This was supposed to be the year that America woke up to the Bocuse d’Or, the international cooking competition that ended last Wednesday in Lyon. We had a favored chef in the ring who was going to rectify America’s zero-medal record and expand the competition’s reach and notoriety to U.S. shores.
Contestants compete in teams that consist of a chef (who must be over the age of 23) and a commis (who must be younger than 22). They train for months, often giving up day jobs, to work out the menu and rehearse its preparation, which will be timed to the minute in a temporary electric kitchen of just over 190 square feet. Between the scrappy underdogs (South Africa) and the flashy dominators (France), the virtuoso displays of culinary skill, and the huge potential career impact for one of 24 talented young chefs, the Bocuse d’Or has serious personal and financial stakes.
I repeatedly forgot this fact as I watched the first day of the competition unfold in Lyon last Tuesday. I wonder if Americans will ever see it as more than a neon-lit, over-the-top Eurohilarity. The term “Olympics of cooking” ricochets around the stadium, but other metaphors for the event spring to mind: Miss Universe, Iron Chef, WWF, a rave, and a 3 A.M. infomercial.
The competition stadium sits at the center of a concurrent, massive trade show—a two-day, 2000-vendor blowout for the restaurant and hotel industry. This means that access to the stadium involves a dizzying tour through radial rows of fake restaurants, sham bars, cardboard lobbies, and disposable cafés. At one point, like a dumb mallard romancing decoys, I really wanted a coffee and sidled up to several convincing-looking espresso bars that in fact only served pamphlets on foam. The scale of this trade show might be succinctly suggested by the presence of both a stuffed-kittens-in-a-basket vendor AND Limoges porcelain.
The cooking begins at 8:50 A.M., at which point fans are already issuing periodic cheers from the row of bleachers that faces the row of kitchens, separated, portentously, by the judges’ banquet table. The kitchens are silent, busy, sterile hives, while the bleachers, as the day goes on, become ever more an unpredictable riot. If noise had gravity, the stadium would capsize in a second. When the Korean chef lifted his head from breaking down a three-foot-long Norwegian cod (one of the sponsored, mandatory ingredients) five air horns exploded in the Korean section. As the Swiss chef prepared to plate his first dish, out of nowhere a band of Swiss folk musicians stood up to bellow mournful chords from ten-foot trumpets (just like the ones in the Ricola commercials). And then there were the Finns. Over the years I have spent a good deal of time with Finns, my mother being one, and I tend to think of them as voluntarily non-vocal people—the kind who, were they to see my hair catch fire, would immediately email me about it. So to see 75 of them open-throat screaming for five hours was, frankly, thrilling.
Meanwhile, the competition’s theme song, which sounded like the musical accompaniment in a Telemundo soap opera when a prostitute kills a sorcerer, thumped in an incessant loop. Above this racket, an Entertainment-Tonight-style duo put on a floor show from about 10:30 until the end of the day. Angela, a giggle-prone American with teeth whiter than a blank computer monitor, bantered with Vincent, a barb-prone Frenchman with an inspector’s moustache. Sometimes they worked in harmony:
Angela: These truffles are so fresh.
Vincent: Did you know truffles cost half this year what they did last year?
Angela: OOOOOOOOH!
And sometimes they hit rough patches:
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.