Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  With the venison came more observances of tradition: a puree of sweet potatoes, a few wide noodles, a sprinkling of cranberries nestled in a hollowed-out turnip. This man is the spiritual successor to Andre Bardet of Chez Bardet, but I suspect MacGuire goes to the market a lot more often than Bardet ever did.

  MacGuire and his wife, Suzanne Baron-Lafreniere, who runs the dining room as well as a basement art gallery, have been partners in Le Passe-Partout since 1981 (but at their current location for only five years). I was surprised that I had not heard a word about them, and MacGuire explained, “We are such idealists, we said at the beginning 1 4 2

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  it would be better if we had no articles about us. At the old location, we even had no sign. What happened was that the people who didn’t like us wrote anyway, and the people who did like us respected our wishes and didn’t write a thing.”

  MacGuire, who grew up in New York City, worked in a number of restaurants and patisseries in France, where his great inspiration was Charles Barrier, once a Michelin three-star chef. From Barrier he learned technique, precision, and discipline, culinary virtues that are ignored more than admired these days. He is able to emulate the food of much grander establishments by turning out a minimum of dishes each day. With one hot appetizer, one soup, one fish, and one meat dish, and with only thirty to forty customers at each luncheon or dinner, he and his two assistants are able to produce nearly flawless haute cuisine.

  So much of what he does makes sense that I could not understand his sister’s characterization of him as a monster—she likened him to the legendary Fritz Karl Vatel, a seventeenth-century majordomo entrusted with preparing a dinner for King Louis XIV of France and three thousand other guests who threw himself on his sword after learning that insufficient fish had arrived. MacGuire told me he had picked up some of his eccentricities from Barrier, who would sit in a glass-enclosed boothlike office in the center of his vast kitchen and bark orders at minions. “He’d use his microphone, and when his voice reverberated through the kitchen, it sounded like God,” MacGuire recalled. Now forty-five, MacGuire avowed that he had changed, become less willful, less obsessed. “If there is a little too much salt in the salad, I don’t say I have to make every salad, which I used to do.” As for his sister’s overall evaluation? “Well,” he said, “I can understand any chef who wants to scream.”

  Chef-owners like MacGuire were once the foundation of Montreal’s restaurant tradition, though few like him remain. To be fair, fewer and fewer like him remain in France, too. The irony, of course, is that many French-speaking French-trained chefs who in past years would have emigrated to Quebec to cook and open restaurants have gone else-F O R K I T O V E R

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  where, driven away by the political environment. They are not comfortable with the plan to make Quebec more Francophile.

  Among those who came to Quebec before The Situation is André Besson of the restaurant Laloux, who arrived in 1975 and is, like MacGuire, one of the old-world monsters. His maître d’ and sommelier, Marie-Isabelle DeVault, says, “Sometimes, for no reason at all, he screams—anything can get on his nerves.” In his defense, Besson says that at least he screams and gets it over with, while MacGuire keeps it all inside.

  Besson was born in Vienne, home of Fernand Point of La Pyramide, and so close was the Besson family to Point that the mythic chef cooked for André’s baptism. Something took, for if Point could taste Besson’s sauces, he would not be displeased. Yet to me, much of Besson’s food tastes French-Canadian, particularly his game pie. This is both unexpected and welcome, because the old habitant cuisine of Quebec (the habitants were the old French-Canadian farmers) is badly represented in most of the city’s other upscale restaurants.

  Habitant cuisine centers around game, maple sugar, beans, and salt pork, and the only refined establishment serving such preparations that I ever admired was the long-forgotten Au Quinquet. In the seventies, Françoise reviewed it favorably in the company of a perfect dining companion, a woman born near the city of Rimouski, one of eighteen children whose mother died at age forty giving birth to twins. In French-Canadian Quebec, such a family scenario was not unique.

  Today, when I want a taste of this classic heavyweight fare, I stop in at La Binerie, on Mont-Royal. I usually go for breakfast, taking a seat at the counter and ordering the number two, which comes with coffee, home fries, feves au lard (beans), a couple of eggs over, two slices of thick toast, and an assortment of odd meats (canned ham, a fatty pork pâté called cretons, crisp bacon, and a morsel of mushy but much-beloved Montreal-style hot dog), all served on a rectangular pale-green plate that looks like a treasure from a yard sale. The cost: less than three dollars.

  Should you stop in later in the day, you can choose from among the dishes that helped very large families through very long winters: sliced 1 4 4

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  veal hearts, yellow pea soup, meatball-and-pig’s-feet stew, even pouding chômeur (“unemployed pudding”), a thick, coarse homemade cake soaked in syrup that’s a leftover from the Depression.

  For the daring, those interested in sampling the extremes of French-Canadian cooking, I suggest breakfast at La Binerie and dinner at Toque, which is located on Saint Denis Street. Toque, in this case, does not refer to the tall, traditional chef ’s hat. Here it means “crazy,” which can refer to the decor, kind of post-Kandinsky modernistic, or to the food, mystical combinations arranged in perilous sculpted stacks. For that matter, it probably can refer to the chef ’s hat—Chef Normand Laprise sports a cap that looks like a cross between a yarmulke and a fez. If La Binerie offers essential French-Canadian staples, Toque’s specialty is impressionistic French-Canadian fabrications.

  Laprise, who comes from eastern Quebec, is the most accomplished of Montreal’s new-style chefs, the ones who operate what Françoise likes to call “hard-surface bistros,” small places without homeyness. The restaurants are multitudinous, but none are as successful as Toque. I went there with my friend Boone, the ex-sportswriter, who ate as though he hadn’t had a good meal since the Star cafeteria closed. The most stunning dish was grilled salmon over chop suey over a grapefruit-orange salsa, and it convinced me that Laprise is the rarest of all chefs, an apparently out-of-control improviser with absolute command over his food and his impulses.

  I selected two desserts—a warm crème brûlée filled with poached pears and a mille-feuille that turned out to be not a mille-feuille at all but a flourless chocolate cake enclosed in a thin puff-pastry crust, sort of an une-feuille. While Boone ate both, I asked Laprise how he could possibly find time to prepare such complicated food at lunch, and he answered, “This is not very complicated. We are more elaborate at night.” Like most chefs in Montreal, he loves to boast that his food is cuisine de marché, or “market food,” the freshest of the day. When I told him that every chef says this about his food, he replied, “Yes, they all say this about their food, but theirs is frozen.” F O R K I T O V E R

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  “After you left,” Françoise said to me, “about fifteen years ago, I got tipped off by a Greek teaching at the University of Athens about this man, Costas Spiliadis, who had a restaurant and is one of the crazy people. You know, there’s a long tradition of divine madness in Greece.

  He’s one of them.”

  Françoise was always the philosopher-critic, discerning high purpose in the eating process. (I sometimes felt that way, but only about Montreal’s smoked meat.) When she learned about Spiliadis, she was the editor of Montreal magazine and wanted to write about him and his Parc Avenue restaurant, called Milos. He resisted. He was an outsider in the local Greek community, and he felt he would become even more of one if she wrote about his standards being higher than everyone else’s. “He’s into angst easily,” Françoise said.

  Spiliadis, whose Greek parents wanted the best for their son, came to the United States in 1966
to study criminology at New York University. He left for Canada, he says, without a smile, after everybody in New York City insisted on calling him “Gus” instead of Costas. When he finally settled in Montreal, he did what many Greeks do. He opened a restaurant.

  Because he didn’t care for the wholesale fish markets of Montreal, he’d drive twice a week to the Fulton Fish Market in New York City, a 750-mile round trip, with American cash in his pocket. He traveled in an old Chevrolet Impala that belonged to one of his waiters, and eventually he put so many miles on the engine and sloshed so much melted ice on the upholstery that he had to buy the worn-out, water-soaked, fishy-smelling car. He crossed the border so often that the customs officials started waving him through. “The joke was that I’d gone fishing,” he says. “If not, they’d have made me fill out all these forms.” His obsessions never diminished. Ten years ago, a prominent customer, a judge, disparaged the bathrooms of Milos, so Spiliadis obtained marble from Greece—full slabs of Penteli marble, the softest and 1 4 6

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  most feminine kind—and he built bathrooms from that. The rest of his restaurant is not nearly so formal. With its blue-and-white checked tablecloths, broad-beamed wooden floor, and displays of fresh fish on crushed ice, Milos resembles a Mediterranean restaurant reserved for the very elegant or the very wealthy. Actually, it does take considerable assets to dine here, because it is probably the most expensive restaurant in the city.

  His fish is perfect. His vegetables are perfect. Everything is as perfect as mania can make it. When I asked him why he insists on such high quality, he replied, “Until people made me aware of that question, I never knew there was such a question.” I went for dinner with Françoise, and when he recognized her, he brought her what I am certain was the best radish ever grown. What madness, for a man to be fixated on radishes.

  The grilled shrimp were flawless, although he needlessly apologized that they were from the Carolinas and not the Gulf of Mexico.

  The octopus was slightly charred and so luscious in texture it reminded me of filet mignon. It was octopus from Tunisia. Only Tunisian octopus would do. Still to come was unrealistically fresh goat cheese from Ontario made by a family from Crete and topped with thyme honey, the richest honey I’ve ever tasted, from the island of Kythira, in Greece.

  You come to Milos, you not only get one of the best meals in Montreal, you also get a geography lesson.

  Once, says Spiliadis, his mother flew from Greece to see the son she had sent to North America for schooling, the one who is only a thesis short of a master’s degree. The visit worried him. “Greeks are notorious,” Spiliadis said. “Send us to university, educate us, we end up opening a restaurant. She came in here, her head down, didn’t look around, didn’t say a thing.” After she ate, I said to her, “ ‘Did you like it?’ She said to me, ‘Eh.’ ”

  He is forty-nine years old now, a bear of a man with a boyish face and an existence that Françoise describes as “an insane pilgrimage.” His restaurant is among the most admirable in North America, what Le Bernardin in New York would be if it were a taverna. When Françoise F O R K I T O V E R

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  said to him, “What is it that you are the first in all of Canada to accomplish?” he was ready with a reply. His expression was so sorrowful, I suspected the two of them had rehearsed their exchange, like an old vaudeville team. “Betray my mother,” he said.

  In recent years, the policies of the provincial government of Quebec have discouraged English-speaking immigrants and welcomed whole-heartedly those from other nations. I’ve always thought of this as part of the grand and misguided strategy of the Parti Québecois: in theory, downtrodden immigrants would be so grateful for admission they would plunge into French language classes and help turn Quebec into a neo-Gallic workers’ paradise.

  This master plan has failed to triumph, because what immigrants really want is to learn English. They’re not dumb. They quickly figure out that English is a good language to know if you’re going to live in North America. Those who cannot speak English tend to continue conversing in their native language, which isn’t what the Parti Québécois wants, either. All these political and demographic changes have done nothing for the cause of French cuisine, simply because immigrants from places other than France are seldom fascinated by stuffed quails à la gourmande.

  Not counting the English, the dominant ethnic minority in Montreal is the Italians, but I never think of them as a minority because Italian food is so mainstream. Most fascinating to me, perhaps because I’m irresistibly drawn to the cuisine, is the community of Eastern Europeans, many of them Jews. Back when immigration was measured by the boatload, Eastern European families made their homes on or near Saint Lawrence Street, which was once so relevant to the commerce and culture of the city it was referred to simply as “The Main.” To this day, Saint Lawrence is an ethnic neutral zone, dividing eastern, French-speaking Montreal from western, English-speaking Montreal.

  Saint Lawrence no longer feels like the first step in every immigrant’s excursion into the New World, a place where avant-garde meant chicken liver light on the chicken fat. Today a restaurant customer is as likely 1 4 8

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  to be offered a Bellini as borscht. In part the changes have come about because of a Jewish exodus from Quebec. The Parti Québécois has never done anything to Jews except encourage them to stay in Quebec, but whenever Jews find themselves in a culture that seems intolerant of linguistic and cultural diversity, they start packing. The Jewish population of Montreal, once well over one hundred thousand, is slowly but inexorably declining.

  There have been reverberations. Montreal’s legendary smoked meat, which tastes a little like corned beef and a lot like pastrami, hasn’t been the same since the Parti Québécois came to power.

  The one restaurant on The Main that has not changed is the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen and Steak House, known everywhere as Schwartz’s. The Schwartz brothers are long gone, but the fame of this delicatessen and steak house (it really isn’t either) has never faltered.

  Schwartz’s has been in business since the 1920s, which is almost certainly the last time a decorator stopped by. The joint is long and narrow, with a single aisle that might have been the prototype for aisles in the coach-class sections of aircraft. On one side is counter service; on the other are tables with seats for six or eight. Communal dining works effortlessly here, because Schwartz’s customers have been eating at Schwartz’s for so long they understand the art of not annoying strangers.

  The waiters are fine if you order what everybody orders at Schwartz’s—smoked meat medium, Coke, french fries. They are too old and ireful to deal with variations. Each and every one has mastered the art of putting your food down in front of you and quickly turning away before you can ask for something extra.

  The smoked meat is hot, thick, and peppery, and it looks just swell, but for decades I’ve been thinking it isn’t as good as it used to be. Vic Vogel, an acquaintance of mine who grew up a few blocks from Schwartz’s, always orders his with extra fat. You can specify lean, medium, or fat, but nobody I know asks for extra fat except Vogel, who is sixty and apparently in good health. He says as long as you eat a F O R K I T O V E R

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  little pickle with it, the fat breaks down in your system. I wouldn’t ordinarily believe such nonsense, but he says his mother eats just like he does and she’s ninety-five.

  The french fries are superb. I don’t believe I’ve ever visited Montreal without stopping at Schwartz’s for fries, even if it means double-parking outside and running inside for a bag. The Cokes are warm.

  They have always been warm, even back when they were Pepsis. It can be minus forty degrees Celsius outside (which is the same as minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, one of the things you learn when you live in Montreal) and the Cokes at Schwartz’s will be warm. Should you attempt to get ice from your waiter, he will return ten minutes later with a glass holding
the two smallest ice cubes you’ve ever imagined, ice cubes that will have no effect at all on the warmth of your Coke.

  Up the street is Moishe’s, a steak house that was once a lot like Schwartz’s, but the owners put some money into fixing the place up.

  At best they had mixed results. Outside, Moishe’s looks a little too much as if it’s boarded up. Vogel calls the interior “Jewish provincial,” a pretty good description. Moishe’s was founded by the late Moishe Lighter. His sons, who now run the place, don’t let you forget. Open the menu and the first thing you see is a full-page photo of Moishe.

  “Moishe was a very happy man,” Vogel says. “As you were leaving, he’d hand you a candy and say, ‘Don’t go to Schwartz’s.’ ” If Schwartz’s looks like it’s from the twenties, Moishe’s looks like it’s out of the seventies, which isn’t good, considering that it was remodeled in the eighties. Even the customers look like they’re from the seventies. As I was walking in, the guy walking out was bundled in a massive fake-fur coat that he could have picked up at Joe Namath’s garage sale. The customers, few of whom are youthful, tend to dress in business suits and sequined dresses. Vogel calls them “Jews of a certain generation.” He’s not Jewish, but he can get away with talking like that because everybody thinks he is.

  Moishe’s can be wonderful, especially if you get the right waiter, which we did. We got Franky, who has been there for forty-three years and still looks young, a testament to the curative powers of marinated 1 5 0

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  herring in cream sauce. Proudly he told me, “In 1976 I served the pope.