[nggallery id=757]
If you want to know what makes a place like Bouchon so good, all you have to do is spend five minutes in the kitchen. Just smell the stocks, inhale the aromas of fresh bread, and sense the intensity of a dozen chefs (and a dozen more bakers, pastry chefs, and assorted helpers) as they go about their tasks of making everything as perfect as possible.
Bouchon is hard to find, impersonal in the extreme, and serves expensive, out-of-fashion (French) food to people who are only there because it’s fashionable to be so.
But that food is so good, you’ll forget about all those objections after a couple of forkfuls.
Bocuse d’Or USA concluded last weekend in Orlando, Florida with pretty much every top toque in the American/French food world being present. After years of being creamed by foreign teams, the U.S. of A. decided to get serious this year with its competition — in order to field the strongest two-person team it could for the international cooking contest to be held in Lyon, France in January ’09.
Photos by Valeria Rispoli