In Montreal, Dining on Char and Caribou

MONTREAL —  Romantic, flirtatious and decadent, this is a city of the heart and the stomach. Its French heritage stokes a joie de vivre that is Montreal’s trademark. Having fun is a top priority here, especially during the brief summers and early fall, when the entire city parties. Hot jazz and African rhythms spill onto sweltering pavements. In July, one of the world’s biggest comedy festivals allows us to yuk it up in French and English. (Next year’s is July 10 to 20.)

Complementing a love of good living is an obsession with good eating. Located in Quebec, a province that is home to Canada’s oldest and most passionate food culture, Montreal has long boasted that it has “the best table in North America.” And small wonder. The city’s food-savvy diners demand high quality, whether they’re dunking a croissant into their cafe au lait on a sunny terrace, tucking into a smoked meat sandwich and cherry Coke at Schwartz’s deli counter or dining at 2 a.m. on steak tartare at the Parisian-style bistro L’Express.

In the 14 years I’ve lived in Montreal, I’ve sampled many of its best restaurants, often with friends who come here from Toronto and Boston simply to eat. Montreal is more laid-back than many of North America’s big cities, and its inhabitants are ardent about “slow food” culture. My friends especially love the four-hour French lunches, consumed with multiple bottles of wine, that seem to be the rule in the restaurants along Rue St. Denis in the Latin Quarter.

In the past, when food writers applauded Montreal’s restaurants it was for classical French cuisine, possibly the best outside France. But the city has been in the dark ages when it comes to hip restaurant trends. While cooking with fresh, seasonal ingredients is nothing new in Los Angeles or San Francisco, most chefs in Montreal and indeed in most of Canada, with a few exceptions, have been slow to embrace the move to organic and local produce.

Though belated in their discovery of the delights of market ingredients, local chefs are bringing to their tables a growing awareness of uniquely Canadian foods, which they are incorporating into their menus: caribou pate and musk ox (burgers, steaks, pot roast, sausages), fiddlehead ferns and milkweed pods, cattail hearts from rural Quebec, tarts or reductions with Saskatoon berries picked by Indians in Saskatchewan, cedar and balsam fir jellies, smoked duck and maple everything--candy, vinegar, wine.

Many of my favorite restaurants, and those listed here, focus on “Canadian cuisine,” as it’s called. Some are well known, such as Toque; others are neighborhood eateries like La Colombe, the kind you discover only when you live here.

Restaurant Toque

Toque is set in the middle of the Latin Quarter’s restaurant row on the oh-so-French Rue St. Denis. Recently expanded to include the space next door, the restaurant is broken up into intimate sections, each wall a different strong yet softly lighted color such as red or yellow, contrasting briskly with the waiters’ funky lime green tunics.

The diners in this trendy temple to good eating range from businessmen to young foodies, but, as in all Montreal restaurants, dress is casual. On my last visit, I counted only two ties, and one of them was on a woman.

This is my favorite haute cuisine eatery in the city and a must for all newcomers to Montreal, a rule of mine that allows me to dine here at least a couple of times a year. The last time I visited, in June, I was served an amuse-bouche, an appetite whetter of a plump Malpeque oyster poached in strawberry vinegar that I’ll never forget; an appetizer of Arctic char tartare in a circle beneath a thin layer of avocado, chives and ginger-tinged celeriac; and a main course of fork-tender venison prepared two ways--a grilled filet and a roasted haunch--accompanied by locally grown white asparagus and sauteed fresh morels and chanterelles.

Toque’s chef, Normand Laprise, has been called Montreal’s “most creative chef” and is widely regarded as the father of the hot “nouvelle Quebec” cuisine. Raised in rural Quebec, he grew up with fresh, seasonal, locally available food, and when he attended a Quebec City cooking school he was shocked by the use of frozen fish and meat, produce and other ingredients imported from France or the U.S.

Laprise decided to do something about it, and in the early 1990s he traveled through the province encouraging artisan growers to improve quality and get creative. The produce he sought was often available, but not in enough volume for a restaurant. It took him 10 years to establish a network of producers, but now Laprise has greenhouses that supply all the produce he needs year-round, including a salty sea spinach, black raspberries for vinaigrette, daylilies for their caper-like buds, and three varieties of strawberries in midwinter--often served with a pomme de glace, an apple cider from Montreal’s South Shore that rivals traditional ice wine.

Laprise has also mined the country for fresh seafood: lobster from the Magdalen Islands, Mingen snow crab from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Arctic char. He makes liberal use of quail, guinea fowl, duck and game meats, which are more popular in Quebec than in other parts of Canada. Laprise’s venison comes from near Ottawa on the Ontario border. “The deer are half wild there,” he says. “They live in the woods and eat the bark off the trees.” Along the shore of the Gaspe Peninsula, east of Quebec City, lambs are put out to pasture on salt marshes to duplicate the slightly salty flavor of the pre-sale meat of northern France. But if Laprise has one ingredient for which he is known, it is his appetizer of melt-in-your-mouth seared foie gras produced in the eastern townships southeast of Montreal. He prepares it “a la Toque,” which means the dish evolves as inspiration strikes him.

Globe Restaurant

What Laprise calls “regional North American market cuisine” is popping up in all manner of restaurants across the city. One early convert was chef David McMillan of Globe Restaurant, on trendy downtown St. Laurent Boulevard. Highly rated since it opened seven years ago, Globe--with its high ceiling, cozy banquettes and French windows that open onto the sidewalk--serves some of the city’s most innovative cuisine, most of it organic and local. It is also a magnet for celebrities, from actors George Clooney and Billy Bob Thornton to Formula One racer Jacques Villeneuve. If you’re serious about food, arrive before 8 p.m.; after 10 the scene is all about people watching.

My favorite dish is a tender, slow-cooked rabbit, a leg and a loin stuffed with herbs, with crisp pancetta, Parmesan risotto and chanterelles. Many of the items on the menu have the no-nonsense feel of comfort foods, like the baby back ribs with apple nectar caramel and the “big boneless quails” served with maple mustard and fries.

With a physique that says he likes to eat, the tattooed McMillan is known as an enfant terrible on the Montreal cooking scene, and he’s not afraid to speak his mind. “Many of the products here are dismal,” says McMillan, who used to travel the Quebec countryside with a fistful of cash paying double the asking price to encourage producers to improve the quality. “For organic we’re dead last in North America.” But he adds, “We’re way ahead in Quebec with cheese.”

If any single food group can stir the heart of the French, it is their fromage. In the past decade, the province has begun producing fine cheeses, and there are now about 350 types. The cheese plates at most restaurants include at least a few regional varieties, and some places, like Globe, serve only local cheeses. There is even an official Cheese Trail across the province, where visitors can drop into 49 small producers for tastings.

Restaurant Area

A relative newcomer in the city, which opened in June 2000 and is making waves and drawing raves, is Restaurant Area, a chic establishment in the “Gay Village.” Restaurant Area is small--all brick walls, white linen and white leather banquettes with subtle Asian overtones in its minimalist flower arrangements. Stepping inside is like entering a cool, serene monastery.

Manning the whisks is 26-year-old whiz-kid Ian Perreault, one of only two Canadian chefs to make Conde Nast Traveler magazine’s 2001 “Hot List” for the world’s “hot tables.”

Perreault is not afraid to mix ingredients that would never occur to other chefs, and the results, such as the Malpeque oysters with herring roe, marinated cucumber and a mint chocolate oil, are mouthwatering. (Recipes for this and many of Perreault’s other popular creations appear on the restaurant’s Web site.) I love his carpaccio of Alberta beef with sherry-pickled cauliflower, chervil and dried apple.

This upscale bistro’s philosophy is that good food shouldn’t be exorbitantly priced. Dinner in its elegant dining room will run about $55 per couple before wine and tip and might feature such inspired Perreault pairings as seared foie gras with apricots poached in sherry, or salad of octopus marinated in sake with a touch of Thai cinnamon and basil oil.

Area is my favorite place for three-course fixed-price lunches, which start at $10 and can include such creative appetizers as Bordeaux cepe mushroom cream soup with roasted Grenoble nuts, hazelnut oil, chives and croutons, before a main course of local lamb shank braised with orange, white beans and gremolata--a seasoning made of grated lemon rind, parsley and garlic--or a duck confit with legumes roasted in cumin in a mild garlic broth.

La Colombe

An especially popular Plateau Mont Royal neighborhood eatery is La Colombe. Now in his 13th year of catering to serious food enthusiasts at a reasonable price, owner and chef Moustafa Rougaibi produces what many--I included--consider to be one of the best lamb dishes in the city.

The funky, contemporary La Colombe is one of many Montreal eateries where you have to bring your own bottle of wine--a local tradition but an oddity in the rest of Canada because of the nation’s strict liquor laws. I always bring a full-bodied red to this restaurant because I never fail to order the braised lamb shank with a sauce richly imbued with rosemary and garlic and served with Le Puy French lentils and carrots.

My favorite cold-weather appetizer is the hot salmon and Arctic char mousse. To finish there is Rougaibi’s excellent selection of raw-milk cheeses, all from Quebec, of course.

Au Pied de Cochon

Quebec’s robust cuisine was brought from northern France by settlers who combined traditional recipes with ingredients found in the Canadian wilderness. The result is a winter menu of game pies called tourtieres, ragouts, coarse country pates, tarts and ultra-sweet sugar pies. Hearty and delicious, these dishes are found in supermarket freezers, at fast-food outlets and on the tables of homes across the province, but rarely do they make an appearance on haute cuisine menus. Except at Au Pied de Cochon.

Its chef, the outspoken Martin Picard, decided to inject 21st century style and his own considerable character into traditional Quebec cuisine by recently opening Au Pied de Cochon--Pig’s Foot--on leafy Rue Duluth in the Plateau Mont Royal area. A big hit with the 30-ish crowd, Cochon is a casual and noisy brasserie set in a former pizzeria whose huge brick oven is put to good use for baking fresh bread.

Simple dishes like tourtieres go up-market here with camembert and ham; fish and chips means soft-shell crab and fries; and the flan is made of foie gras with pureed figs.

There is little on the menu for low-fat dieters or vegetarians. This is down-and-dirty Gallic comfort food: duck breast, blood sausage and scallops, venison tartare, tourtiere filled with many types of game, French onion soup, pigs’ feet with Alsatian sauerkraut and even half-moon-shaped oreilles de crisse, known colloquially as “Christ’s ears,” a delicacy of thinly sliced lard--bacon without the brown bits--that is fried until very crisp. The dishes are usually served at family meals in sugar shacks in the forests of Quebec when the maple sap starts running in March. They are not for the faint of heart.

Picard has even hoisted the humble poutine several notches up on the culinary ladder. In a province known for great food, it’s almost shameful to admit that Quebec’s signature dish is a messy jumble of French fries sprinkled with pellets of rubbery white cheese curd drowned in gravy, a concoction available everywhere from mobile chip wagons to McDonald’s. Picard’s poutine appetizer is a small mound of dark French fries in a puddle of rich jus, sprinkled with curds of a tasty local cheddar and crowned with a seared slice of foie gras.

It just goes to show that food in Montreal doesn’t have to be fancy to be good.

*

Guidebook: A Mouthful of Montreal

Where to eat: Restaurant Toque, 3842 Rue St. Denis; (514) 499-2084, fax (514) 499-0292, www.restaurant-toque.com. Dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Reservations essential. A la carte appetizers from $6; main courses from $17. Five-course tasting menu $47, with foie gras appetizer $54.

Globe Restaurant, 3455 St. Laurent Blvd.; (514) 284-3823, fax (514) 284-3531, www.restaurantglobe.com. Dinner from 6 p.m. daily. Reservations recommended. Appetizers from $6; main courses from $17.

Restaurant Area, 1429 Rue Amherst; (514) 890-6691, fax (514) 890-1208, www.rest-area.qc.ca. Lunch Tuesday-Friday; dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Reservations essential. Dinner for two without wine, $55.

La Colombe, 554 Ave. Duluth Est; (514) 849-8844, fax (514) 849-6686, www.restaurant.ca/lacolombe. Dinner Tuesday-Sunday. Reservations recommended. Three-course meal $21 per person. No wine list, so bring your own bottle.

Au Pied de Cochon, 536 Rue Duluth Est; (514) 281-1114, fax (514) 281-1116, www.aupieddecochon.ca. Dinner 5 p.m.-midnight Tuesday-Sunday. Appetizers from $3; main courses $10-$20.

*

Margo Pfeiff is a freelance writer in Montreal.