Toqueland

Bocuse d’Or USA 2010: The Journey to Lyon Starts Now

What We Saw, and Learned, in Hyde Park This Weekend

 

A platter is paraded before the judges at the CIA on February 6, 2010.

(photo copyright Andrew Friedman)

It was a successful weekend for the Bocuse d’Or USA at the Culinary Institute of America.  Team USA was selected; chef demos, panel discussions and book signings were packed; and great food was served.  Herewith, a few observations and reflections on the happenings:

The Bocuse d’Or USA Has Cause for Optimism.  Journalists don’t get to taste the food at the Bocuse d’Or (see below for more on this), but the thing that stands out to me above all else this weekend is how very Bocuse d’Or-appropriate Eleven Madison Park’s James Kent’s food (his meat dish is pictured to the right) looked.  With a year to revise, tweak, hone, and practice for the Main Event in Lyon, I truly believe the US has a shot at the podium with Kent and his commis Tom Allan at the rudder.  Moreover, these guys are personally psyched to make a go of it, and the value of that cannot be overstated. 

Team EMP at the Bocuse d'Or USA:

Commis Tom Allan, EMP General Manager Will Guidara,

Bocuse d'Or USA champ James Kent, and EMP Exec Chef Daniel Humm

(photo copyright Andrew Friedman)
 

Similarly, I was impressed that, on the whole, the candidates’ food looked much more Bocuse-appropriate than did most of the food dished out by candidates at the 2008 Bocuse d’Or USA at Epcot.  Generally speaking, there was more “work” on the individual garnishes and they were scaled down and executed with more finesse.  (Flip side: a number of judges told me that some of the dishes didn’t taste as good as they looked.) There’s also clearly a growing pool of talent interested in investing the time and energy it takes to pursue this culinary holy grail: with chef-candidates on hand who work or have worked at 11 Madison Park, The Modern, Charlie Trotter’s, and Daniel, plus a number of candidates who had competed in either the Bocuse d’Or USA or American Culinary Federation events in the past, it was a good showing.  It was also nice to see past competitors such as Hung Hyung and Kevin Sbraga in the house to lend their support. 

Setting the Event at the Culinary Institute was a Brilliant Decision.  The Bocuse d’Or USA 2008—the first time the event was under the auspices of Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Jerome Bocuse—was held at Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida.  It was well attended and a helluva lot of fun (e.g., Chef’s Beach Barbecue on Friday night), but there were no national journalists in attendance, other than yours truly, there to write my book, and Food & Wine’s Dana Cowin, who was on hand to present awards, not report on the happenings.  This year’s CIA Hyde Park location, just 2 hours north of New York City, made it easy for the likes of Mimi Sheraton and (from Boston) Corby Kummer to be on hand.   The location likely also inspired more than a few future candidates from the student body, many of whom were getting their first look at a competition on this scale.  Perhaps a New York City location would have attracted more “civilians” and even more media, but it felt right that it be at the CIA—a spectacular facility with all the necessary kitchens and talent on hand to pull off the weekend with considerable aplomb.

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. 

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.