{"id":1003,"date":"2011-02-13T14:47:03","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T19:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:19:15","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:19:15","slug":"a-day-in-montreal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1003","title":{"rendered":"A day in Montreal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Le Gout des Mots<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Friday, I took the train to Montreal to take part in a symposium on food writing at McGill University, a joint \u2013 and bilingual \u2013 venture of the French and English Departments. The venue was the Faculty Club Dining Room, a delightfully eccentric Victorian salon resplendent with stained glass and mock-Gothic columns. There were to have been five of us on the panel, including master baker and author Marcy Goldman, chef and veteran restaurant critic of the Montreal Gazette Lesley Chesterman, and anthropologist and food writer Robert Beauchemin. Robert is an old friend who is also Senior Judge of Gold Medal Plates\u2019s Montreal jury but, h\u00e9las<\/em>, he was stricken with a cold and forced to make his excuses. Instead, we were joined by Catherine Turgeon-Guin, a rather brilliant graduate student working on historical aspects of food writing, so the academic side of the subject was well represented. Our moderator was Professor Nathalie Cooke, renowned culinarian and also editor in chief of CuiZine, the Journal of Canadian Food Cultures. I believe the proceedings of the day will be fully reported there, so I won\u2019t go on about them. Suffice it to say, I hope the audience had as much fun as the panelists. Time sped by. By way of self-introduction, each of us was invited to name our favourite piece of food writing. To my surprise and delight, Lesley Chesterman nominated the Jeeves stories of P.G.Wodehouse, especially those tales dealing with Anatole, the brilliant French chef employed by Bertie\u2019s Aunt Agatha and coveted by every other household in the brittle but endearingly\u00a0innocent world of Wooster. Her father read them to her when she was a child, she explained, and she remembers being deeply impressed by the power and influence the great chef exercised over aristocratic society. It was a good start to an afternoon that gave much pleasure and food for thought.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The organizers of the event, Professors Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Charbonneau and Paul Yachnin, had also invited another panelist who had been unable to join us \u2013 Hugo Duchesne, co-owner and sommelier of La Mont\u00e9e de Lait, the excellent little restaurant on St-Laurent. He has been too busy since the recent departure of chef and co-owner Martin Juneau to take part in the discussion. Juneau, if you recall, won the Gold Medal Plates Tour de Montr\u00e9al in the fall and will be competing in the Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna next week. Meanwhile, he has moved to a new kitchen \u2013 Newtown, on Crescent Street. Taking over at La Mont\u00e9e is a 25-year-old chef called Jonathan Lapierre. My friends Fr\u00e9do (the same Professor Charbonneau), his wife, Marie-Pierre and their pal, Andy Paras, and I were eager to taste his work and see if La Mont\u00e9e is still one of Montreal\u2019s finest, so off we went there for dinner.<\/p>\n

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(right) Professor Charbonneau. (left) me in full academic costume. (behind) splendidly decorated Faculty Club Dining Room<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 La Mont\u00e9e is a cosy and merrily informal spot with an open kitchen at the back. A tall red banquette runs down the centre of the room creating a partition between the bar area and the dining area. The d\u00e9cor is cheerful \u2013 a high ceiling covered in dark blue pressed tin, walls of open brick or white clapboard, black wooden tables set very close together. It\u2019s a little bit scruffy, very serious about wine and food and always full.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We began with oysters \u2013 some from St-Simon in New Brunswick (briney with a fine minerally, metallic finish) and others from Summerside in P.E.I. (creamier, sweeter) served with their mignonette on long, rough-hewn wooden boards. A glass of Cadel Vispo Vernaccia di San Gimignano 2008 was an almost perfect match. The wine list here is mostly French, jewelled with interesting producers from small appellations, but a blackboard of other wines by the glass changes frequently.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From there, I pursued a nautical theme with a plank of seared mackerel \u2013 very intense, salty and densely textured under its crispy skin. Chef Lapierre had cut it into bite-sized pieces and arranged them into three mounds with fresh, crunchy shaved fennel and radish, pungent chives and whole segments of tangerine. There were dots of thick tangerine curd on the board and a puddle of smooth white caill\u00e9 de vache, which Google translates as \u201ccow quail\u201d but which is really a separated dairy product somewhere between buttermilk, cr\u00e8me fra\u00eeche and green cheese. Its cool creaminess was a perfect foil to the mackerel.<\/p>\n

For my main course I chose sweetbreads \u2013 a single good-sized lobe perfectly cooked, tender and creamy inside its browned and fairly crispy surface. Surrounding it were wands of firm roasted parsnip with their uniquely aromatic, sweet, rooty flavour, and little slices of cooked apple that had been pickled in vinegar with a slightly too heavy hand. Chewy lardons of smoked bacon, a delectable cauliflower pur\u00e9e and a sticky brown reduction of pan juices completed a scrumptious dish. Fr\u00e9do chose a great wine to sashay down the gastronomic aisle with it \u2013 a limpid, elegantly oxidated, altogether seductive 2003 Savagnin from Jacques Puffenay of Arbois in Jura\u00a0that tasted of walnuts and an autumn walk through the woods. After that, he still had room for a beautifully moist financier cake with fresh orange and citrus sorbet but I declined (for some reason I don\u2019t now remember) and regretted it for the rest of the evening.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWe must go to La Brasserie T next time,\u201d suggested Marie-Pierre. It\u2019s Normand Laprise\u2019s new casual spot next to the Museum of Modern Art, inexpensive and open for lunch. He gets his beef from Cumbrae Farms in Toronto (only Laprise could get away with that in Montreal) \u2013 beef of such quality that he can cook his bavette rare and it\u2019s still tender. So that will be a date, next time in Montreal.<\/p>\n

La Mont\u00e9e de Lait can be found at 5171 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal. 514 273 8846. www.lamonteedelait.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, I took the train to Montreal to take part in a symposium on food writing at McGill University, a joint \u2013 and bilingual \u2013 venture of the French and English Departments. The venue was the Faculty Club Dining Room, a delightfully eccentric Victorian salon resplendent with stained glass and mock-Gothic columns. There were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[96,104,91,1,19,103],"tags":[318,167,316,317],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2043,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/2043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}