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

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

A L A N R I C H M A N

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

1 4 7

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