If cooking really is an art, then one Harvard biophysics concentrator is a master.

Michael Pavloff '88 will travel to France next month to compete in an international amateur French cooking contest after winning the national cook-off in Minneapolis last Monday. The Adams House resident won the award for his "Lapin aux Trois Facons Sensuelles," or Rabbit in Three Sensual Ways, which costs about $125 to make.

Pavloff's victory in the national competition qualifies him to go to Lyon, France in November for the Trophee des Amateurs Gourmands. The Hotel Sofitel, the site of the national competition, awarded Pavloff and the nine other finalists an all-expense-paid trips to Lyon, spending money, and personal translators. Pavloff also is entitled to a chef who will act as his assistant during the competition.

Expert chefs predict that Pavloff may well walk away with the grand prize of a week's vacation for two at a resort in Corsica. "His recipe can win in the finals," says Daniel Hubert, the executive chef at the Hotel Sofitel, the site of the national competition. "The way he made it is the way they enjoy it in France."

Internationally acclaimed chefs will gather at the Hotel Sofitel World Headquarters in France to sample Pavloff and the other finalists' dishes and judge them on presentation, originality, and taste.

The French Chef

While Pavloff has been cooking for nearly his entire life, he became interested in French cooking only after he arrived in Cambridge. "It's not something everyone does," he says. "No one comes to Harvard and gets into cooking."

But Pavloff says he loves to cook here, especially for others. "It's such a wonderful thing," he says. "You can make so many people happy by cooking."

His roommates will attest to that. For example, two nights ago Pavloff prepared sauteed foie gras in a red wine apple sauce a midnight snack, says roommate Ben Loeb '88. And Harold Litt '88 calls Pavloff "an absolutely incredible cook."

Occasionally, Litt says, Pavloff will cook dinner for some of his friends. "He will spend four or five hours going shopping at gourmet and wine stores, and it takes him a long time to cook."

Pavloff, who is the head teaching fellow for Math 21B, attributes his success in cooking to his manual dexterity, his ability to organize his thoughts, and his love of food. "You have to have those if you want to be a good cook," he says.

And, you have to have a lot of patience. The recipe for Pavloff's original rabbit dish is seven pages long. It describes in detail how to prepare the rabbit in three ways: rabbit loin stuffed with black truffles, rabbit leg stuffed with foie gras (fattened duck liver), and quenelles (rabbit made into a mousse and boiled in red wine).

But this recipe is only an abriged version from the one he used in last year's competition. The dish is so complicated that Pavloff sometimes has difficulty completing his artwork in the full three-and-a-half hours that the cooking contests allow for preparation.

In 1986, Pavloff went just a few minutes past the deadline for the preparation of the entree and was disqualified from the regional competition in Minneapolis. "He might have won," muses executive chef Hubert.

The annual contest began seven years ago by the hotel chain not only to get publicity, but also "to get to know the people that will be guests in our hotels," says Joanne Torney, the administrative assistant to the general manager of the Hotel Sofitel in Minneapolis, who helped to organize the North American part of the competition.

Pavloff says that, despite his education in the sciences, his long term goal is to open his own French restaurant. For the short term, he would like to go into the field of computers. And, maybe he'll suggest a few changes at the Union before he graduates.