn, that most of the candidates who compete in the Bocuse d'Or are sous chefs. There are good reasons for this: prep and line cooks don't have the experience or sense of culinary self to head up a team (they are appropriately chosen as the commis, or assistant), while full-fledged chefs and executive chefs, generally speaking, can't be spared for the time it takes to prepare and train for the Big Event in Lyon.  (This isn't always the case; there are a few bona fide exec chefs in the mix for Hyde Park, such as John Rellah, Andrew Weiss, Percy Whatley, and Michael Clauss, executive chef of The Daily Planet in Vermont, whom I just interviewed the other day for an upcoming profile.)

Sous chefs occupy a curious position in the professional pecking order.  Many of them have the managerial and expediting chops to be chefs--they do, after all, run kitchens during service--but their own style isn't necessarily formed to the point that they are ready to essay their own menus.  Generally speaking, that's because the food they put out--often for years at a time--is somebody else's.  Even the specials they might devise have to hew to the style of the guy or gal they work for, or else the menu won't fully gel.

James Kent, a sous chef at Eleven Madison Park, is learning what many past Bocuse d'Or candidates have learned--that the Bocuse d'Or offers a valuable exercise in determining where their chef ends and they begin.  For whatever the reason, observers of the Bocuse d'Or will tell you that if you don't cook from the heart in the competition, then your food will suffer.  Accordingly, chef-candidates aren't generally sent into battle with instructions to simply execute food conceived by, say, Daniel Humm, who happens to be a Bocuse d'Or USA advisory board member and Kent's chef at EMP.

And so, on New Year's Day, when Kent cooked the working draft of his Bocuse d'Or USA menu for Humm (for whom he's worked for three years) for the first time, it was a Big Moment.  "This is Chef’s restaurant, and this is Chef’s food," says Kent of the dynamic most days at EMP.  "All of us have our say, but ultimately he’s the one who likes it, or changes it."

Not so on January 1st.