Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman

Author:Andrew Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2009-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

For the fish platter there were:

The custard: Hollingsworth sliced a raw scallop into thin rounds and overlapped them in a circular pattern over a brioche melba, then set that in the glass high above the custard, finishing it with a quenelle of Petrossian caviar; and

The mille-feuille: Once Guest had baked and cooled it, Hollingsworth unmolded it and cut out a rectangle with angled ends, topping the piece with crème fraîche and a quenelle of caviar.

For the meat platter, there were:

The revised pommes dauphinoise: A rectangle of the potato preparation was set on a rectangular pommes Maxim, the browned top layer trimmed and decorated with chestnut and a salad of shaved celery, green celery leaves, and cutting celery (a microgreen);

The smoke glass: into the orb that everybody loved went apple puree topped with a tornado-like twirl of bresaola, a brunoise of cabbage, and a chiffonade (long, thin strips) of quick-pickled pearl onion.

The deconstructed beef stew: a punched-out turnip round (made by pushing a cookie-cutter-like tool through a slice of the vegetable) topped with a cube of stewed beef cheek, then small buttons of punched-out carrots threaded on a thyme sprig and perched horizontally, and pickled pearl onion … before tasting that, Hollingsworth put another cube on a paper towel to its left, topped it with broccolini florets and stem segments and pickled pearl-onion layers. He professed a preference for the look of the second one.

Hollingsworth felt better about this day’s work product. In comparison to the carrot-wrapped potato concoction, the one he had just made—with the celery salad and chestnut on top—pleased him both as a chef and as a potential eater. “That looks like something I want to eat,” he said. “The other one does not.”

Guest agreed with her chef’s assessment of the prior day’s experiment. “There’s just no purpose to it,” she said. “Especially the carrot.”

Nothing was completely nailed down, and there remained a number of issues unique to the competition: for example, the brioche melba had become soggy after just twelve minutes of resting over the steam of the hot consommé, which wouldn’t be a concern in a restaurant, but at the Bocuse d’Or, with that lag time, could prove fatal.

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.

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