Most top chefs wouldn’t be caught dead serving Spam. But Frédéric Morin and David McMillan, two of Canada’s hottest chefs and the masterminds of Montreal’s wildly successful Joe Beef restaurant, wouldn’t be caught dead apologizing for using the cheap, tinned meat.
“Spam is like chipped ham. It’s good,” Mr. McMillan insists. “It’s delicious.”
Spam makes a cameo appearance in the duo’s unconventional book The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts, a widely anticipated tome written with one of their original Joe Beef staff members, Meredith Erickson, released this month. The heavily processed pork is recommended as an ingredient in their oeufs en gelée recipe. Like other recipes in their book, such as “pork fish sticks,” “kale for a hangover” and “smoked cheddar with doughnuts,” this is not intellectual food. Their food aims straight for the gut.
It’s cheeky dishes such as these that exemplify Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan’s disdain for culinary snobbery. And their irreverence toward everything but that which tastes good has won them legions of fansthroughout North America and beyond, including renowned New York chef David Chang, who considers Joe Beef his favourite restaurant. Their names have been mentioned in the likes of Food & Wine magazine, The New York Times and Bon Appétit.
“Pretension is the enemy of good food and good wine,” Mr. McMillan says.
“When I make a dish and it’s too beautiful, I hate myself,” Mr. Morin adds.
With their opening of Joe Beef in 2005, and their subsequent Little Burgundy neighbourhood restaurants Liverpool House and McKiernan Luncheonette, Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan have helped shape Montreal’s food scene, setting the bar for unfussy, yet indulgent, cuisine. If they weren’t well-recognized already, their new book, part cookbook, part memoir, part Montreal guide and instruction manual, is certain to bring them even more celebrity. Besides Mr. Chang, the book is endorsed by a host of culinary personalities, including television host and author Anthony Bourdain, Montreal chef Chuck Hughes and trailblazing Los Angeles chefs Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook. But unlike other internationally acclaimed chefs, Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan say they have no ambitions to expand their reach, host their own TV cooking shows or run restaurants outside their own city.
“You can’t live the life according to Joe Beef if you’re, like, [operating a business empire], you see what I’m saying? Then we can’t be who we pretend to be,” Mr. McMillan says.
As it happens, living the life according to Joe Beef is full of paradoxes. Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan loathe taking food and drink too seriously, yet they seriously love good food and drink. They’ll tell you they don’t care what anyone else thinks, but they lose sleep if their customers leave unsatisfied. Their success would be impossible without putting in long hours and plenty of elbow grease, yet they pride themselves in appearing not to work hard. As Mr. Chang writes in the foreword of their book, “It almost seems like they’re trying not to try.”
Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan have a love of history and tradition that is reflected in their food. Their “dining car calf liver” dish, for example, is inspired by an old Canadian National Railway menu. Their “Pojarsky de veau” veal meatball on a veal chop bone is based on a French classic, purported to be created by the favourite innkeeper of Russia’s Czar Nicholas.
Yetthey attribute their culinary careers, in part, to being incredibly picky eaters as children. Mr. McMillan says his mother claims he ate nothing but Premium Plus saltine crackers for two years, while Mr. Morin recalls going through a phase of eating only saltines, Chef Boyardee ravioli and hardboiled eggs with tiny packets of salt.
