Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman

of the [other] competing chefs.”
    When Weaver shocked the Sirha and landed in the top five on Day One, qualifying for the finals, “all hell broke loose.… It was hilarious. It was almost like—
gotcha!
” she laughs today. “Paul Bocuse and all the disciples were all of a sudden with me, getting their pictures taken with the utmost respect.” For Weaver, the mission was already accomplished. “I wasn’t doing it to win; I was doing it to gain credibility and validity as a woman chef, and sticking my head outside of the kitchen.”
    Of the first Bocuse d’Or, Weaver recalls that at the time, it was a biggerfood event than anybody had ever staged. “It was more like a hockey game,” she said of the bleacher seating and boisterous crowd. There was even a home team—the French, in the person of candidate Jacky Fréon. Weaver didn’t mind at all; because all eyes were on him in the final, virtually nobody noticed when an oil spill in her kitchen caused a
fire
.
    â€œOnce they got past the fact that I was a woman and that I could actually cook and beat out the majority of these guys, they had a twinkle in their eye for me. They were like, ‘Okay, then!’ They nicknamed me
La Petite Américaine
. If you see Paul Bocuse today, and ask him about
La Petite Américaine
, he remembers.”
    Weaver was followed by Jeff Jackson from the Park Hyatt in Chicago in 1989, then by George Bumbaris from the Ritz-Carlton, who placed seventh and received the prize for Best Fish in 1991. (Best Fish and Best Meat are Bocuse d’Or consolation prizes, somewhat misnamed because they are handed out to the top-scoring platters in those categories
outside the top three
.) In 1993, the first non–Windy City candidate was fielded, Ron Pietruszka from the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills, California, who placed ninth. From there, the results were an up-and-down affair: in 1995, Paul Sautory from The Culinary Institute of America placed thirteenth, and the next three candidates placed eighth, ninth, and tenth, in that order.
    In 2003, Handke’s sixth-place finish (and Best Meat booby prize) set the high-water mark, but the Sisyphean American history next logged an eleventh-place finish by Fritz Gitschner in 2005, followed by Kaysen’s fourteenth place result.
    Bouit concluded and proceeded to introduce the chefs and commis who would be cooking and competing over the next two days …
    A MONG THE APPLICANTS WAS Rogers Powell, for whom the Bocuse d’Or represented an opportunity to sweeten a sour moment from his past. An instructor at The French Culinary Institute (FCI) in New York City, Powellwas one of the few who wasn’t immediately put off by the rigorous nature of the application and the short turnaround time of just four weeks.
    In 1996, Powell had found himself in a perhaps-permanent hiatus from his culinary career. To pay the rent, he worked for his uncle’s business, promoting a man-sized robot with a pivoting head at trade shows around the world. (The robot was immortalized in cinema when Rocky Balboa gave one to brother-in-law Paulie in
Rocky IV
.) One day, while waiting to board a flight to an expo in Portugal, Powell’s friend Jean-Jacques tapped him on the shoulder.
    â€œLook who’s over there!” he said.
    Powell turned to see Paul Bocuse and another legendary chef, Joël Robuchon, recognizable even without their chef’s whites and toques. “We all knew Bocuse,” said Powell, whose childhood was spent shuttling back and forth from New York to France. “When you go to culinary school, you
study
him.”
    Deciding to have a little fun, Powell discretely worked the robot’s controls, causing it to slide across the terminal’s slick floor and up to the chefs. Arriving at Bocuse’s side, the robot (actually Powell via a tiny remote microphone that he cupped in his hand) spoke to them in its tinny,