Free Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman Page A

e-mail making an analogy to the Olympics: “You don’t send a TV crew to the training camp before they go to the world championships … that kind of stays secret.” Like Keller, Bocuse was also concerned about unwanted distractions: “They [TV people] always tell you that they will be a fly on the wall but then they impose their schedule.”
    Outnumbered by his colleagues, Boulud pulled the plug on the program, and by all accounts did so quickly and graciously, even though a production team was already in New York and in preproduction mode. As a result, the Bocuse d’Or USA ended up reimbursing the producers about $10,000.
    Boulud freely cops to his full-steam-ahead modus operandi. Regarding the entire incident, he said, rather cheerily, “That was again me going into overdrive with these things and full throttle trying to really get as much attention as possible.” But Boulud hastened to add that he had other reasons: “I was worried [about] what am I going to give to the sponsor. What kind of return can I give besides saying, ‘Oh, thank you very much for participating in this Bocuse d’Or competition.’ So TV was one way for me to create some good return to the sponsor.”
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, Pelka commented, “That right there is whythey [Boulud and Keller] are such a good pair … we occasionally jump in a little too deep and then there is the reminder that someone like Chef Keller is there who is more choosy.”
    T HE A PPLICATIONS WERE REVIEWED on Monday, July 14, in the private dining room at Daniel. Boulud met with several New York–based members of the Advisory Board and the final eight were chosen from a pool of … well, the committee won’t say exactly how many. “Fewer than twenty,” is all that Pelka will allow, though Henin, who was not present, believes the number must have been much lower.
    The eight were set: Hollingsworth, Hyunh, Powell, Rosendale, Rotondo, Spraga, Whatley, and Damon Wise, executive chef of Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group.
    As planned, the candidates were announced in a press conference at db Bistro Moderne on Thursday, July 17. The night before the press conference, Damon Wise sent Pelka an e-mail withdrawing his candidacy: “After discussion with Tom, and much thinking,” he wrote, “it is not going to be possible for me to devote the amount of time needed to compete.” John Rellah was slotted in as a substitute just in time for the conference, and the planned visual presentation was updated accordingly. Thank god for PowerPoint.
    Though the television project was scrapped, the French Culinary Institute orientation went forward, largely due to Kaysen’s support. In one of the increasingly frequent conference calls taking place in the summer of 2008, Kaysen pointed out to the group that when the competition was under the auspices of Michel Bouit, there were three regional semifinals prior to the final selection event, which were useful because they gave the candidates practice for not just the American finals but also the big show in Lyon.
    In a poetic bit of misspeak, Kaysen, reflecting on his endorsement of the FCI orientation, explained that the semifinals “let us know if we were going in the right direction or shitting up a creek.”
    Kaysen also felt it was important that the candidates get used to beingaround chefs like Boulud and Keller, who might make some of them quake in their clogs when the time came to “bring it” in Orlando, and his colleagues took his recommendation. In a twist on reality TV, an event created for television had become reality. (In a sign of how quickly things were moving and how much Keller was deferring to Boulud and his team, this rationale was never shared with Keller, who couldn’t be on the conference call in which it was first floated, and privately wondered if the candidates needed this extra pressure