“Kids that ate everything? They’re not discriminating now,” Mr. Morin says. “People that eat everything are the people who put like … beets and grapefruit jelly on oysters. You know? The only way that could taste good is if it doesn’t taste like beets and grapefruit.”
The two met more than 15 years ago, when Mr. McMillan dined at Montreal restaurant Toqué!
“I was working in the restaurant in the basement,” Mr. Morin recalls. “David came down in a sheepskin coat, the [kind] where you turn over the collar and it’s all like fuzzy and nice and he had his hands in his pockets, and that nonchalance was what got me at first.”
Mr. McMillan denies ever wearing such a coat. Regardless, the two clicked and they’ve never spent more than a month apart since. They share the same culinary sensibilities. (As Mr. McMillan explains, they both agree that “a small piece of cod looks stupid and a big piece of cod looks good.”) Both have worked in fine dining. Both have worked in grocery retail. And if it weren’t for cooking, their lives would likely have been much bleaker. (Mr. McMillan says he came “damn close” to becoming a serious drug dealer.) They share the same sense of humour, the same habit of peppering their speech with curse words. They can count on one hand the number of times they’ve quarrelled with each other, and they finish each other’s sentences.
Take the following exchange, for instance, when Mr. McMillan is asked about a reference in their book to rumours that he threw busboys into dumpsters:
DM: “Who did we throw into a dumpster? If we threw someone in the dumpster, it was a cook … Pelo! Pelo we threw in the dumpster.”
FM: “No, for his birthday, some kid for his birthday or something …”
DM: “Maybe it’s JD in the freezer?”
FM: “No, we put JD – we put a cook half-naked in the freezer with Saran wrap and ketchup …”
DM: “… in his ears. And then we sent another busboy downstairs to get ice … so when he opened the freezer, all he saw was a dead body, wrapped in Saran wrap with blood in the ears. So he freaked. He actually took his stuff and never came back. He thought we were a Mafia restaurant.”
Clearly, the two enjoy playing practical jokes on their staff. But they walk a careful line between work and horseplay. Working at their restaurants means handling everything from tending the garden to sewing sausage bags to firing up the meat smoker. Every so often, they count on each other to play the role of bad cop to keep staff on their toes.
“Instead of him having a confrontation with [a staff member], he’ll put it on my back,” Mr. McMillan says. “Which is fine because I put tons of stuff on his.”
Besides having each other to rely on, Mr. Morin and Mr. McMillan emphasize that their families keep them grounded. They may be among the few acclaimed chefs who don’t regard food as their top priority. It’s their families and their interests beyond the kitchen that keep them in good humour. Mr. Morin loves gardening and tinkering in his workshop; Mr. McMillan paints.
Each has two children, of whom they speak with blissful, almost rapturous, expressions. The abrupt change in their manners while discussing their domestic lives hints at what may be essential to their own art of living, and why they never want to get too big.
“What happens when you do that, your quality of life will suffer,” Mr. McMillan says. “I don’t want to do other things.”
