Choufleur a la rotisserie, a dish served up at Vin Papillon, a wine bar with a large selection of "natural" wines in downtown Montreal, November 19, 2014.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
I've seen my wife drunk twice. Both times were on visits to Montreal and both times were the result of gargantuan, debauched meals filled with unconscionable amounts of fat, meat, cheese, cream and booze that left us shattered and hungover for days afterward. There was a time when it seemed as if Montreal's whole culinary identity was defined by rivers of fat, copious lashings of liquor and riotous excess.
"We used to kill people with tasting menus at DNA," admits chef Derek Dammann (and my co-author on the True North cookbook) about meals at his previous restaurant. Now, at Maison Publique (his new eatery) he's abandoned the tasting menu altogether and focuses on smaller plates where vegetables and greens are often front and centre.
He's not alone in this city. Over the past couple of years, there's been a shift away from unbridled excess. Montreal has embraced a new, lighter way of eating that cherishes beets as much as bone marrow, Brussels sprouts as much as bacon and figs as much as foie gras. The city hasn't gone vegetarian – banish the thought – but meat is taking a back seat and it seems the whole town has lightened up.
If there's any lingering prejudice that eating healthier is more austere and less fun, chef Charles-Antoine Crête's new restaurant, Montreal Plaza, will quickly dispel that tired notion. When I arrive the chef is wheeling his pet bird, Jazz, out of the restaurant's flower-arranging room, past the film studio and over toward the collection of grandfather clocks. No sooner am I seated than there's a drink in front of me and in short order a plate of vibrant vegetables in a clear, smoked tomato broth with a few plump mussels for protein. For a delicate soup it packs a punch.
Chef Crête stops by to say hello and I ask him about the move away from gargantuan proteins and heart-stopping meals. "We're all cooking totally differently now," he says. "The reflex we had was always to put the meat and then put the vegetable around, but here I don't want to do big main courses I want the menu to be the way I like to eat. If I eat vegetables and fish, I can drink, like, 17 bottles of white wine and still be partying. If I start to drink red wine and eat meat, I'm under the table asleep."
A similar revelation occurred to chef Theo Lerikos when he was opening Tuck Shop in Montreal's up and coming Saint-Henri neighbourhood. "When I started this restaurant I made a point of going and checking out every restaurant in town," he recalls. "I would try the foie gras dish, the pork belly dish and drink red wine. I couldn't get enough of it. But after eating in restaurants like this for a couple years, I started ordering fish crudo and a vegetable plate and drinking white wine and keeping things a little lighter and I realized that's how I like to eat. As a Montrealer I don't necessarily have to eat foie gras."
Today his most popular dish is, shockingly for Montreal, a market salad. It is a big portion, Lerokis explains, "It's got, like, 12 different vegetables in it at any given time, but you're going to feel good after eating it."
At Hôtel Herman – one of the city's early proponents of vegetable focused menus – an artfully composed plate of vibrant, roasted beets paired with dark elderberries, sweet lavender and sharp crème fraîche that stops me in my tracks. There's pork, venison and foie gras dishes on chef Marc-Alexandre Mercier's menu but, depending on the time of year, fully half of the dishes will emphasize vegetables. Mercier didn't always cook like this. "When I worked at places like La Salle à Manger we were doing huge meat plates, whole ducks and whole animals," he recalls. "That was great and in Montreal there's still a lot of that, but I like to cook with vegetables."
Mercier suggests that in many cases it's just easier to make beautiful food from vegetables. "If you're working with sweetbreads that can be more challenging," he explains. "I mean, it's a pretty brown looking piece of randomness, but if you've got something like zucchini flowers, they're just amazing looking on their own."
Visually, vegetables might be more appealing than a hunk of brown flesh, but as chef Marc-Olivier Frappier of the vegetable-focused Le Vin Papillon explains, they present their own set of challenges. Over a plate of rotisserie roasted cauliflower garnished with chicken skin and candied lemon peels, he explains: "It's much harder to work with vegetables than it is with meat. It isn't harder to come up with ideas, there's just so much more labour involved. You do a steak, you get the beef, you cook it and it's ready to go. You get some dirty-ass organic carrots, like those really good carrots, you need to wash them, you need to treat them you need to do all these little things. There's much more you have to do to a celery root for people to be like, 'Wow,' than there is for a rack of lamb."
So in demand is this style of cooking that Le Vin Papillon, co-owned by Joe Beef founders Frédéric Morin and David McMillan, recently expanded, essentially doubling in size, and it's still jam packed. When the chefs who made their name resurrecting such epic dishes as lièvre à la royale – rabbit, hare, bacon and veal wrapped in caul fat and served with a cream, butter, egg, wine and blood sauce – embrace vegetables, it is a full-fledged movement.
My meal at Le Vin Papillon goes late and features too much food and too much wine, of course, but by the end I'm still sober, not stuffed. Quite frankly, I'm surprised and tell the wine director, Vanya Filipovic, as much. "People who like to enjoy a meal are different from people who like to enjoy an evening," she says. "If you like to enjoy an evening, it's not just a big, heavy, rich meal, a bottle of wine then bed, it's a curiosity that keeps going and for that you need the proper things like acidity and freshness and lightness. We still love to eat those big crazy meals once in a while, but you can still have a great night with just a salad."
The writer was a guest of Tourism Montreal. It did not review or approve the story.