*!Adina, Tim, Roland in window
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By Andrew Friedman, TW Contributing Editor
This being Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., Pete graciously invited me to pop in and say a few words to the Tribe about my forthcoming book Knives at Dawn (Free Press, 2009; hardcover, 320 pages), which tells the story of the US team that competed for the Stars and Stripes at the 2009 Bocuse d’Or, sometimes colloquially referred to as The Olympics of Food. (Fans of the show Top Chef might have seen the Bocuse-themed episode that aired a week ago.)
The rules of the game are deceptively simple: an organizing committee assigns the meats and fish, to which the competitors can add whatever ingredients they like, so long as they work from scratch. On judgment day, the teams cook for five and a half hours, then present two eye-popping platters (one fish and one meat) that are paraded before an international jury, then plated and served to the individual judges. It all takes place over two days, before a stadium packed with rabid fans, not unlike a Davis Cup match, only with twelve countries present instead of two.
The narrative of Knives at Dawn is pretty straightforward: Despite our growing reputation as a culinary leader, the U.S. has never medaled at this event, in part because our candidates haven’t had the same resources as frequent champions like France and Norway, whose teams are so well funded that the teams often take months off from their regular jobs to rehearse their kitchen choreography—all five and a half hours of it—scores of times.
In 2008, the top two chefs in America—Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller—along with Bocuse’s son Jerome, who owns and operates Les Chefs des France restaurant at Epcot, decided to try to change that. You get to be a fly on the wall as this triumvirate comes together to field a team, then watch as that team—a sous chef and a commis (assistant) from The French Laundry—develops and practices the culinary routine it took into battle last January in Lyon.
Cooking is also a solitary pursuit. Books like Kitchen Confidential (of which I am a huge fan), have created the impression that the kitchen is one big playpen, where rough-talkin’ guys and gals swap raunchy jokes while they sling hash, then hit the town and binge drink until sunup. That might be true for some, but the road that gets even those cooks to the stoves is a profoundly long and lonely one—year after year of slowly working their way up—their days and nights spent executing a handful of tasks, or cooking an assigned roster of dishes, over and over, until the brain shuts down and the muscles and instincts take over.
Knives at Dawn opens with a description of “The Dance,” a phrase Keller and his cooks use to describe the highest state of kitchen being. Timothy Hollingsworth, the French Laundry sous chef who headed up Team USA, likens it to the quintessential image of a running back “spinning and weaving his way around or through an onslaught of defenders,” but he could just as easily have compared it to a tennis player, tracking the ball, making lightening quick decisions, and executing strokes honed by a lifetime of repetition.
The cast of characters in Knives at Dawn are training for an international competition, but the irony is that they’ve been training (and in some ways competing) their whole lives. The book shares back stories of all the major characters, from superstars like Thomas Keller to Hollingsworth to his assistant, Adina Guest, a seasoned culinary competitor at age 22.
Each of these people came to the kitchen via his or her own distinct path, but they all have something in common: they sacrificed mightily to get where they are today. One great difference between cooks and tennis players is that there is not—at least not to my knowledge—such as thing as a “cooking parent.” Cooks are cooks because they want to be cooks; more often than not, at least until very recently, their parents would prefer that they did anything else.
If a young man or woman elects to leave home, travel to Europe, and work in a Michelin-starred restaurant for little or no money, he does it for the love of cooking. It’s unimaginable to me that you will ever pick up a chef’s autobiography and see the equivalent of Agassi’s Open mantra, I hate cooking.
Keller’s mentor, Certified Master Chef Roland Henin (no relation to Justine except, perhaps, for my metaphorical purposes), was the coach of the American team, and he shares his personal story in Knives at Dawn. Henin discovered the kitchen in his late teens. A falling out with his father led him to move out of his family’s house and take a job in a local patisserie where he fell instantly in love with cooking. He found the ability to transform flour, water, and butter into flaky pastries almost magical, and he would often stay at the shop late into the night, after his job was done, just to watch the chef make chocolate, soaking up whatever knowledge he could, even though it meant cleaning up the master’s marble when he was done.
Now in his sixties, Henin still vividly recalls waking up in the wee hours to go to work, pushing open the windows of his apartment to see his old school chums headed home from their nightly bar crawl. The moment illustrates one of the essential truths of any chef’s life: he is almost always at work while others are at play.
Put another way: Just as a certain tennis player from Las Vegas—after finding meaning in, and motivation for, tennis late in his career—famously ran hills on Christmas Eve, some of the best chefs in New York, well past their dues-paying days, are in their kitchens right now as you read this… and there’s no place they’d rather be.
For those of you in the New York area, I’ll be talking (briefly) and signing copies of Knives at Dawn at Borders Books at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle this coming Tuesday, December 1, at 7pm, which also happens to be the book’s official publication date.
If you have any questions about the book, or the adventure of writing it, I’ll check back periodically for as long as this post is up.
In the meantime, here’s wishing everybody a very happy Thanksgiving, every food lover’s favorite holiday. And thanks, Pete, letting me drop by, but most of all, for providing this wonderful forum for all of us to share our common passion for tennis and the people who play it.