With Montreal, It's a Menage a Trois

J’adore Montreal.  Beaucoup.  There.  I’ve said it.  And now you know.  Because with those three little words, I have done far more than simply profess my feelings for a new favorite city; I have just confessed, however obliquely, my recent infidelity to the city of New Orleans, my long-time secret sharer, keeper of all my best secrets, and my first North American love.

Yes, I’ve been unfaithful to New Orleans.  I’ve strayed.  Just please don’t tell anyone.

Of course I regret making a cuckquean of NOLA, really I do in that kinda-sorta way all philanders maintain, but my beloved Crescent City will surely understand—and better than most—that life is often a messy enterprise, a non-linear, often-myopic, and always-hopeful stumble from one relationship to another, and that each of us ultimately has precious little say in the matter of whom we love so truly and deeply—the way I now love Montreal.

My love affair with Montreal was never supposed to happen.  The divide between us seemed far too enormous ever to cross.  There was me:  a devotedly dirt-covered Americanist and student of all-things Southern (both the holy and repugnantly profane), whose bourbon-soaked soul and deep-fried gastronomic sensibilities have invariably led me to find fulfillment in some fried chicken shack at the end of a Mississippi gravel road.  And then there was Montreal:  haughty and aloof and insistently, irretractably Quebecois in mien, whose legendarily indifferent Francophone heart and long-held self-awareness of her old-world beauty has made her impervious to the envy and scorn of newer settlements across the North America cityscape.  That I should fall head-over-heels for the City of Saints was beyond unlikely.  But the moment I stepped out of my rideshare onto the Boulevard Saint-Laurent, I was smitten.  Because what I found in Montreal was a funky, perfectly-dirty, two-fisted drinking town smelling of freshly baked bread and freshly smoked marijuana, whose streets were teaming with young, well-inked, I-give-no-fucks fashionistas, who, to the person, looked to be in desperate need of a bath.  My kind of town.  But more than that, I found Montreal to be without peer in its mastery of the low-to-high gastronomic spectrum, a town where cooks and chefs operate, sans irony, in kitchens that are clearly and avowedly no-bullshit zones.

J’etais amoureux.

To say Montreal is a repository of gustatory joy would be a rhetorical understatement in the extreme; it is a gastronomic wonderland, a culinary Valhalla.  Every restaurant I visited, every dish I tried, was, in some disquieting and wholly unexpected way, a whispered revelation.  Because the food of Montreal seems utterly unfettered by an orthodoxia to any one fixed position on the low/high continuum.  Menus delight in the subversion of that hierarchal expectation by unapologetically juxtaposing perennial snout-to-tail classics against the latest and more fashionable golden boys du jourof the culinary haute monde.  What follows then is not a Homeric catalog of ships to guide hungry travelers to the many, many restaurants and drinking establishments of Montreal I found glorious and good, but the eateries that I believe best represent the quiescence of gastronomy in the City of Saints.  Three meals in one day.  The basics.  And by no means are any of these establishments “new” discoveries by any measure.  Each is a venerated Montreal institution and has, in most cases, been around for decades; each has been celebrated in food media the world over.  But despite the attention and accolades they’ve yet received, none of these eateries has, by all reports, been changed by the sparkle and wonder of sudden fame; each has stayed true to its primary mission of feeding the masses of Montreal what they’ve always served, the way they’ve always served it, the Food Network be damned.

BREAKFAST

St-Viateur Bagel & Fairmount Bagel

You’ve had bagels before.  I get that.  But unless you’ve been to Montreal, you haven’t had these bagels before, boy-o.  These are different.  These, inarguably, are better than any you’ve had in New York or the contiguous lower forty-eight.  Fighting words, I know, but please hear me out; the differences between the two are produced, fundamentally, by their respective terroir:  the municipal water supply of New York City is lower in magnesium and calcium carbonate, resulting in softer gluten strands and a far more pillow-like bagel.  Bagel makers of Montreal add sugar to their dough and poach their hand-rolled bagels in honey-infused water.  The Montreal bagels are then baked in wood-burning ovens, producing bagels that are smaller, denser, and inarguably crispier than their American cousins, with a noticeably larger center whole.  To eat a Montreal bagel for the first time is to surely experience the epiphany of a Magellan or Vespucci:  a new world of hitherto unseen culinary vistas opening before your very own eyes.

Of the myriad bagel shops in Montreal, two reign supreme:  St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel.  Located just blocks from another in the neighborhood of Mile End, both produce the kind of bagels whose savor will make your eyes roll back in your head; both are open 24/7 for the drunk and sober alike; both produce feverishly and deeply cult-like opinions among eaters as to which shop produces the superior bagel—divergent devotions that have reportedly divided families, ruined friendship, and sunk otherwise seaworthy marriages.  

Founded in 1957 by Krakow native and concentration camp survivor, Meyer Lewkowicz (now deceased), St-Viatueur is Montreal’s oldest and arguably revered bagel shop.  Down the street stands its archrival, Fairmount Bagel, who, beyond producing equally delicious bagels, boasts having sent the first bagel into space in 2008.  The good news:  as a visiting American, no one will ask you to swear allegiance to either bagel shop.  Just do what I did:  eat both.

BREAKFAST REDUX

Beauty's Luncheonette

Or…

If your breakfast needs demand fare of greater piquancy and heft, then you must, must, dear friend-o, have yourself delivered by foot, by car, to Beauty’s Luncheonette, which, happily enough for you, is just down the street.  Established in 1942 by Hymie Sckolnick to feed the hungry workers of Montreal’s long-storied Jewish garment district, Beauty’s produces an omelet that instantly, and upon my very first forkful, became a favorite.  The Mish Mash Omelet is a mélange of hot dogs, eggs, green peppers, onions, and salami.  It’s also a veritable first-class ticket for a synesthetic thrill ride back your own culinary childhood when eating hot dogs for breakfast was de rigueur.  As the Mish Mash Omelet shows us, it still should be.

LUNCH

Wilensky's Light Lunch

Let me be crystal clear about my feelings about Wilensky’s Light Lunch:  this is now my favorite restaurant in North America.

My.  Favorite.  Restaurant.  In.  North.  America.

Put another way:  I love Wilensky’s more than any other restaurant in which I’ve eaten.  Ever.

You dig?

So why, in a lifetime of eating, is it Wilensky’s?  Why?  Because Wilensky’s was built and 1932 and looks every year of it.  Because Wilensky’s offers a very short, very worn lunch counter over which nine—and only nine—luncheoneers may perch on nine very wobbly stools.  Because there is no flatware with which to eat; there are no plates—just the thinnest of diner-issue paper napkins comes between the decades-old Formica and your beloved Wilensky Special.  And because at Wilensky’s there are rules, each as immutable as a commandment:

Wilinsky's Special

1.      Every sandwich will come with mustard (eaters who request a sandwich sans mustard are fined 10 cents per request)

2.      No sandwich will ever be cut in half, no matter how emotional the entreaty

3.      No tipping, ever  

But it’s by the tenets of this it’s-our-way-or-you-can-fucking-leave gastronomic and aesthetic austerity that allows the good folks to focus their efforts on making the extraordinary Wilensky Special:  one slice of all-beef bologna, five slices of all-beef salami, with either Swiss or Kraft American cheese—your choice—and served on a Kaiser bun that’s been grilled on vintage, Canadian-made Serv-All sandwich presses that Moe Wilensky bought in 1932, on credit, and paid off at twenty-five cents every week.  As for the two pickles spears you’ll want to order, they come in two varieties—sour or extra sour—and are served, like your sandwich, on a paper napkin.

Paul Scheffer made my Wilensky’s Special (with Swiss and four pickles).  Paul, a long-time employee of Wilensky’s, is the Leonard Cohen of all culinarians; one senses something beatific and deeply meaningful in his most cursory gestures or observations.  We made small talk while he worked the tiny grill—when the Expos might return to Montreal, the forecast for rain—then Paul put my sandwich on a napkin and pushed it across the counter at me.  He leaned in slightly as if waiting for me to eat.  So I lifted my Wilensky Special and took a bite.  Paul arched his eyebrows and leaned in further still.

            “So?” he asked.

            And that’s when I told Paul Scheffer that the grilled bologna and salami he had just made me was the best sandwich of my entire life.

INTERMEZZO

La Vieille Europe

Let’s blame the F.D.A.  Their draconian insistence that most cheese sold in America be made from pasteurized milk has made us mediocre as makers of fine cheeses.  And that’s good for Canada.  Because topping the litany of all things that Canadians do far, far better than their continental cousins of the lower forty-eight—a list of Canadian superiority that most certainly includes ice hockey, maple syrup, and the saying of soorry—is cheese.  Because in Montreal, as elsewhere in Quebec, they’ve got the good stuff:  cheese made from raw milk and sold without the 60-day age incumbrance that leaves most American cheeses—even the very few made from raw milk—toe-tagged and gastronomically dead on arrival.  Not in Montreal.  Here, cheesemogers proffer varieties of extraordinary freshness and unabashed aggressiveness that never fail to hit the eater’s pallet like an umami bomb fired from a pretty blue gun. 

So it was with my own intermezzo of two raw-milk cheeses—the sublime Le Riopelle and the dazzling Bleu D’Elizabeth—procured from Le Vieille Europe on Boulevard Saint-Laurent and eaten avec baguette atop a grassy knoll within the summery embrace of Parc La Fontaine, just as every cheese from Quebec should.  

DINNER

Au Pied de Cochon

Duck in a Can

If there is one restaurant that singularly best exemplifies the gastronomic zeitgeist of Quebec and the epitome of culinary Montreal, it’s this:  the ever-luminous Au Pied du Cochon.  Founded in 2001 by Chef Martin Picard, the current high priest of Quebecois gastronomy, Au Pied du Cochon reigns supreme as the oink-to-quack temple of all-things-meat in a food world now increasingly beset by the dogma of plant-based diets and all of its attendant finger-wagging of the cultish quinoa-and kale bowl folks.  Not here, friend-o, not in the vegetarian-free zone that is Au Pied de Cochon.  Here you’ll find the very best of the nasty bits.  Foie gras.  Head cheese.  Beef tongue.  Boudin noir.  The celebrated classics on every true carnivore’s playlist of all-time greatest hits—the same playlist with vegetables, few as they are, being relegated to occupy the obscure B-sides among the darker nether regions of Au Pied’s long-playing menu of carnivorous delights.

My companions and I all-too-happily did our own deep dive into Au Pied’s highly curated gluttonscape of blood and guts and gastropods galore.  We ate whelks.  We ate tripe and beef tendon and blood sausage and pig knuckles, each and all braised into a state of gustatory bliss.  But what really sang Au Pied’s greatness was its infamous Duck in a Can:  a duck breast seasoned with thyme, mirepoix, and venison demi-glace, cooked in a can, then opened table-side with a can opener and served over a plate of celery root puree.  It was at this moment—amid the sucking sounds of roasted duck slowly emerging like some extraterrestrial she-devil from inside its own amniotic can—that I decided my love for Montreal was immaculate and true. 

These were my people. 

This was my tribe.

But what to tell New Orleans?  How to break the news that there was a new city in my life, a favorite surmounting all others for my greatest favors, and one that excited me in gustatory, pheromonic ways I never thought possible?

Luckily for me, the French have a phrase for such polyamory:  a menage a trois.

Go to Montreal.  Eat.  And please tell her I love her. 

A Montreal Cuisinier in Repose

La Fromagerie - Let Them Eat Cheese

Everyone needs a Frenchman like Sebastien Tavel in his life.  This means you.  Mais pourquoi?  Because Sebastian possesses all the uniquely Franco-continental qualities that we Americans so desire in our French.  He's got great hair.  Looks dashing in a turtleneck.  Speaks with an impossibly charming accent.  Displays an impeccable taste in music.  But best of all, Sebastian owns a cheese shop.  And not just any cheese shop, friend-o.  Sebastien, along with his wife, Mary, the delightful American Southern belle she is, owns and operates the almost impossibly fantastic La Fromagerie in the historic Old Town, Alexandria, neighborhood of suburban Washington, D.C.

I confess to meeting Sebastien years ago and to loving him on first sight.  Here was a dark knight of the Washington food world, I thought.  A culinary hit man.  A gastronomic assassin in chef's whites who disguised a Marco Pierre White-sized passion for food perfection inside a French-hipster insouciance, a Gallic fuck-you kind of ennui, and who would just as soon as argue about the lasting importance of The Clash versus The Sex Pistols, than ever debate the merits of, say, sauteing your shallots in truffle oil instead of virgin olive.  

But as all too commonly happens in the food business, the trajectories of our respective careers required different courses, and I didn't see Sebastien again for several years until a sudden and unrelenting craving for really, really stinky cheese brought me, almost by accident, into Sebastien's La Fromagerie.    

Cheese guys are the esoteric wack-jobs of the food industry.  The Van Goghs of the business.  The purists.  And the culinary Green Berets.  They are the guys (and gals) who peddle still-living caseins of almost infinite variety of texture and flavor to a population of neophyte consumers whose grasp of cheese making and consumption goes little beyond Velveeta, and yeah, we know, that ain't cheese.  Those of us who work in the food business work with, and eat, cheese almost daily and know, truly know, precious little about the stuff.  Sure, I could hold forth, at appreciable length, about the differences between, say, Stilton and St. Andre, but the lecture would really be all smoke and mirrors, and dog and pony show, and about as nuanced as some professorial barfly discussing the difference between bourbon and tequila--an easy trick to pull off because each, Stilton and St. Andre, bourbon and tequila, is so profoundly different and unique.  We food pros are down with the wine guy.  We throw back with the sommelier several nights a week.  He's lied to our wives for us.  He's even driven us home and helped us up the porch stairs.  But the cheese guy?  He's the guy whom you really never get to know.  He's the mystery wrapped in enigma, the guy who played too much Dungeons and Dragons in his youth and grew up a gastronome.  He's also the guy who you, the food professional, with your profound lack of true cheese knowledge, never fails to disappoint.  

Except for Sebastian, the big daddy-o of French cool.  Now this guy has got your back.  Walk into La Fromagerie on any given day and stand slack-jawed before the cheese case, packed with often-local and always-artisinal American cheeses and Sebastian will guide you through an otherwise daunting gauntlet of choices.  He will ask you what you like in cheese.  Sharp or mild?  Goat or cow?  He will listen.  He will be patient.  He will let you speak.  He will nod.  Then he will remove cheese from his case, cut you a slice and offer it across the counter.  He will tell you to put it in your mouth.  And he will watch new culinary worlds open up for you and smile his Gallic smile.  Then he will walk you over to the wine case and teach you how to say vas te faire encule to your American compatriots with a perfectly delicious bottle of French rose.

My time in Paris, in that cold water flat in the Port de Orlean, taught me, out of an abject Orwellian poverty and necessity (re:  Down and Out in Paris and London, kids), that wine and cheese were French street food, that for less than five dollars American, I could walk into any Parisian grocery and walk out, minutes later, with a truly delicious and wholly satisfying lunch of wine, bread, and yes, cheese.  I spent glorious afternoons lunching in Pere Lachaise and on Montmartre, discovering revolution in the simple acts of drinking burgundy and eating brie beside the grave of Oscar Wilde, or on the street, with all of lower Paris laid out at my feet.  And if it wasn't to be cake for the Parisian masses, wine and cheese would duly, if not gloriously, suffice.  

To encounter Sebastien's La Fromagerie was no less a culinary epiphany.  Here was a guy, albeit one already known to me, who was offering the best, freshest cheeses and charcuterie to a tourist-heavy Old Town population greatly in need (whether the knew it or not) of gastronomic enlightenment.  Here was a guy bringing the Parisian street to the people.  Here was a guy selling a food product which, at its glorious best, and heterodox to the impulse of appetite, smells much like the white shit you dig out from under your big toe.  Here was a culinary gangster.  So I did what I knew I had to do.  I bought Sebastien's cheese.  I bought the Invierno, the Kentucky Tome, the Greyson, and I bought his charcuterie, the wild boar salami, the truffled salami, and his bread, and I went home and there went at this food purly intent on learning something, intent on truly paying attention to what I was eating.  And how often does that happen in this life?  The Japanese word for epiphany is satori, which translates as kick in the eye, not the actual eyes in one's head, I suspect, but the third eye of the soul, which for foodies might not be painted in red in the middle of one's forehead, as Hindu belief suggests, but sure-as-shooting tastes like pig fat and duck liver and, yes, leaves your breath smelling exactly like cheese.

So I ate my cheese and I ate my charcuterie and I told myself I had, if not learned about cheese, per se, learned what I loved about cheese, that its flavor changes with temperature and that it's flavor changes with the passing of days and that keeping it in my home fridge, exactly as it was, was like trying to keep a Genie in a bottle, or fresh bread fresh.  It was well above my pay grade.  And it simply couldn't be done.  

So when I hurried back to La Fromagerie to inform (or bore) Sebastien of my newly minted insights into all things cheese, I discovered this moody French bastard had now added a cafe to his cheese shop and that Sebastien, now once again sporting his beloved chef's whites, was churning out (from his open, one-man kitchen in back) such bold and daring lunch-time offerings as a braised pork belly sandwich, or a classic pork rillette, or house made head cheese and duck foie gras.  When I saw this, this miracle on King Street, I knew Sebastian was the mad French culinary genius I long suspected him of being.  I knew the day had come when a guy like me could walk off the street into a perfectly inviting cheese shop, sit down to a lunch of pork belly and cold French rose, and listen to Paul Simonon of The Clash sing The Guns of Brixton.  Then and only then did I truly know the new American food revolution had come.  Then and only then did I truly know the good guys had won.

Go to La Fromagerie.  Buy some cheese.  Buy some wine.  And for the love of the gods, buy some pork belly.  Happiness awaits.  Go and be happy.  And tell Sebastien I sent you.