Knives at Dawn Read Free Page B

naturally agreed. That’s what you do when you’re a chef and Paul Bocuse comes a-knocking. There are no two ways about it.
    P AUL B OCUSE HIMSELF, FRESH off a flight from Lyon, sat just behind Keller as he made his toast on that September evening at Epcot. Eighty-two years old, with a persistent tremor in his right hand, he silently scanned the room. At Epcot, with its ersatz nations lined up like department-store windows, one could be forgiven for thinking that this wasn’t really Paul Bocuse, but a Disney-engineered mirage. But Bocuse it was, there to help usher in what he hoped would be a new era for the United States in his namesake event.
    When it comes to the Bocuse d’Or, chefs have been saying “
oui
” to Paul Bocuse since the mid-1980s. That was the time that the organizersof the Sirha, Europe’s largest international hotel, catering, and food trade exhibition, which is held at Eurexpo, a Lyon convention center gargantuan enough to register on satellite images, were looking to add a culinary competition to their roster for the 1987 show. They approached Albert Romain, director of the Parc des Expositions venue of Lyon, who turned to his good friend Bocuse, and suggested attaching his name to it because of the worldwide clout it would automatically confer on
le concours
(the contest).
    There are many immortals in Bocuse’s kitchen generation—Vergé, Alain Chapel, the Troisgros brothers—but the respect and affection of the world’s chefs for Bocuse is a little special. He is widely recognized as the first of his comrades to march proudly into the dining room to commingle with the clientele, an act of emancipation that helped his professional brethren migrate from the heat of the kitchen to the glare of the spotlights.
    â€œWe chefs and celebrity chefs owe so much to Bocuse; we were
domes-tiques
, now we are nobility,” said Alain Sailhac, who was present at Epcot to act as a judge for the next two days. Formerly the chef of Le Cirque and now executive vice president and senior dean of programs at The French Culinary Institute in New York City, Sailhac remembers that when he was a young cook in France, before the Bocuse reformation, he would conceal his profession from young women he was courting; if forced to confess that he worked in a restaurant, he would claim that he was a
chef de rang
, or dining room captain, which had more cachet.
    In time, Bocuse’s prominence extended around the world. The promotional copy on the back of the menu at Paul Bocuse sums up his contribution: “More than anyone else, it is he who rendered eminence and dignity to chefs, making them the undisputed stars of the professional food establishment. Yesterday’s employee (or, worse, yesterday’s lackey) is today’s entrepreneur, restaurant owner, concept designer and marketing specialist—exactly like Bocuse and in large part thanks to Bocuse.” That sounds awfully boastful, but few in the industry would dispute the claim.
    The irony of his gift to the profession isn’t lost on Bocuse. According to son Jérôme, he ventured outside the kitchen not exclusively for personalfame and glory (though he has reaped plenty of both for decades), but to elevate the appreciation for his craft in general, and for French cuisine in particular. Many of today’s young chefs crave a permanent relocation to the artificial world of a television-studio kitchen, but Bocuse points with pride to the fact that when he returned home from his globetrotting, he always parachuted right back into the kitchen. To this day, though he requires an afternoon nap in his home above his restaurant, and retires most evenings while guests downstairs are still slurping tastes of his famous
Soupe aux truffes noires V.G.E
. (a hearty broth of black truffles and foie gras created to honor President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1975) or nibbling on other signature creations such as