Knives at Dawn (25 page)

Nonetheless, he was getting warmer. “Once you have one really good thing on a dish it's easy to support those good things. So now it's going to be about going home and defining, finalizing a couple of things, even though they might change.”

Despite his growing optimism, once he stopped working, it dawned on Hollingsworth with alarming quickness that he was bone-tired, and the exhaustion spread through him like a cancer on the way back to Napa—his eyelids were at half-mast, at best, and he felt his shoulders slumping. He pulled off the highway and knocked back a coffee from Starbucks, but that didn't do the trick; back home, in his living room, sitting at the table by the front door, trying to hone his concepts, he felt the claws of slumber reaching up though the floor of his apartment, pulling his head down. Fighting for a few more hours of consciousness, he bolted out the front door and sprinted around the block, but it was useless; no amount of stimulation could revive him. He returned to the table, his notebook open before him, but failed to think, his head tumbling forward, then snapping back up in quick bursts of barely deflected sleep.

“Go to bed,” implored Laughlin.

“I can't,” he said.

“Go. To. Sleep.”

“I
can't
.”

“Go to sleep and wake up early.”

“Yeah, like that'll happen.”

But eventually, Hollingsworth did give in and go to sleep, feeling, for one of the first times in his life, the limits of his stamina, throwing in the towel on a day in which his to-do list exceeded the time he could find, or make, in which to get it done. This was no small matter. Forget the competitors he'd face in Lyon. Forget the judges and the notoriously noisy crowds. He was locked in a struggle with something bigger than all of that, a test of his creative powers and technical skill, his ability to apply all that he knew in an unfamiliar context, his readiness to step forward as a chef in his own right, to emerge from the cocoon of The French Laundry and his role as sous chef, holding forth two platters that announced, “Here, world, this is me. This is who I am and what I stand for.”

No wonder he was tired. He was growing, and growth depletes the body and fatigues the mind of a full-grown man just as it does a small child. And there was something else, something he'd been keeping at bay, but that must have been taking its psychic toll as well: the next day, at 6:00 p.m., The Chef, Thomas Keller himself, the most acclaimed culinary figure in the United States, the one Hollingsworth had worked for his entire adult life, would be visiting the Bocuse House to taste his Bocuse d'Or dishes for the first time.

It was enough to make anybody pass out.

C
ULINARY GARDENER
T
UCKER TAYLOR'S
name doesn't appear on the menu at The French Laundry, but he has a hand in just about every dish served there, especially on the “Tasting of Vegetables” that's offered as an option to the “Chef's Tasting Menu.”

On Thursday, December 18, Timothy Hollingsworth parked his SUV in front of the Bocuse House and walked across the street to meet with Taylor for a farm tour. The purpose was to see what was gestating in the hoop house, and might be ready in time for Lyon. He had a look at some fennel and beets, but was most impressed by the turnips—pristine white, with smooth skin and brilliant green leaves. He had an appreciation for the turnips, having taken the time to learn about gardening over his years at The French Laundry, both from Taylor, who occasionally loaned him books on the subject, and from Peter Jacobsen, proprietor of nearby Jacobsen Orchards, which provides produce to a number of Keller's properties. He knew that it was the soil, the unrocky soil, that allowed them to grow into such perfect little orbs. He tasted the turnips raw, and tasted them cooked. He tasted the greens. He found the flavor clean, nutritious even. One of his secret weapons for the Bocuse d'Or, he figured, was the produce grown at The French Laundry—“You can't buy that” was how Hollingsworth described the flavor.

After the farm tour, Hollingsworth and Guest spent the afternoon cooking, getting ready for The Chef's visit later that day. Befitting an emerging theme, the music reflected the mood with a mix of reflective rock, such as “Epiphany” by Staind followed closely by Metallica's “One.”

For lunch that day, they had sandwiches from a nearby Pacific Blues. Hollingsworth dunked his onion rings in ranch dressing, which prompted an oddly relevant discussion of flavor combinations encountered in fast-food joints. As a kid, Hollingsworth had liked Maui Zaui pizza from the Round Table chain—a pie topped with ham, bacon, pineapple, tomatoes, and onions that he loved dunking in ranch dressing. He also discovered a bizarre delight one day when he dipped a French fry in a caramel sundae from McDonald's—the hot crunch of the fry, the sweet caramel, the cool ice cream. It might sound like a surprising guilty pleasure for a guy who ended up a sous chef of The French Laundry, but he's managed to apply the central combinations to his sophisticated surroundings: when the waiters at Bouchon ask him what condiment he wants with his fries,
he orders crème fraîche. And, though he didn't offer the comparison, the mille-feuille topped with crème fraîche and caviar that he was trying out for his fish platter had much in common with those culinary memories as well. (Hey, if Thomas Keller can make history from a visit to Baskin-Robbins, why couldn't one of his sous chefs look to Round Table Pizza as a muse?)

Aside from lunch, they stopped only to hang out briefly with a surprise visitor, Daniel Humm, executive chef of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, who was in the area to guest chef a holiday event at a Bay Area hotel.

At four fifty-five, the sound of the front door being swung open was audible in the kitchen.

Chef Keller, wearing his chef's jacket and black slacks, entered, slipped off his clogs, and strolled right into the kitchen. His demeanor, as is often the case, was unassuming.

“Hey, how's it going?” he asked.

“Hi, Chef,” said Hollingsworth. “It's going well. But we're not quite ready. I heard you were coming later.”

“You want me to come back?” said Keller, doing a convincing impression of a man with nothing else going on in his life.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, when?”

“You could maybe taste in an hour.”

“Okay, fine. I'll come back then.”

For the next hour—as The Nationals' CD,
Mansion on the Hill
, washed over the kitchen—Hollingsworth and Guest worked in total silence. As Hollingsworth butchered beef, Guest pulled all the delis (cook-speak for plastic, Tupperware-like containers) from the past few days, all the items and components that had been prepped in anticipation of this evening. Hollingsworth made a custard with clarified butter, eggs, Champagne vinegar, and xanthan gum (a thickener). Then, as he cut pommes dauphi-noise and mille-feuille into rectangles, Guest blanched broccolini florets and stalks and turnip rounds, sliced chive slivers, plucked celery leaves,
stripped thyme sprigs of their leaves, and warmed clarified butter for heating vegetables.

As the hour drew to a close, Hollingsworth put tarragon sprigs in the shellfish bouillon, gave a stir, then discarded them. He then cut the top off a small lemon, squirted a few drops of juice into the mixture and sniffed. He shaved the bresaola and prepared the smoke glass; there were already brunoised pearl onion and Granny Smith apple in the base, which he topped with the bresaola slices. He added a quail egg yolk to the smoker, topped it with the lid, added the smoke, then set the timer for three minutes, after which both he and Guest took spoons in hand and tasted.

“More salt?” asked Guest.

Hollingsworth nodded. Yes.

Cooking for The Chef was no small matter. Keller was much more than an employer to Hollingsworth, who had basically grown up at The French Laundry. When the two worked side by side, Hollingsworth was continually awed by his talent and his precision. “You could just sit there and watch … watch him fillet a fish … anything he was doing, you wanted to watch him, because he was always doing it the way that you wanted to do it. I never saw him do anything wrong. I could never say his station is a little messy now. I could never say that about him,” he said.

Hollingsworth was also among the last generation of cooks to witness Thomas Keller as a daily presence in the kitchen, before The Chef ascended to his current higher level of being. The young cook would check the schedule to see when The Chef was working because that was automatically more pressure. “You felt his presence and his pressure and the need to do your best whenever he was around,” said Hollingsworth. We [always] put pressure upon ourselves … but when he is around, he … pushes you to be even better.”

Meet Keller today and his placid demeanor makes it difficult to imagine exactly what this must have been like, but front-and back-of-the-house veterans describe working alongside him as an honor that occasionally required
thick skin. Keller wasn't a constant screamer, the way some chefs can be, in those days, but “if something went wrong, the whole town of Yountville knew it,” said Benno.

Keller also had a great deal of respect for Hollingsworth, even when the younger man was a commis. “He has always been the go-to guy,” said Keller. “Out of the teams he was always the strongest.”

Told of the comment, Hollingsworth was surprised and gratified: “It doesn't shock me but it's not something that I have heard said aloud. I have always tried to be like that. I think that comes from my father, too, because I worked with him a lot as a kid and he was really intense to work for. So if he needed a tool or anything, I was always like, okay, what is he going to need? Okay, he is going to need a crescent wrench or this or that? I wanted to be one step ahead always.… That's really carried on from construction … to being in the kitchen and wanting to be the person who is one step ahead. I know The Chef is going to ask for this, I am going to get it. Really being able to read someone.”

Would he have read The Chef on this day? Would he put something in front of him that excited and pleased him? That made him …
happy
?

He'd find out soon enough.

A
T
6:03, C
HEF
K
ELLER
returned to the Bocuse House and again slipped off his clogs. Hollingsworth, who'd been exhibiting his surfer-level aura of carefree nonchalance all day, spun his head around so hard and fast it could have caused whiplash. Something that looked like panic seeped into his eyes and set his jaw on edge. He recovered immediately, looked at Guest, and they both nodded. They were ready.

The first thing the team prepared was the current iteration of the smoker garnish, which Hollingsworth had adjusted overnight: he put some leek puree in the bowl, topped it with a maple-braised beef cheek cube (made by straining and reducing the beef's cooking liquid, adding
syrup, then glazing the cubes with the mixture), set a spinach ball on top and a soft-boiled quail egg, then fired some smoke into the glass.

Keller stared at it, curiously, neutrally.

“When are you going to put the smoke in?” he asked.

“When the platter comes back.”

Keller's facial muscles tightened, indicating disappointment. “There's something provocative about it smoking on the platter.”

“I know. But it takes too long. The food gets too smoky.”

Keller nodded. He suggested that maybe another kind of smoke would solve the problem, but he didn't know what that might be. He lifted the lid and the smoke tumbled out, dissipated into the air. Keller tasted.

“Who's going to lift the lid?”

“I'll explain to the maitre d' and he'll have the servers do it.”

Keller made a little muffled “mmm” sound and nodded, pondered.

“The puree really absorbs the smoke,” said Hollingsworth.

Keller thought for a moment longer, then spoke: “Maybe you could put an isomalt [a sugar substitute] disc so that everything below it doesn't taste like smoke.” He hadn't let go of that provocative smoke. “If you lose smoke, you lose drama.”

Keller began sketching on a paper towel on the stainless-steel prep table.

“I'd almost look for something …” he said as he rendered a rough cross section of the smoker, creating in pencil a mushy mound with a circle perched atop it.

“… like a puree of apple or something. Bind it. Giving you the ability to top it. Like a panna cotta.”

Hollingsworth considered this, but not for long because Keller moved on to the subject of the egg.

“What if we deep-fried the egg?” asked The Chef. “It's still kind of clunky. Is there any way to make it round and deep-fry it? The issue is how to make it stay crunchy forever, but we know that we can do that.”

Keller didn't actually know what the method to accomplish this might
be, but as his organization had grown, populated by talent he doesn't have to micromanage, he's developed the opinion that no goal is out of reach— he has the time, funding, and resources to solve any riddle.

“I think that would be fun,” Keller said.

Keller held up one of the smoke glasses, and it became clear that he'd been mentally multitasking, reconceiving the garnish on a macro level as he'd been discussing the micro.

“I think we need to coat the glass with parsley puree, or maybe coriander,” he said. “Liquefy it, put it in the glass, turn it. That would obscure it and you would have the pureed horseradish, apple, beets. As you eat it, you get the parsley off the side, or coriander or whatever. You get the flavor, texture, color,
precision
. I think it would be critical. Precision is critical.”

Hollingsworth didn't say much, but he wasn't sure how much of this input he'd be able to use. The pureed green coating the glass was something that would have to be executed to perfection—on fourteen individual glasses (twelve for the judges plus one for the official photographer and one to serve as an example for the servers)—and it went well outside his comfort zone. He was also worried about what an obscuring coat of green would do to the smoke and lights effect he'd fallen in love with. Additionally, he hoped that The Chef wasn't making any judgments about the lack of precision in the bowl. Despite his belief in being precise at all times, in this instance, he wasn't going for precision; he was still stuck on flavors and how to get there. But that was a small matter; because after weeks of realizing, “I can't smoke this; I can't smoke that,” and becoming frustrated almost to the point of thinking nothing but a piece of meat could survive a turn in the bowl, the concept of the isomalt barrier was a potentially revolutionary one that gave Hollingsworth room to breathe as he honed the smoker garnish.