Knives at Dawn (33 page)

Determined to dote on her guests to the absolute limit, Mme. Boulud offered little tubs of
fromage blanc
, then a cheese plate of Roquefort,
caprice des dieux
(a double-crème cheese), and Comté. Noting that several of her guests had jam smeared on the plates they were using for cheese, residue from the “first course,” she belatedly offered them clean plates. Of her delay, she said, “
Le service est mauvais
.” The service is bad.

Following the meal, the indefatigable M. Boulud offered a guided tour of the property, showing them the tarped swimming pool out back, the mammoth oven and grill with its accoutrements lined up like pool cues along the wall, and sunken tennis court with an Astroturf-like artificial grass surface. Walking back toward the main road, he escorted them in
and out of the barns and the little rooms recessed within them, each one a treasure trove of culinary delights—house-cured hams hanging from the ceiling, jars of preserves, onion confit, preserved Swiss chard ribs, reserves of Champagne. One memorable bottle contained a snake suspended in a solution of eau de vie.

“In the old days, this was medicine,” he said.

Unexpected and numerous little nooks were scattered about the compound, and M. Boulud clearly delighted in sharing them all. As the team began unloading the rental vehicle—they'd be using the farm as a staging site until Monday, when they would relocate to Paul Bocuse's catering hall—M. Boulud danced out of one of the rooms with a bottle containing a thick, neon-tinged yellow liquid. He poured tastes into small glasses and passed them out: it was a house-made lemon cream fortified with eau de vie, and it was a strong, warming antidote to the morning chill.

The team checked its more delicate cargo. For the most part, everything had survived the trip, although there were casualties: the brioche had got a little bruised, a deli of pistachio cream had ruptured, but the Ziploc bags containing it held firm, and so on. Having assessed their needs, the team packed everything up again and stashed it neatly in one of the rooms.

They left the Bouluds as they were beginning work on an apple galette at the kitchen table, M. Boulud shaving slices on a mandoline, his wife arranging them in circles in a dough-lined tart mold. Just another Saturday at the farm.

Of the morning, Guest said, “It made me appreciate who Daniel was more.… Once you meet someone's parents you understand the person … amazingly warmhearted people, and then I started seeing those qualities in Daniel.”

“That was an amazing experience,” said Hollingsworth. “My last time in France was in Paris and it was just working. Parisians say, ‘You really need to go to the countryside, you really have to go here or here and experience what it's like.' And that was all those stories combined. It was going to that place in the country and experiencing the living. It was incredible.”

The team checked into the Hotel Ibis Lyon Est Bron, a resolutely no-frills traveler's lodge on an industrial stretch of highway about thirty minutes from Lyon proper. Travel plans had kept changing up until the last minute, and by the time the itinerary had been settled on, even über-connected Michel Bouit couldn't procure them enough rooms anywhere closer to civilization. They would crash at the Ibis for one night, then relocate to the Hotel Beaux-Arts in the city center the next morning. It was the kind of decision that rankled Henin: the result of poor planning and a distraction that would diminish the team's mental energy. He was also apprehensive about a plan to move the team
back
to the Ibis eight days later, so that they would wake up closer to the event space during the Bocuse d'Or. An extra half hour of sleep on Game Day was not, in his opinion, worth the hassle and psychic toll of moving again—not even close. (There is an official team hotel, but a number of competitors opt not to stay there.)

That afternoon, without benefit of a nap, Team USA sans Coach Henin drove into Lyon. For all of the money that had been raised for the team, they were still expected to manage an awful lot. First up was a scavenger-hunt-worthy list of items to be located and purchased, including cellular phones, a printer, a power strip, power converters, extension cords, batteries, and hotel pans. So much for Joseph Viola's advice to let the team focus on nothing but their platter. (Another quickly emerging distraction was that, since the team had no driver, Hollingsworth and Henin did almost all of the driving on this and all subsequent days.)

That January afternoon was a dream of spring in Lyon, sunny and temperate, and the city center was mobbed with shoppers and strollers. The recession that had gripped the United States seemed a distant memory as every venue, from cosmetics shops to electronics megastores, was brimming with consumers and shopping bags swung like pendulums at the end of every arm in sight. Adding to the energy of the day were two organized protests—one against overcrowding in the schools, the other contra Israel's actions in Gaza—and Obamamania was in evidence at every newsstand in town, with magazine covers both American and European displaying
the imminent president's mug. (The pro-American vibe that week was enhanced by ever-expanding stories about Captain Chesley Sullenberger on both French television and on BBC World News.) The team spent the afternoon roaming the streets in a pleasant delirium—the combined effects of jet lag, sleep deprivation, and the relentlessly unfamiliar details: not just the language, but billboards that rotated every few seconds, street signs shaped like collar stays, and little automated bike rental stations. It was an onslaught of newness and it was intoxicating.

T
HE NEXT DAY , A
dreary, windswept Sunday, following breakfast the team relocated to the Hotel Beaux-Arts, an art deco–styled boutique hotel on Rue du Président Edouard Herriot in the city center, then bee-lined for Halles de Lyon—Paul Bocuse, the famous indoor culinary marketplace. Lined with rows of food booths interspersed with a smattering of restaurants and oyster bars, the market's dropped ceiling rendered it all but impossible to discern just how far back the rows extended. As the team perused
fromageries
, fish shops, and butcher counters, the depth and superiority of the food on offer became increasingly clear. In the United States, a market of this breadth and scope, and the unfailingly artful presentation of the goods, would warrant major magazine coverage. In Lyon, it's just the way things are.

At Cerise et Potiron, a produce shop, Hollingsworth bought a turnip and an avocado, to get a sense of how much he'd have to have sent from Yountville. The team cut the market visit short that day because many of the shops weren't open on Sunday, when Lyon essentially shuts down, and others would be closing early. They drove back to the hotel, then roamed the forsaken streets in search of a
bouchon
(the word means “cork”), a genre of eatery that is most closely if not exclusively associated with Lyon, similar to a bistro, only more stripped down, both in décor and in the scale of the menu. The team had an unremarkable lunch, then marched back to their new hotel, tucked themselves into their infinitely softer quarters, and slept.

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING
, R
OLAND
Henin ate in the breakfast room on the second floor of the Beaux-Arts, a mirrored, carpeted space staffed by a solitary waitress clad in frilly French maid uniform, whose main functions were to cheerily intone “
Bonjour!
,” offer
café
to all comers, and to keep the buffet stocked. As hotel breakfasts go, the Hotel Beaux-Arts' was first-rate: a selection of French and alpine cheeses, freshly baked baguettes, scrambled eggs, sliced ham, little foil-topped jars of yogurt, crêpes, and the hazelnut-chocolate spread Nutella, obscenely ubiquitous in Lyon, slathered on breakfast crêpes and available as a filling from
crêperies
and carts around town at all hours.

Henin sat alone at a long table in the dining room, his legal pad resting beside his plate, and wondered where everybody was. Though they hadn't discussed it, he had walked in at eight o'clock, sharp, expecting that they'd follow the protocol established the day before: a group breakfast mixing conversation and planning, after which everybody would briefly return to their room, then congregate in the lobby ready to go.

“If you organize your day that way, even a non-practice day, that will help improve communication,” said Henin. “It reinforces the team. You are a family. There is nothing else that exists but the team. Everything else is eliminated but the team. So all the focus is on the team. If you don't have that team spirit, or whatever you want to call that, then you don't have nothing,” he said.

And so, Henin finished his meal alone, concerned about losing time and not having a plan.

The plan was
supposed
to be to go to the Boulud family home, sort through the equipment and food that had been shipped there, or stored there by Michel Bouit, and decide what to bring to L'Abbaye de Collonges, Paul Bocuse's catering and special event facility. But Hollingsworth, who had been awake since two o'clock in the morning, watching
The Departed
and then going out for an early breakfast with Laughlin, had thought about it and had decided they should all go to L'Abbaye first in order to introduce themselves to the manager who would be their point person for the week,
then
go to the Boulud compound. He was cross with himself for not automatically thinking of this beforehand; it would have been downright rude to show up with a van full of boxes without first dropping by, making yourself known. Rude by his family's standards, and rude by the etiquette he'd been taught by Keller. He recognized this as a sign that he wasn't firing on all cylinders, that his instincts had been dulled by the travel, the jet lag, the exhaustion, the stress.

There was another bit of news overnight: though the team had been told that two practices had been arranged for them, on Wednesday the twenty-first and Saturday the twenty-fourth, somewhere along the line between Yountville and Lyon communications had broken down.
L'Abbaye
was booked out for a number of events that week, and the
only
available day was Saturday. Hollingsworth absorbed the news painlessly, in part because he and Guest had become so used to cooking on the actual competition equipment in the Bocuse House that he was loathe to cook in
two
unfamiliar kitchens in Lyon.

Henin could not have disagreed more: “Well, yes, it's a big deal because it is going to hurt us,” he thought. It was just the latest disappointment for the coach, who was once again confounded by the decisions of his charges. It was fine that they took the weekend to get acclimated, but after two days, it was time to get to
work
. “Everybody carried on into the easy path as opposed to doing our sit-ups,” he would say later. “I think right there, after a while, it became like, ‘Wait a minute. That is not what we are here for.' Are we here for sitting on our ass and going to restaurants and having a good time? We are here to do a job and that job is to get ready for the battles that we are going to have. But nobody was waking up. Nobody was saying, ‘Wait a minute, let's do something about this.'”

Despite his role as coach, Henin kept this opinion to himself. “Who do
I need to voice it to?” he would say later. “Isn't anybody else old enough and mature enough and understanding enough and knowledgeable enough to understand that on their own?”

The difference in attitudes was a fine illustration of the gap between those who are members of competition society, and those who are not. About the cooking life in general, Hollingsworth's and Henin's points of view were actually not that dissimilar. Henin prized total commitment to one's vocation—the level of lifelong devotion that determined whether one would sink or swim in, say, the Certified Master Chef exam—and Hollingsworth had exhibited that total commitment since he first fell in love with his chosen craft about a decade earlier.

But they simply didn't share the same passion for culinary competition. Henin vividly remembers the first time he saw a competition; it was about the same time he first met Keller, way back in 1976, when he visited the International Culinary Olympics in Frankfurt. The event offered spectators the opportunity to purchase food from the competing teams. Waiting in the lunch line, he saw the windows of the kitchen, his view obstructed by the people in front of him so that he could make out the tops of the cooks' white toques. Many of the hats were moving around, but one team's barely moved, which he realized meant they were highly organized, so didn't need to waste time or energy. He later discovered that was the American team, the one that tied with the French. “I was very impressed and I didn't know why,” Henin said. “I went to see the cold food. That is when it really started.… The following Olympics I competed on my own not really understanding what I was doing.… I made a bronze by luck.”

Henin went on to compete in other events, and treasured what competition brought to his life. “It's a good thing because you learn a lot,” he said. “You get the feedback from the judge. You push yourself to the point that you didn't know that you were able to push or achieve. You learn something all the time. You didn't know you had this in you. You didn't know that you were capable of producing all that stuff. There again it was that amazement when I produced those brioche or croissants.”

At the end of the day, Hollingsworth simply didn't feel the same way. He, like his chef, was there because he was asked to be there, not because he had a great
desire
to be there.

It wasn't that he didn't take it seriously. But he felt that his reverence for cooking in general and his experience at The French Laundry in particular were the ultimate preparation. “I've been practicing for this
my whole life
,” Hollingsworth said of the situation in Lyon, whereas Henin's opinion was that your whole life doesn't have a damn thing to do with what's waiting for you next week, kid. You think you can hop up on your surfboard and ride that wave that's rolling in from the horizon? Guess again. Because that ain't no point break. It's a
tsunami
.