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

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.