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

When Desperation Begets Perfection - Hoosier Mama Pie Company - Chicago

Pie was never this cool. Not where I was from.  Not in rural Missouri.  Not in the 1970s.  Pie then seemed the default setting of middle-American culinary laxity and the thing you brought to church socials and offered to new neighbors and won in elementary school raffles.  Pie was the snooze button on culinary innovation.  It was old fashioned.  And it appeared on restaurant menus and family dinner tables like some artifact of a bygone era, always dolloped, it seemed, with the Pleistocene miasma of culinary decay.  It was emblematic of everything a child of that time and place didn’t want at the end of a meal.  Pie wasn’t Pop Rocks. It wasn’t Laffy Taffy.  It sure as shooting wasn’t Zots.  Pie was the foodstuff of octogenarians and culinary nostalgists.  It was soft food for farm people with leaky, Depression-era memories and bad teeth, and its ubiquity in our young American lives made it an object of ridicule and scorn for all the cool kids across the Show-Me state.  Because cool like this pie was most certainly not.

Not until the seventeen-year-old version of myself had chanced across Kerouac’s famous pie references in On the Road did I first get a whiff of pie’s inherent panache and élan.  Not until I had read Kerouac’s confession that pie was “practically all [he] ate all the way across the country” did I consider pie’s place in the pantheon of the culinary hip.  But it wasn’t until my accidental career as a thirty-year-old culinarian brought me into daily contact with some truly great pastry chefs did I truly begin to understand that pie is simple, and that simple is almost always really, really hard, and that the intricate interplay among butter, flour, and water in the making of pie dough is as ethereal as the rendering of gastronomic gold in an alchemist’s kitchen.  Pie is magical.  And no one—and I mean no one—is making better pie in the American Midwest these days than Chef Paula Haney and her crew of cool kids at the Hoosier Mama Pie Company in Chicago.  

Paula Haney is just the kind of chef that professional culinarians and food careerists like me love to love.  She is the once-nascent amateur turned celebrated virtuoso, whose rise to culinary acclaim came through years of fantastically hard work, making her bones (in the parlance of this industry), as she did, in some of the most demanding fine-dining kitchens in the country.  Haney is a chef’s chef.  A pro’s pro. A savant of the sweet stuff who walked away from the high-wire act of fine dining to pursue her possibly financially-ruinous passion for all-things-pie.  It’s a theme found in many of the winning narratives across this business, and it’s a central trope to most stories that speak to self-sacrifice on the path to culinary greatness:  the late-to-the-game, self-taught outsider who risks it all for a glittering, gastronomic prize.  And it's Haney’s daring, as well as her hard-won triumph, that has made her a much-beloved figure in the world of Chicago food.  

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Haney majored in journalism at Indiana University.  It was only when she failed to find work as a reporter—so the story goes—did Haney first take up a rolling pin in anger.  First as a five-dollar-an-hour baker for a Bloomington, Indiana, area coffee shop, and then, later, two hours to the north, in our shared big city of Chicago, as head pastry chef at Pili.Pili, One Sixtyblue, and, finally, Trio, with then-gastronomic wonder boys, Shaun McClain and Grant Achatz. But for all her prowess as a pastry chef, I believe its Haney’s non-culinary antecedents as a writer (e.g.: big, huge brain; sweet tooth for culinary context and gastronomic intertextuality between savory and sweet), as well as her origins as Hoosier-state native, that have all happily coalesced in producing what is easily the best desperation pie I’ve ever encountered, and what may very well be the best piece of pie in Middle America:  the Hoosier sugar cream pie.

For those yet unfamiliar with desperation pies—or “make-do” pies, if you’re from Missouri—they are the very definition of locavorism and seasonality in gastronomy:  they are what your deprivation-addled, pre-refrigeration-era forebears made for dessert when the larder was empty and local trees had stopped fruiting—when ingredients like vinegar and sugar, molasses and cream, were all that might be had for these hard-scrabble, seasonally-bound, intrepid early bakers.  Desperation pies are the very acme of thrift in baking, and they represent the high-water mark of making due—and making delicious—with whatever ingredients might be on hand. 

Chef Haney’s Hoosier sugar cream pie is the supreme archetype of the desperation pie and the best shot we mortals have at experiencing the Platonic ideal of godliness in pie.  Made with just eggs, cream, brown sugar, and vanilla paste, Haney’s Hoosier pie has the mouthfeel of a cloud and the savor of a custard that has politely declined the opportunity to become butterscotch.  It evokes the best in American gastronomic ingenuity, and it’s so deeply and ridiculously delicious that I found myself—fork in hand—pounding on the Hoosier Mama table with every miraculous, perfect little bite.

When desperation begets culinary perfection, it tastes like this.  I think Kerouac would agree.

Your link: Hoosier Mama Pie Company

Swinging For the Fence With Chef Robin Choi - Chicago

Accidents happen.  This we know.  Houses catch on fire.  Planes crash.  Men like Donald J. Trump are elected President of the United States.  Accidents are part of the integral calculous of modernity and the differential geometry of occasional bad luck to which we are all inevitably consigned and which, on better days, we are able to accept with the implacable what-me-worry shrugs of Hindu cows.  Like when the door of your shiny new car catches its first ding.  Or when you trip over a shoe lace and skin your knee.

Not all accidents are bad or ruinous, of course.  Among our everyday lives there transpire the happy accidents of serendipity and kismet.  Like the purchase of a winning lottery ticket. The chance meeting of a future lover. The discovery of a newly-made acquaintance’s forgotten phone number on a matchbook inside the pocket of a newly washed pair of blue jeans.  And while these strokes of good fortune often appear, at first glance, to be inconsequential, experience teaches us they can be agents of transformation and epiphany secreted inside yawns of the seemingly mundane.  Like the day I took my eleven-year-old son to our local batting cages to work on his swing, only to encounter some of the most honest, genuine, and forward-thinking food purveyance I’ve yet experienced in a year of eating across my new hometown of Chicago.

That’s right, boy-o:  some of the best streetfood I’ve yet encountered in the Chicago area was found at my local batting cages.  Batting cages, dude.

To imagine Stella’s Batting Cages and Pro Shop as a mothership of gastronomic good works does require, on the part of the casual observer, exquisite powers of invention—that much I’ll grant you.  Situated next to the perennially porous banks of the Des Planes River on what is euphemistically known—in the patois of unscrupulous real estate agents, at least—as “bottomland” (re:  flood prone) at the periphery of the none-too-remarkable township of Lyons, Illinois, just twelve miles southwest of downtown Chicago, Stella’s has, however, been the place since 1986 for girls and boys to perfect the sweetest science in all of sports:  to hit an 80-mile-per-hour fastball with a 32-inch aluminum bat.  Nothing—and I mean nothing—about Stella’s outwardly suggests culinary excellence. Nothing about Stella’s belies the fact that it stands as a shining gastronomic Brigadoon in a suburban food desert otherwise bereft of culinary excellence.  But that’s part of Stella’s quiet genius:  to have the extraordinary juxtaposed with the ordinary, and in plain sight for everyone to see.

My eleven-year-old son wanted a chili dog after some swing time in the cages; I wanted a beer. We quit the cages and entered the adjoining restaurant space, happily resigned, as we were, boy and man, to our certain and respective culinary fates of a dirty water dog indifferently topped with canned chili, and warm, cut-rate, piss-colored beer in a plastic cup.  What we found in Stella’s, instead, was a veritable wonderland of self-described “ballpark-centric” Korean-American-themed streetfoods.  Oh, sure, the hand-lettered menu above the counter offered—then as now—all the obligatory ballpark fare you’d ever want and expect at a sports complex: the nachos, the pizza puffs, and the cheese sticks of ho-hum middle-American culinary complacency.  But next to these tried-and-true culinary workhorses of sports-related cookery loomed an astonishing litany of what Stella’s calls “ballpark specials”:  an unlikely lineup of quasi-Korean-centric streetfoods representing various regional ballparks—and cuisines—from around the lower forty-eight, and beyond.  Representing Philadelphia, for instance, was a fried pork belly sandwich with gilled pineapple and Korean red-pepper paste mayo. From Montreal, a Quebecois poutine with jus-made-gravy and giardiniera.  Out of Houston: the crispy buttermilk fried chicken thighs with salted maple honey butter in a waffle cone.  And beer. Cans of the really good stuff. But it was the presence of sushi—made-to-order, no less—that sent me to my iPhone and down Google’s all-consuming rabbit hole of information to discover what kind fever-addled madman would so foolishly dare to offer this kind of cuisine in the middle of a fly-over, suburban wasteland, populated with gastronomic indifference and culinary mediocrity.

Texas Rangers Choomongous

Chef Robin Choi. That’s who.

To read Chef Choi’s biography is to chart the course of a journeyman culinary auteur through the all-important stops of an already-remarkable career:  Ra Sushi. Kabocha.  Japonais By Morimoto.  Yusho.  Dukku. Furious Spoon.  The list of restaurants under his belt is dazzling.  Especially for a 38-year-old guy.  So why, then, would Choi walk away from it all?  Why would Choi forsake the loving (and often lucrative) embrace of the culinary establishment to instead set out on his own, in a woebegone kitchen space, contiguous to batting cages, and populated by a mostly-apathetic eating public, in a one-lunged suburban Chicago town?  

To know a chef, any chef—Choi and all his brethren cooks of a certain advanced age—is to know that the answer to this question is self-evident, because all chefs, the truly driven among them, at least, eventually require creative autonomy in their own kitchens and a greater—never lesser—degree of financial independence from the soul-sucking culinary compromises inherent in any venture funded by (and beholden to) restaurant groups and return-hungry investors.  Ownership is everything.  Independence is the whole game.  So Choi bought Stella’s to make his stand.  Just how—and where—Choi has chosen to express his hard-won and high-stakes freedom was (and remains) of abiding interest to me, so I did what I thought would reveal the greatest insight into this maverick chef’s soul: I put down my iPhone and ordered his food. 

Camden Yards Soft Shell Crab

I ordered three menu items of whose savor I was admittedly skeptical.  Not because I doubted Choi’s prowess as a culinarian, but because the regionality of the dishes seemed far too specific for Choi to pull off there, in that tiny Stella’s kitchen, next to those batting cages, with any real or accomplished degree of fidelity to the original versions to which they aspired, or with any real degree of uniformity of success among the three if Choi somehow managed to not screw them up.  The Kilimanjaro-like degree of difficulty of succeeding on all three dishes appeared far too high for Choi to surmount, I thought.  There was simply too much working against him.  And I wasn’t entirely convinced he had the juice or resources to pull any one of these dishes off.  But I ordered anyway.  Gleefully. I ordered the Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich, the Texas Rangers Choomongous (re: Korean-style steak, kimchee slaw), and the Camden Yards soft shell crab sandwich, then sat across from my son, across all that food, and ate.

To say Choi’s food was delicious would be an understatement. It was beyond delicious, actually; it was sublime, transcendent of context and limitation, deep in complexity of textures and layers of depth of flavor, and yet forthright in its deliverance of perfectly-balanced piquancy and goodness, while palpably devoid of all pretense.  And all of this served, without ceremony, by Choi himself, in Stella’s dining space, which is clearly and steadfastly a bullshit-free zone. Choi’s food is the perfect amalgam of haute and the ordinary, of fancy and plain, of the exotic and familiar.  It’s food for foodies.  Food for the masses.  Food for you and me.  And it’s exactly the kind of food I want to eat every time I go out to eat.

Nashville Hot Chicken 

But something else happened while I was eating Robin Choi’s food.  Something almost unique in my experience as an eater.  Something magical.  For after coming out from behind the counter to ask if my food was okay (my mouth was too full to lavish Choi with the much-deserved superlative of best soft-shell crab ever), I watched Chef Choi approach a nearby table, where sat two older adults and two young children.  And by the almost wordless intimacy and winking conviviality that passed among the five of them, I saw the adults were Choi’s parents, and that the two children were Choi’s kids, and that Choi’s entire enterprise at Stella’s—the batting cages, the pro shop, the exquisite ballpark food—has been built not just on the pursuit of culinary excellence—that seems merely a happy and inevitable result of Choi’s protean abilities as a cook—but on the idea of a family’s collective pursuit of prosperity (or some facsimile thereof) through the collaborative experience of hard work.  That is still the most beautiful and most American of ideas that I know, and to see its value similarly prized by the Choi family made me want Choi to succeed at this crazy endeavor in a way I rarely—if ever—feel for a chef in this most-Darwinian world of food purveyance.

I want Robin Choi to win at this.

Eat his food, and you will, too.


Your link:  Stella's Batting Cages & Pro Shop