FRENCH PASSION
Quebecois cuisine wows
Wow! That’s my monosyllabic response when emotion trumps my thinking brain. Such was the case at St. Lawrence.
The restaurant, in Vancouver’s historic Japantown, opened the week of Canada Day celebrations and how apt. It’s a Quebecois restaurant that puts the lie to poutine as a symbol of Quebecois food. Although, chef and owner J.C. Poirier could craft poutine into a wow! if he wanted to.
St. Lawrence is so plainly his passion project. You see and taste the love. It’s his most heartfelt restaurant of the Kitchen Table Restaurant Group collection (Pourhouse, Ask for Luigi, Farina, Joe Pizza). It’s the food he grew up with, although amped up in sophistication and using the best of ingredients.
Lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (poem) fit questing chefs like him: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” A lot of chefs, after years of toil, find deepest meaning in the food they grew up with.
So it is with Poirier, who’s cooked with Canada’s best (Normand Laprise of Toque in Montreal, Rob Feenie of Vancouver). “At the end of the day, you realize the closest you can get to being honest with yourself and your guests is going back to the source. It’s who I really am as a person and chef. It’s the food I grew up with, the food of my childhood.”
What is Quebecois food, you might wonder. Certainly not poutine, a relatively recent, accidental creation. “It’s vague to a lot of people but if you go to restaurants in Montreal or Quebec City, you’ll find sweetbread, calf ’s liver, chicken livers — it’s the little Europe of Canada,” he says. He calls it cuisine de campagne. “In a simple sentence, I want to treat it like a region of France. Quebecers drink a lot, eat a lot.”
Step over the entry tiles (they spell out ‘Kumura’ from earlier Japantown days) and you feel
you’ve disrupted a bustling family kitchen. Craig Stanghetta, responsible for so many cool dining spaces, makes it look authentic. The black and white old-time photos around the room are of Poirier growing up. French music, French bistrostyle food, French accents whisk you to Montreal. “When people walk in, I wanted them to feel like they’re not in Vancouver,” he says. Accomplished!
His French-speaking staff (from Quebec and France) are stoked in their home away from home and eagerly show it, sharing intel on the food and drink. Be aware, it’s casual and homey but prices are high-end ($17 to $21 for appies and upwards of $30 for mains).
You’re welcomed with an amuse-bouche of creton (Quebec-style rillette) with mustard and bread from The Bird And The Beets.
We started with smoked bison tongue ($18) with Montreal spices and herb sauce and a dish of cured salmon with buckwheat crepes and crème fraîche ($19). I’d only order tongue from a chef who I know won’t make it into shoe leather. Poirier serves it like a mini steak: It goes through five days of brining, braising at a slow, low temperature, then a cold smoke. Then he cooks it à la minute on cast iron and serves it with ravigote sauce (a chunky vinaigrette with chopped eggs, shallots, capers, and olive oil). I loved it.
Curing transformed the salmon into a luxe and silky thing. There was lots of it with capers, pickled onion, chopped boiled egg white and yolk and a perfect quenelle of crème fraîche, waiting be wedded to buckwheat crepes.
And while tourtiere ($32) seems best on a fall and winter menu, my husband rejoiced — it’s such a lovely tourtiere, the likes of which we’ve never seen (although one at Timber is scrumptious, too). The venison is lean and the meat was a little clove-forward (maybe too much?). The dish is cheeky with a small Montreal Canadiens flag planted atop the crust and a tiny bottle of Heinz ketchup on the side. On the plate, there’s a light sauce, cornichons and housemade tomato ketchup. The pastry is perfect thanks to the addition of lard without which pastry cannot soar.
The duck ballotine ($39) could easily outshine dishes from many a haute establishment. Duck farce rolls around duck breast and is bundled in collard greens. The sauce tastes of maple syrup and a hint of orange (shades of duck a l’orange). It was served with pomme dauphine, piped and burnished gold, the opposite of slovenly poutine.
Desserts shouldn’t be resisted when the rest of the meal has been a wow! We ordered sugar pie and rice pudding, calories be damned. The sugar pie crust was too hard for my fork to get through although my more muscular mate wrestled it just fine; I ate the filling most happily as it wasn’t too sweet. My teeth were grateful. Rice pudding, which I don’t associate with Quebecois food, was a cloud drift with a hit of salted caramel. Poirier added candied pecans and a sister’s fart — and that wasn’t an overzealous autocorrect. It’s little palmier-like cookies made with the leftover pastry dough, rolled in brown sugar and butter, a Quebec specialty. (In French, it’s pets de soeur.)
St. Lawrence’s beverage list abhors trends. A restrained cocktail list has only cognac drinks and there are aperitifs, digestifs and ciders and a Japanese whisky list, a nod to the original tenants of the building and to the very good whiskies produced in the country. The wine list is totally French “because that’s what I like to drink,” says Poirier.