{"id":2928,"date":"2013-12-04T20:54:46","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T01:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=2928"},"modified":"2013-12-05T11:52:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T16:52:16","slug":"2928","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=2928","title":{"rendered":"Montreal Gold Medal Plates 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"Nick<\/a>
Nick Hodge of Ice House won bronze<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Antonio<\/a>
Antonio Park of Restaurant Park in Westmount won the silver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Gold<\/a>
Gold went to Danny St-Pierre from Auguste in Sherbrooke<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yesterday we flew into Montreal –\u00a0in and out – to meet up with a merry group and set out into the city in a luxurious and colourfully lit stretch charabanc to find our 2013 Montreal Gold Medal Plates champion. Ten first-class contenders had already emerged from the other 10 cities across the country where we had held our gala events; but how could we show up in Kelowna next February without a Montreal star? Impossible. Hence the road-trip, a \u201cGMP plan B\u201d that has worked very well for us before. Four of us represented GMP \u2013 our fearless leader, Stephen Leckie, our two senior Montreal judges, Lesley Chesterman and Robert Beauchemin, and me, together with World Champion short-track speed skater and three-time Olympic medallist Isabelle Charest, and many new friends from Deloitte and Impact de Montr\u00e9al. We visited five very different restaurants, tasted five exceptional dishes and emerged at the end of it with a very worthy new champion.<\/span><\/p>\n

I must say, the marks were\u00a0scarily close. Kudos to the chefs, who welcomed us into their restaurants and honoured the rules we insisted upon \u2013 with one exception\u2026 Of which more later.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our bronze medal was awarded to Nick Hodge, Texas-born chef of the ruggedly unconventional Ice House, a brilliant, casual restaurant with its roots in the southern U.S. The splendidly bearded Hodge introduced his dish as \u201cQuebec-Mex\u201d and served it up on an earthenware dish with a handle \u2013 very rustic and effective. The heart of his concept was local Wagyu beef brisket, cool-smoked over Texas oak wood then cooked sous vide for 72 hours. The texture he achieved by this method was remarkable \u2013 not fibrous, perfectly moist, with a crispness and firmness to the meat that met with universal appreciation. The block of beef sat on the edge of a drift of silky corn pudding, made from organic Quebec corn whipped with egg yolk, a knob of butter and a little salt until it was utterly smooth. The second sauce on the plate was in total contrast in terms of flavour, a black and intense sour cherry mole, laboured over for days and involving dried fruits, nuts, seeds, dried chilies, and \u2013 instead of using traditional but foreign-to-Canada chocolate \u2013 toasted wild elderflowers, that Chef explained had a kick just like inhaling cocoa. This sauce was amazingly deep, tangy, layered and great with the beef. The finishing touch was a garnish of fresh and pickled watermelon radish\u00a0cut to the minuscule size of those tiny, worthless\u00a0Sharjah postage stamps that every schoolboy collected when I was a nipper. The final flourish, the panache to the dish, lay on top \u2013 a crunchy, dehydrated, pickled, flattened okra. It was a sturdy, forthright dish with great depths of flavour in the three main components. Chef Hodge matched it with Norman Hardie\u2019s unfiltered 2012 County Cabernet Franc, a wine that \u201cscreamed fresh cherry\u201d to Chef Hodge and inspired the mole sauce. Like the garnishes, it contributed refreshing acidity along with its own fruity personality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our silver medal went to chef Antonio Park of Restaurant Park in Westmount, who also won silver last year. I have to say, his dish was exceptional \u2013 complex, technically impeccable, imaginative\u2026 Alas, there was a serious issue with the beverage he chose to accompany it. Gold Medal Plates is a celebration of Canadian excellence and we insist the chosen drink must be Canadian, whether it be a wine, beer, spirit or anything else. Chef Park paired his drink with a fine green tea from Japan brewed with brown rice. As a result we were obliged to score him a zero for Wine Compatibility, a category that commands ten percent of the total marks. We took our lead from the Olympic athletes we strive to support: break the rules of your particular discipline, and you must suffer the consequences. This in no way detracted from Chef Park\u2019s fabulous dish which was centred around snapper. Introducing his creation to the table, Chef Park explained that he had used seven acupuncture points to numb the living fish into a state of neural oblivion before dispatching it and preparing it three ways. First there was a tartare, the raw fillet chopped and mixed with a sauce of yoghurt, ginger flowers, minced shallots, Japanese microchives, onion, carrot and Japanese plum that had been fermented for two months before being introduced to its fellow ingredients. It was a divine tartare. The second \u201cway\u201d was a seared fillet, still raw in the centre but lightly charred on the edge \u2013 absolutely gorgeous! The third way involved the fish\u2019s bones, boiled down to make a broth in which to poach some yellow soshito peppers (with some three-month-old kimchee to add a touch of pep). Over to the side was a finger of seared foie gras. Did it belong with the snapper? Would, say, monkfish liver have been more \u00e0 propos? Either way, the foie was totally yummy. There were many other elements in the bowl. A red sauce of pickled anchovies in wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic and ginger, spiked with a dash of Korean red pepper sauce, added serious umami. As did molecular pearls of balsamic vinegar marinated in soy sauce. As did the tissue-thin ribbons of bacon that lay on top of the fish, alongside burdock chips and shavings of white truffle. The final component, and the only heavy-handed moment on the plate, were some hard, crunchy \u201cchips\u201d made from deep-fried albacore tuna. Such a complex, delicious, intellectual construction! Most of our group scored it very highly indeed. If only that tea had been from Canada\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there was our gold-medal-winning dish, from chef Danny St-Pierre who has a restaurant called Auguste, in Sherbrooke. In order to make life easier for the judges, he had borrowed a downtown-Montreal restaurant space belonging to the Soupesoup chain, and was there to greet us and present his composition. His protein was beef tongue, sliced as thin as carpaccio and arranged into a rectangle on the plate. It was incredibly soft and tender \u2013 not slimy or stringy, as tongue can be \u2013 and its flavour had been subtly boosted by an umami-crazy drizzle of balsamic, soy and Vietnamese fish sauce. Truly subtle\u2026 If he hadn\u2019t described it, I wouldn\u2019t have sussed it at all. Other components were strewn about on the bed of tongue. We found shaved radish, soft discs of purple beet, crispy little croutons with the diameter of nickles that had been infused with bonemarrow, chopped chives, dots of cranberry pur\u00e9e like warm, tangy jam spiked with five-spice flavours that reached out to the wine, some finely grated parmesan. On top of it all was a quail egg, sunny side up, its runny yolk providing the simplest but most sublime of sauces to the tongue. Chef St-Pierre found his wine first and then created the dish to match it \u2013 and what a wine! It was something I had never tasted before. From the Venice range, grown and produced in Quebec by the Carone winery, it was a lightly chilled 2011 Cabernet Severnyi (a variety normally associated with the Czech Republic) \u2013 full-bodied, fruity, intense, purple, like some civilized cousin to a Baco Noir. A really good match for this dish!<\/span><\/p>\n

So we found our Montreal champion. And that concludes the Gold Medal Plates 2013 campaign. Eleven chefs are coming to Kelowna in February \u2013 on the same day that the Sochi Olympics open, coincidentally. After the intense three days of competition, we will be crowning our own Canadian Culinary Champion. If anyone would like to join me there, just let me know (<\/span>www.jameschatto.com<\/span><\/a>) and we can talk. It\u2019s going to be AWESOME.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Yesterday we flew into Montreal –\u00a0in and out – to meet up with a merry group and set out into the city in a luxurious and colourfully lit stretch charabanc to find our 2013 Montreal Gold Medal Plates champion. Ten first-class contenders had already emerged from the other 10 cities across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,92,1],"tags":[683,528,525,527],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928"}],"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=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2939,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions\/2939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}