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Boulud is chairman of the U.S. team, while Bartolotta serves on its board of culinary advisers, and both come by their interest sincerely—they both worked for Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France, in the 1980s. Some in the food world question whether the Bocuse d’Or and a culinary world that revolves around France really ought to matter to international chefs today, but they still take it for granted that classic French technique, as modernized by Bocuse and other nouvelle cuisine chefs since the 1970s, is the heart of modern refined cooking and a worthy aspiration for chefs anywhere.
Paul Bartolotta: This past year we lost a demerit point because of a technicality. But our team continues to get better and better. Listen, it’s only been our third competition that we’ve been involved in. I don’t care what anybody says, we talk about it in our meetings—people want to talk about France, or the Scandinavian countries, and these are people that spend their entire four years, two years between each competition, purely focusing on winning that dish and that item. And there’s a certain level of perfectionism that goes into that, and that can be appreciated.
Think about it. Twenty years ago, we barely had farmers’ markets. Today we’re a country that is setting a trend almost globally. Because we are that melting pot, because we have the street forms, because we have that modern economy, because we have social media—we have so many things about American lifestyles that get exported elsewhere. If anything, we’ve seen that consumers have moved toward high quality, but they don’t always want the trappings of the uberluxury fine dining experience. And as a result, I think the Bocuse d’Or appreciates the speed at which the United States has moved forward, culturally, in food and wine.
