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EATING HIS WORDS

Thirty years later, America’s most lauded restaurant critic returns to his food-writing roots and finds Montreal to be a city – and a food scene – much changed (for the better... except for the raw duck).

Text: ALAN RICHMAN
Photos: SOLOMON KRUEGER

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All the familiar faces, gone. The wolverine, the grizzly, the muskox, even the bison charging through the back wall.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“In the cemetery,” said the manager of the newly renovated Beaver Club in the Queen Elizabeth hotel. Once bedecked with bestial body parts as a tribute to the fur traders of old Montreal, the Beaver Club now resembles what it has always been, an upscale restaurant.

Over to my table, carrying a 1950s-style relish tray, came a 1960s-style waiter. He was Elias Politis, a face from my past. I recognized him from the mid-1970s, when I was the sports columnist for the now-defunct Montreal Star.

Those were the best of times, at least for the Beaver Club, which boasted 24 waiters, six captains, six busboys and two martini wagons with staffs of their own. The food was unrivalled hotel haute cuisine, featuring such fantastical French dishes as the legendary coeur du charolais soufflé aux splendeurs du Périgord. “A filet mignon sautéd in butter, topped with imported foie gras and a purée of white chicken meat with sauce périgueux,” Politis reminded me.

I had to confess that I’d never tried the dish – sportswriters are too cheap for such indulgences. Although I was also, for about a year, the restaurant critic for the Star, pairing with Bee McGuire as the pseudonymous couple William and Françoise Neill, I never reviewed the Beaver Club. I was a regular, but only for the luncheon table d’hôte.

The fare in Montreal a quarter-century ago was a particular style of French cooking not found in Larousse Gastronomique. As I recall, the city’s top chefs were fixated on flambéing and believed melted cheese would elevate any entree. My return to the Beaver Club was partly an attempt to relive past glories, but I had also come up from New York, where I now live, because I’d read in the Times that Montreal had evolved into an “international dining city.” I hoped not, because to me that phrase means “businessmen eat here.”

In the nearly 30 years since I worked in Montreal, I’ve been a frequent visitor, generally sticking to a few worthy restaurants I liked, none of them in business in my day: Toqué! (for improvisational Quebecois cuisine), Milos (North America’s best taverna) and L’Express (an iconic bistro). Yet my quibble with them all has been that they could exist elsewhere. They didn’t seem quite of the fabric of Montreal: edgy, earthy, charming, idiosyncratic.

Back in the 1970s, lunch at Montreal’s finest French restaurants cost a fraction of dinner, and I could not have been happier with what the Beaver Club recently served me for $28: that relish tray (with quail eggs!), veal carpaccio, halibut in crayfish sauce, pastry from a rolling chariot, grapes, coffee and petit fours. I particularly admired such generosity because the day before I’d sampled the $38 table d’hôte lunch at Toqué!, which is in a brand-new location and has been done up in shades so muted the entire room appears brown, not my favourite colour except when I’m shopping for shoes.

Toqué!’s special included three brilliant tuna tartare variations (one topped with salsify sprouts, one with taro chips, one with marinated zucchini) and a twin pork presentation of roasted loin (couldn’t have been better) and braised leg (couldn’t have been drier). The grand dessert finale? A cup of coffee – unadorned, clear proof that the days of the luncheon extravaganza are vanishing. A plea to chef Normand Laprise: For $38, a cookie, please.

Before coming to town, I called an old pal, Mike Boone, now the top columnist for the Montreal Gazette but in the 1970s a kid sportswriter on the Star. To be honest, I was his hero. He worshipped me.

“I’m coming back,” I said. “We’ll start with a drink at Henri Richard’s tavern…”

He interrupted me. He’d never have dared do that 30 years ago.

He said, “That hockey player-tavern thing is so 1978.”

I insisted on visiting a tavern, even if they’ve changed. Women are now legally permitted on the premises, an enlightened legislative act that has enabled their lives to be as rich and as fulfilling as men’s. We went to Magnan’s, in Pointe-Saint-Charles, once a rough-hewn joint in an industrial neighbourhood. Now Magnan’s looks like a fern bar in the Hamptons. We were asked if we desired patio seating. Boone and I shared some soggy nachos and left. Note to the ladies: It’s all yours.

Then I heard rumours that the fries at Schwartz’s weren’t what they used to be. I react to any distressing news about Schwartz’s much as a fireman responds to the call of a cat up a tree: I race to the scene. When I got there, I ordered smoked meat, Coke and fries, the same as always. The soft, peppery meat was irreproachable. The fries could have been crisper. The Coke was warm, as usual. But something was indeed wrong: The rye bread tasted like Tuscan white. I found a counterman who’d been there nearly 20 years. He swore the bread hadn’t changed.

“Tastes more white than rye,” I said.

“Well, yes, sometimes,” he said.

Finally, I paid a sentimental visit to La Binerie, a joint that has made a virtue out of the Great Depression. I particularly love La Binerie’s condiments, little pitchers of molasses and syrup. If you order beans, which you must, the molasses is indispensable. I noticed that a disproportionate number of customers were elderly folks with canes, and Boone, well-versed in provincial matters, explained: “La Binerie is part of Quebec’s vaunted social safety net. When you get to a certain age, you get a cane and a map to find your way to La Binerie.” Incidentally, the pea soup alone is worth a visit to Montreal, although you might try a few other dishes while in town.

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