Knives at Dawn Read Free Page A

Manhattan instead of France’s more provincial Rhône-Alpes region, Boulud strutted into his first day of work in Bocuse’s kitchen sporting sunglasses and a bass player–worthy mane. Bocuse kicked him out, literally. “He kicked my ass and said, ‘Go andcut your hair. And we don’t need sunglasses here to work!’ ” remembered Boulud, joyously laughing at the memory of his own impetuousness.
    The seeds for this evening in Orlando were planted elsewhere in Florida, on Saturday, January 12, 2008, when Paul Bocuse’s son, Jérôme, was married in Palm Beach at Boulud’s Café Boulud restaurant at the Brazilian Court Hotel. When Boulud was the chef of Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque—
the
see-and-be-seen dining destination for the cultural and political elite of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan—Jérôme, who had come to the United States to attend The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, visited him often. The fact that Bocuse and Boulud were both Lyon boys determined to make their mark in the States forged a quick and lasting bond; for example, Boulud is godfather to Jérôme’s young son. Today, Jérôme Bocuse is an owner of Les Chefs de France restaurant at Epcot, the food and beverage facility his father founded in 1982 along with fellow French icons Roger Vergé and Gaston Lenôtre and which he took over in fall 2008. At a prewedding lunch at Café Boulud, the senior Bocuse asked Boulud to participate in the 2009 edition of the competition by becoming
Président d’honneur
(Honorary President), and to shepherd the American effort—in particular, to help him get Keller on board as president of the Bocuse d’Or USA.
    The United States’ best-ever showing in Lyon was Handke’s sixth-place finish in 2003. Bocuse longed to see that track record improved. His motivation was partly sentimental: as a soldier in the First French Division, he was shot in Alsace. “I was taken to an American hospital in the countryside where I received a blood transfusion from an American GI,” said Bocuse, whose eyes moisten when recalling the larger sacrifice America made for his country. Of the American flag that flaps in the wind outside his eponymous restaurant along the river Saône, he said, “Remember the sixth of June, nineteen forty-four. Ten thousand people died at Normandy.” All of that he said in French, but then he paused, and said, in English, his voice creaking, “Thank you, America.”
    Bocuse’s fondness for the United States deepened when son Jérôme took on dual U.S.-French citizenship and married a Yankee, and the twoproduced an American grandson. But Bocuse, the first great chef-marketer, surely also recognized that success by an American team would mean a wider audience for his competition, which is a phenomenon in many European countries: attended by several hundred screaming, flag-waving, noisemaker-wielding fans, the Bocuse d’Or is broadcast around the world via streaming video to 106 countries and covered live on French television, but was scarcely known in the United States, even to many chefs.
    Jérôme Bocuse, a fit, bald, perennially tanned man whose Gallic fashion sense makes him easy to spot in the shorts-and-muscle-shirt theme land of Florida, had his own vision of what an American victory would mean to the Bocuse d’Or. A sports fan as well as an avid water skier, he had noticed a trend in American television coverage of the Olympic Games: “If the U.S. are not a strong competitor, they don’t show the event,” he said.
    â€œI am not judging that,” he added. “But it’s just a reality and a fact.”
    Translation: if the United States did well at the Bocuse d’Or, there’d be a whole new, massively huge nation of interested spectators for the contest that bore the family name.
    When Bocuse made his request, Boulud