Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman Page A

electronic staccato: “Hello, Mr. Bocuse. Hello, Mr. Robuchon. I like my steak medium rare.”
    The chefs and fellow passengers chuckled agreeably, then boarded the flight. Powell took his seat in first class, disassembling the robot and parking its torso in the seat the company purchased for it. Hours later, waiting for the other passengers to deplane in Portugal, Powell felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw Bocuse staring down at him, a friendly smile forming beneath his hawk-like eyes.
    â€œGood luck,
l’artiste
,” said Bocuse, having determined that Powell was responsible for the preflight entertainment.
    Powell almost told Bocuse that he, too, was a chef, but it felt a bit silly under the circumstances. In time, he found his way back to the kitchen, and eventually to a role helping to train future chefs. Now, he explainedin his letter of inspiration, he was eager for the challenge presented by the Bocuse d’Or, and to meet Bocuse himself “as a chef, not a comedian.”
    About forty miles away from Powell and the FCI was John Rellah Jr. Even devoted foodies haven’t heard of Rellah, but years ago he cooked in the rarefied air of Gray Kunz’s kitchen at the opulent restaurant Lespinasse, working as a
chef de partie
(station chief) alongside future celebrity chefs such as Cornelius Gallagher and Rocco DiSpirito. There are plenty of men and women out there who, like Rellah, flirted with big-city gastronomy but ended up leaving the metropolis for the quiet pastures of suburbia or the country. By 2007 Rellah had become the chef of Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, New Jersey. He saw the Bocuse d’Or as a challenge into which he could pour his amassed knowledge, much of which was gathering dust in some nether region of his brain, and set about preparing an application.
    In Philadelphia, twenty-nine-year-old Kevin Sbraga, culinary director of the Garces Restaurant Group, heard about the Bocuse d’Or USA from a weekly e-mail he received from StarChefs, an online magazine for foodservice professionals. He had recently seen a documentary on Food Network about Tracy O’Grady, the American who competed in 2001, and remembered it well. Sbraga, a former high-school wrestler from Burlington County, New Jersey, who attended Johnson & Wales University on scholarship, had participated in three small-scale cooking competitions as a student and enjoyed it, and this seemed like the ultimate culinary throw-down. “It was almost like magic,” he said. “I thought,
I’ve got to do this
.”
    One of Sbraga’s competitors had experience in a different type of culinary competition. In June, at the
Food & Wine
Magazine Classic at Aspen, Hung Huynh, the season three winner of
Top Chef
, picked up a piece of literature from an American Express booth that alluded to its sponsorship of the Bocuse d’Or USA.
Top Chef
viewers will remember Hyunh as the ambitious, unapologetically intense Vietnamese American with mad skills; even host Chef Tom Colicchio was left speechless at the sight of Hyunh breaking down chickens in fast motion. Every reality show has one contestant(cheftestant in
Top Chef
lingo) who says things like, “I’m not here to make friends; I’m here to win.” Hyunh was that guy.
    Some applicants were prodded by members of the Bocuse d’Or USA organization: Michael Rotondo, the chef de cuisine of Restaurant Charlie, Charlie Trotter’s Las Vegas outpost, was encouraged by Trotter himself, who had once been a judge in Lyon; Percy Whatley, the unassuming executive chef of The Ahwahnee in Yosemite, California, was nudged by both longtime acquaintance Kaysen and by Roland Henin, who oversaw him as part of his role as corporate chef of Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts.
    Henin also encouraged Richard Rosendale, chef-owner of Rosendale’s restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, to apply. Rosendale, who has a large, flat nose and dark