The Passion and Pitfalls of National Team Hot Cooking

The Restaurant of Nations at the Erfurt Messe Hall 1 is a massive quardrupal-ballroom sized floor space heavily gaurded (mostly against freeloaders and annoying press) by grim young men in official jackets who pace the floor just inside the rope barriers. In this space, national teams must serve up 110 three-course lunches to paying guests and a team of tasting judges.

This is no mean feat. Banquet cooking requires flawless coordination and timing, a keen eye for detail (imagine if one guest gets one piece of meat for lunch while his neighbour gets two), and exhausting, intense but swift manual labour. National teams train up to four years for this particular category of competition, honing the same recipes to perfection and even so, they can encounter any number of problems that need to be solved on the spot.

Through the viewing panes you can sense the urgency in their brief spurts of verbal communication internal sign language, head bobs and the occasional frown that are alien to onlookers.
Every day, lunch is served between 12pm and 3pm to eager supporters, fans and foodies who queue up to buy tickets for the meal they want to have. All three-course offerings are displayed in glass cases just beside the ticket counter to make deciding an easy job. (the catch being that appearances are sometimes deceptive)

Unfortunately, one of the most frequently-heard comments in the feedback from diners is that the food is served too SLOW - not just one or two teams, but many. Now, with the world's top chefs competing at such high standards, you have to ask the question "how can this be?"

The Problem...

Is that in recent years comeptition meals have been edging towards "too much on a plate" in a grossly misunderstood effort by competitors to one-up ther rivals by delighting guests with more. Naturally every team hopes to hit that "wow!" by balancing the various elements in their courses.

"The chefs are trying to make food that is like what you would serve in a three Michelin star restaurant," commented Ferdinand Metz, president of the World Association of Cooks Societies and culinary judge for the national team Restaurant cooking category. "This is fine, as long as you can serve up 110 portions of this recipe. I think we need to tighten the guidelines to help them realize that the service part of the competition matters as well. Currently there are no points awarded for fast or slow service."

Two of the biggest objectives for judges and organisers of the Restaurant category are firstly, to select the best hot cooking team and secondly to ensure that the paying customers enjoy a good dining experience. "So far, this has been a problem," continued Metz. "There's a food design flaw on the competitor's part, and perhaps there's also a flaw on the organiser's part. But ultimately such thing serve to refine and improve the standard of the comepetition as a whole, so that's what we'll work on for the next event. Meantime, we've had to put people in the kitchens to help serve up the food after the judging was over."

Yet Despite The Unforeseen Circumstance...

"...The general standard of the show has been elevated since the previous event," concluded Metz. There are some teams that have caused that elevation, and there are some teams that have not kept pace with it. There are tradditional countries who have been in this competition for a long time and are expected to do well. And we think they will do well. But we also have alot of new countries - like Bahamas and Malta, who are here for the first time and they don't really know what to expect. So it was obvious that they would encounter some problems, and they have."

A Word From The (Brand New) Small Fry

Malta (a country no bigger than 42 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide with a population of 400,000) is one of the aforementioned first-timers at the Culinary Olympics. "Yes we have some little mistakes that we need to address for next time but I think we're doing well," said team manager Joseph Vella, who kindly obliged to an interview in the middle of the competition. For main course they prepared a traditional Maltese rabbit, loin roasted with mushroom powder, shoulder stuffed with minced pork, mushroom fricasse and Rabbit jus to finish.

The team has been together four years, during which they've comepeted in about 12 international competitons, from the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg and the Grand Prix in Scotland, to smaller competitions in Korea and Hungary. "This should be the highlight for these six guys," continued Vella. "We got bronze and silver medals and one diploma certificate for our cold table display on sunday. We are satisfied with these results... our first time to the Culinary Olympics. We don't expect much."

Well, we certainly hope to see you rise to your fullest potential in coming years, Malta. Keep at it!

A Word From TMULT
(Or The-Most-Unfazed-Looking-Team)

While many other national teams were frantically sweating it out in the cooking booths this afternoon, one team in particular worked in a manner so completely untroubled (and were more prone, in fact, to loud guffaws from time to time) that we just had to stop by and ask a few questions.

The Icelandic team manager introduced his team as "mostly chefs in restaurants, while the pastry chef here has his own bakery". He also explained that although the team has been together for 4 years, Iceland has taken a 2-year hiatus from other competitions, since the 2002 Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg, due to budgeting challenges. (considering that this team insisted on flying one tonne of ingredients from Germany and Holland back to their homeland to practise their dishes, one can understand how competitions can be an expensive affair for them, registration fee aside)

"We all live in the same city and we meet each other alot, so we are good pals, not just the team that comes together only for training sessions. That's very important" he explained. So, the secret of having a good time while in the midst of a high pressure international culinary competition is quite simply - friendship.






(Incidentally, the Singapore national team was also spotted posing - as a whole team, with COFFEE in hand - for press photographers DURING the competition! Some teams must truly enjoy living on the edge!)

Chatting With The Judges
Looking very much like medical doctors in their long white lab coats embroidered with sponsor logos and embellished with name tags, these folks (who often appear deep in thought and sometimes walk the halls in clusters) keep the competition fair and exciting with their scores and commentary.

Since you've done both, what's the difference in perspective between judging and competing?

"When you're a competitor your head is down and you're working working working - you tend to get blinkered in what you're doing. As a judge you get the privilege of seeing it from the outside so you can spot where the mistakes are. Sometimes as a competitor you don't know what you're doing wrong because you're just going at it."

- Tony Jackson

What's the most important element in the hot cooking category?

"In my opinion, it's if what's on the plate can truly be served to the customer. These dishes must be created with the intention of winning the customer back again and again to the 'restaurant'. However, the customer is not really interested in the way a dish is cooked, so that's where we come in as judges - to make sure the food is cooked according to the proper standards.

Has the recent leap in kitchen technology made this kind of competition easier?

Technology has moved on around the world and yes, kitchens have become very technically sophisticated, with programmes that take care of the item once you load up the machine, but you still have to know how to cook. There are still only a few cooking methods that are right, and the same rules still govern the way meat and protein toughens or doesn't. It's on the bone, the animals are still the same. Competitors today still face similar problems as they did 10 years ago.