At Leméac restaurant, chef Charles E. Pariseau sautées escargots in a tomato confit with portobello mushrooms, then covers them with a sweet basil mousse to fashion one of the trendy restaurant's most popular appetizers.
The snail dishes at Leméac are a far cry from the traditional French escargots à l'ail, or snails in their shells swimming in garlic butter.
That clichéd preparation, which dominated the menus of high-end restaurants for decades, fell out of fashion during the 1990s as restaurant goers became more sophisticated and demanded more subtlety in flavouring. Once served in reusable shells and eaten with the assistance of awkward clamps, the gastropods disappeared from all but a few traditional French establishments in Montreal.
These days, though, escargots are staging a comeback at Montreal eateries - and they've shed the fake shells and extra butter. At Leméac, where lunch sometimes features snails with veal juice and bone marrow, Mr. Pariseau says he's "taking something old and making it new."
At Halte Urbaine, chef Ian Perreault serves escargots with caramelized onions and yogurt. "It's something retro that's very in style now," says Mr. Perreault, who also serves the traditional buttery version on his lunch menu in a dish called Escargots Old Fashioned.
Probing top chefs about snails, however, is a bit like asking an artist about house painting. In North America, snails are an inexpensive canned product with a neutral taste and texture that works with most preparations - not qualities valued by today's gourmets looking for freshness and originality.
"It's something you can pull out of the cupboard," admits Chuck Hughes, executive chef and co-owner of Old Montreal's Garde-Manger, one of the city's hippest eateries. "There's a simplicity factor."
The most famous snails hail from Burgundy, where production is tightly controlled by the French government. Although the same species is also farmed in Eastern Europe, at a cheaper price for consumers, the majority of snails served in Canadian restaurants are a smaller, even cheaper version called le petit gris, farmed in Indonesia, Thailand, China and Greece. Snails are not produced in Canada.
Known for its nutty flavour, le petit gris is about one-third the size of the Burgundy snail. The larger version can still be collected in the wild in Europe.
The canned version comes swimming in brine, without the shell. The snails have completed an eight-day fast to remove impurities from their digestive system that could be toxic to humans, says Jean-Louis Thémistocle, chef and instructor at the Institut de Tourisme et d'Hôtellerie du Québec.
Mr. Thémistocle says it's important to add fat when cooking snails because the herbivores are mostly composed of water, so they're lean. He prepares them with cream, carrot, white wine, fish stock and a bit of curry, or he mixes them with bacon, sautéed onions, peppercorn and watercress.
"This isn't Europe," Mr. Thémistocle says. "We are not dogmatic about recipes."
Mr. Hughes, of Garde-Manger, says escargots are going through a "revolutionary" period, considering he learned only two preparations in cooking school a decade ago - escargots à l'ail and a version baked with cream and fennel in a phyllo pastry pouch.
He didn't imagine chic Montrealers would be interested in either. But he was inspired by the popularity of sea snails, or whelks, after touring top gastropubs in the Britain, where the marine creatures, served steamed in salt water, are considered a delicacy.
When Garde-Manger opened last summer, with a new menu each evening, Mr. Hughes put whelks from New Brunswick on seafood platters. Montrealers weren't interested, so he created dishes that showcased their more familiar land-loving cousins.
He's prepared escargots in a red-wine sauce with chorizo sausage, arugula and cheese - an homage to his previous job as a chef at Spanish tapas bar Tapeo. He has also served escargots in a black bean sauce, a common preparation in Chinatown, and deep-fried them, calamari-style, to serve with a lemon aioli. He's even used them as a garnish on mushroom and onion soup.
"Sometimes it's a little weird," he says. "It's an education for the customer."
