Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

Gazette, Montreal’s last remaining English-language daily, explains it this way: “They’re like frat guys. They won’t take no for an answer.”

Between the referendums came the Quebec language wars, with the ruling PQ passing unpleasant little laws mandating the use of French in the workplace and establishing an enforcement arm called L’Office 1 4 0

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de la Langue Française. This resulted in the creation of a funny little Quebec sublanguage invented by bureaucrats—the most infamous was the transformation of hamburger into hambourgeois. It could have been amusing, but it was not.

All of these burdens—financial, political, and social—caused Montreal and Quebec to decline economically. The culinary consequences were startling. I recall, early in the eighties, a fine dinner at a restaurant above La Brioche Lyonnaise, a candy store on Saint Denis Street selling uncommonly good chocolate-covered orange peel. On my next trip, the restaurant was out of business. Once I thought I had discovered a treasure in the working-class East End of Montreal—one with, of all things, a wonderful wine list. On my second visit, a transvestite stripper was performing. I quickly gulped my sweetbreads and my 1986

Château Sociando-Mallet, then departed, never to return.

Recently, I have sensed a comeback. Even though “The Situation,” as the long-standing political unrest is known, is as discouraging as ever, and even though the city lacks money and leadership, the restaurants have a great deal to offer. The infatuation with nouvelle cuisine—that movement toward artistic, unsatisfying food that faltered quickly in France but hung on tenaciously in Quebec—seems about over. (Even today, should you see a menu découverts, or menu of discovery, in a Montreal restaurant, throw down your napkin and flee.) Indeed, there are too many bistros, too many imitators of food made in New York, too many menus découverts, but now it is possible to visit Montreal and eat nothing but good food, food boasting of authenticity and prepared with passion. After two decades of waiting and watching, William Neill has returned.

When I asked Françoise to recommend the best restaurant in the city, she hesitated. I assumed this was because we never had agreed on much when we were critics for the Star, but I was wrong. Reluctantly, she told me about a storefront restaurant called Le Passe-Partout, located on Decarie Boulevard, a few miles from downtown. She warned me that the chef was a monster; the last time she went there they F O R K I T O V E R

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argued, and he threw her out. The chef is James MacGuire. If you recall, Françoise’s real name is Bee MacGuire. They are brother and sister.

Le Passe-Partout (which has several meanings, including “pastry brush”) is small, seating only about thirty, and open not nearly enough.

MacGuire offers lunch four times a week and dinner only three. I found it difficult to get a reservation—I sure wasn’t going to drop his sister’s name—but I finally got a table on a Saturday night.

Entering the restaurant, I passed through a small retail shop offering wondrous baked goods, breads as flavorful as any in North America, plus all manner of extravagant luxury foods that nobody really needs, like wild-berry preserves from Saskatoon. In the dining area, the tables are dressed with damask cloths, the walls are a soothing peach-salmon, and a towering fresh-flower arrangement imparts luxuriousness. It’s all perfectly charming, except for a perfectly awful chrome-and-glass front window that shatters any illusion that you might be in the countryside of France. The food, however, is the sustenance of such fantasies.

I started with a mussel soup so extraordinary in flavor and so modest in quantity that I had to restrain myself from ordering a second bowl. The broth was smoky, the potatoes firm. My main course was a venison preparation conceived at least a half-century ago, thick slices from the loin matched with a pale-yellow peppery grand veneur sauce that has been used with venison as long as the French have been hanging antlers in their hunting lodges. MacGuire, I was learning, is an absolute classic French chef.

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