Vincent: The chef is working with a beautiful filet of Scottish Black Angus Beef.
Angela: It looks like a dead body.
Vincent: [furious death stare]
The 24 judges—former Bocuse d’Or laureates like Léa Linster from Luxembourg (the only female winner in the competition’s history) and éminences grises like Thomas Keller—filed in just before the food was to emerge. All in white jackets and toques (slapped with sponsors’ labels), the panel looked like some sort of ritual gathering, with Bocuse himself, flanked by his son and Daniel Boulud, at a central high priests’ table. You really could not have been faulted for confusing 82-year-old Bocuse with the Pope.
In two rounds, one for meat and one for fish, the chefs emerged from their kitchens carrying a glass or mirrored platter (de rigueur for international cooking competitions as much as for 60th birthday parties in Mamaroneck). In baby steps, sweating, like uninsured movers carrying a Louis XV commode, each team carried their platters of individually portioned and garnished dishes across the long stadium to be viewed by the jury before being served. Some teams courted attention by courting disaster: Foot-tall flames licked off the Brazilian team’s mirrored platter as they carried it across the floor (Angela: “The chef is going to lose his arm hair!” Vincent: “Free depilation!”). Aside from a few large roasts carved tableside, most preparations took the form of individually portioned savory napoleons or petits fours. Chefs cooked in an overwhelmingly French idiom, offering mousses and gelées whose ingredients often referenced their home countries, like the Finnish “sauna-style” birch-smoked cod.
Even as this jury, loaded with culinary heavyweights in their reading glasses, poked at, conferred about, and tasted these miniature sculptures, the overall atmosphere felt devoid of any reverence or attention. As Bocuse scooped the Brazilian fish dish into his mouth (Vincent: “It’s normal, he hasn’t lunched yet! He’s hungry!”), a French representative of Scottish Black Angus Beef in full kilt, sporran, and garters stood four feet in front of him, expounding upon the succulence of his beef.
I skipped around the bleachers, first hanging out with the Finns, where I felt I belonged, until they got (miracle!) too loud for me. I ended up with the Swiss for a while. I tried to chat with the folk musicians, but their words were clawed to incomprehensible shreds by their moustaches. They let me swig their Malvoisie, a Swiss Pinot Gris, for which I almost thanked them with tears in my eyes as the competition’s theme song looped around again, maintaining its brain-ravaging homeostasis. On the verge of a panic attack, I ended up with the small Australian cheering section, almost entirely composed of the families of the chef and commis. I remarked in some way upon the silliness of this whole thing, but they didn’t respond to that at all. With their eyes fixed on their man—head down in his white cube kitchen, performing a precisely timed operation he’d rehearsed for six months—they reminded me that the Bocuse d’Or can change a young chef’s life.
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