Celebrating poutine
FESTIVAL A TRIBUTE TO QUEBEC’S BELOVED DISH OF FRIES, GRAVY AND CHEESE CURDS
Danny St-Pierre has never built a bridge or designed a shipping canal linking two great bodies of water, but the Montreal chef can lay claim to a much bolder feat of engineering.
Fourteen years ago, StPierre dared to reinvent the poutine. Some purists might scoff at the notion of modifying the heaping bowl of gravy, cheese curds and french fries, but St-Pierre embraced the challenge.
“In a drunken stupor, it came to me ... I should invert the poutine,” said StPierre, speaking in his Parc Ave. bistro, La Petite Maison. “After trial and error, it became clear that this bitesized crust of potato should be what holds together the sauce and the cheese. The contrary of poutine.
“A poutine, as you know, is sloppy, gravy-driven, big and bold, but this is a nice little bite of madness. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s a little joke, a little wink.”
Later this month, StPierre will take his “inverted poutine” — which is effectively a golden crisped, deepfried potato filled with gravy and cheese — to the 10th annual Festival de la Poutine in Drummondville, Que., about 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal. There he will go toe to toe with other chefs to see who will walk away with the award for the festival’s best poutine.
A panel of festival goers will vote to determine who walks away with the trophy — a golden fork. One awardwinning restaurant — Granby, Que.’s Cantine Ben La Bédaine — had a display case built to house the shining utensil.
“Those guys are nuts, you gotta love ’em,” said StPierre, whose specialty is less greasy spoon than fine dining.
The event may seem like a romp for a bunch of overgrown children, but for the people who launched Festival de la Poutine in 2007, it began as a communitybuilding exercise. The founders — Quebec rock group Les Trois Accords — saw it as a way to meld music, junk food and fun in their hometown.
“We would play in summer festivals across Quebec but never in Drummondville,” said Simon Proulx, the group’s lead singer. “There wasn’t really that kind of a scene. And the other thing is, we just couldn’t believe that a poutine fest didn’t already exist.”
Said drummer Charles Dubreuil: “We played at the beef festival, the gibelotte festival, the lake trout festival, the big log festival, you know, there was a festival for everything.
“So we would Google search ‘Festival de la poutine’ with quotation marks, without quotation marks and there was nothing, nothing. Those words had never been combined and we wanted to be the ones to do it.”
Since their beginnings as a ragamuffin punk group at Polyvalente Drummondville in 1997, the band had a knack for getting things done themselves. They scrounged together $3,000 to record their breakout Gros Mammouth Album — a playful, irreverent, ceaselessly fun collection of songs — and often acted as their own booking agents, producers and publicists throughout their 20-year career.
After landing an opening slot at a Rolling Stones show in Ottawa in 2005, the band used its hard-won fame to generate momentum for their poutine fest dreams. They worked with the city of Drummondville and recruited a small army of volunteers to get the event off the ground.
“We had our friends taking time off work and getting up at 5 a.m. to make sandwiches for everyone,” Dubreuil said. “It was humbling to see everyone come together — from the city workers who put slabs of concrete in just the right place to the people we grew up with just rallying to get it going.
“It’s cool, as a rock band, to get people to scream ‘Drummondville’ at a show in Montreal or Paris. We always had that sort of civic pride for this place we grew up in. So to hold a big concert series there each year only seemed natural.”
This year, the Festival de la Poutine will draw some of Quebec’s biggest celebrity chefs as well the bands Half Moon Run, Kevin Parent, Les soeurs Boulay and Alex Nevsky, among others.
For Chef St-Pierre, who’s confident his inverted poutine could make waves in Drummondville, it will be a chance to celebrate the ultimate Quebec treat.
“I mean, the poutine really is a little piece of the Quebec countryside,” he said. “We’re good dairy farmers, we love cheese, we’re good with potatoes and this brown gravy is derived from the hot chicken sandwich. In a proper Québécois casse-croute, you always have french fries, you always have hot chicken sandwiches and you always have cheese curds.
“So all of that came together as the poutine. So I’ll be in Drummondville, enjoying great bands, great food, great people. It’ll be madness. It’s the quintessential Quebec gathering!”
The Festival de la Poutine runs from Aug. 24 to Aug. 26. Tickets cost $23 for a daily pass or $38 for allweekend admission.