BEEF STOCK
Joe Beef, the groundbreaking Montréal restaurant, is going on the road. Ahead of his first-ever appearance at Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, straight-talking chef David McMillan tells us what’s what, writes MICHAEL HARDEN.
Ahead of Melbourne Food and Wine, Joe Beef chef David McMillan tells us what’s what.
David McMillan never leaves you wondering. The co-chef and coowner of Montréal restaurant Joe Beef, in Australia for the first time for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, is a man of strong and blunt opinions that he’s not shy about sharing. There is, for instance, his take on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. “It’s something I have a problem with,” he says. “It’s highly élitist restaurants for the richest, most well-travelled, most sophisticated one per cent of the world. That’s not my goal; I don’t want that to be my life. I want to enjoy cooking – I don’t want a chef in a white vest screaming at me or working for me. I don’t want to work in even a top 1,000 restaurant. I don’t abide by that system.”
“I want to work in a very good restaurant that has very close ties with the winemakers and the cheese-makers it has on its lists. I want to speak to my oyster guy while he’s on his boat. I can’t be a farmer – I’m not, I’m a cook. But I’ll practise agriculture in downtown Montréal in a 10-square-metre kitchen vicariously, through the farmers who surround us.”
It is this tension – loving the acts of cooking and running a restaurant but hating the dining scene – that has earned McMillan and his long-time co-chef and business partner, Frédéric Morin, an international following, and something of a cult status among fellow chefs.
The late Anthony Bourdain hung out with them on an episode of Parts Unknown, and David Chang has called Joe Beef his favourite restaurant. Their first cookbook, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef, has clocked close to 100,000 copies sold. Their recently released second book, a hefty volume called Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse and coming in at more than
300 pages, includes recipes for crisp frogs legs, pickled deer necks, soap and cough drops, plus a lift-out dedicated to correctly stocking a bunker.
The eccentric cookbooks defy formula, and go some way to explaining how Joe Beef, a 75-seat restaurant in Montréal’s Little Burgundy with an obsession for French country cooking, hyper-local ingredients and a whole-beast philosophy, has struck such a chord around the world.
“We went in with these books and just started ranting and raving and going off on tangents and personal experiences and successes and failures,” says McMillan. “We were giving people a more personal glimpse of our personal hell: running restaurants while trying to make something we kind of hate, something that we like.”
“I wanted to write these books with Fred in a way that people would understand that cooking is not the only thing that defines us – we have many other interests. Yes, we are cooks, and there are recipes, and it’s our idea of how cooking should be, but it’s not only that. We’re into welding, interior design, finance, community, the First Nations community in our area, fishing, hunting, fierce loyalty to the province of Québec, and at this point, educating the young people who come through our kitchens to maybe not look at restaurants through the lens of Instagram.”
Since McMillan and Morin first opened Joe
Beef 15 years ago, the pair have opened four other restaurants in Montréal (Liverpool House, Le
Vin Papillon, Mon Lapin, McKiernan). Each has a different focus – Le Vin Papillon, for example, emphasises plant-based dishes and deliberately funky natural wine – but all have participated in drawing attention to a place which is now considered one of the great food cities of North America.
“The food scene in Montréal has always been really great, but people outside of Canada didn’t know it for a long time,” says McMillan. “Montréal is a particular situation. It’s 90 per cent French-speaking – the only place in North America with a majority Frenchspeaking population. There’s been a lot of popularity in recent years with Nordic cuisine. Québec is as Nordic a place as anywhere on that side of the world, but it’s been shielded by the French language. Québec stands alone in its frozen corner of the North American continent, a French nation that eats French food, speaks French and has a very advanced dining public. It’s still something of an interesting lost culture.”
This unique dining scene is also one of the reasons the chef is notoriously festival-shy. People outside of Montréal, he says, are less likely to go in for the sort of food he wants to cook.
“I don’t go to festivals because I can’t cook at them,” he says. “I sell kidneys. I sell tongue. I sell ears, brains, tails. I sell all the weird creatures in the ocean. I like to cook out of my comfort zone. We cook in a certain way so if I go to a one in a North American city and everybody’s cooking chicken and steak there’s nothing there for me.”
But if he avoids festivals, why has he decided to give the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival a go?
For starters McMillan, a history buff, counts
Robert Hughes’s account of Australia’s European settlement, The Fatal Shore, among his favourite books. But he also cites Stephanie Alexander as a major reason he and the team from Joe Beef –
Morin, sommelier Vanya Filipovic and head chef Marc-Olivier Frappier – decided to make the trip.
“I was 17 when I first started working in restaurants, and one of the first cookbooks that
I ever owned was Stephanie’s Australia,” he says.
“There were many things inside that book that I didn’t understand: proteins that I didn’t have access to, the fish are different, the oysters are different. There were glimpses of Aboriginal cooking, of Italians in Australia, of the Asian community. It was all outside of my comfort zone and I thought it was brilliant. It’s still one of the most dog-eared books I have in my library.”
The trip is also about his desire to see something totally new. “When the invitation came to come to Australia I wasn’t going to miss it. It’s a place where I always wanted to walk through the markets,” he says. “There’s nothing in New York for me. It’s just rich opulence – that doesn’t interest me. But Australia is an opportunity to be put out of my comfort zone a little bit.”
“We cook a certain way. The sauces are the sauces are the sauces. But this is about adaptation. We can take our skill set and we take a good look at the Australian market, and whatever is it that makes us most excited, that’s what we’re going to cook.”
David McMillan is appearing at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival on Saturday 9 March. Hear him speak at Theatre of Ideas (day pass $65) or enjoy dinner cooked by the Joe Beef team and Derek Dammann for Kings of Québec, supported by Destination Canada (7pm to 10pm, $185 including snacks and a three-course shared menu with matching wines). For more information and tickets, visit mfwf.com.au