Restaurateur was giant of Quebec gastronomy
Les Halles was one of city’s top tables
Montreal restaurateur Jacques Landurie, who died Sunday at the age of 82, was the owner of the legendary Crescent Street restaurant Les Halles, which operated from 1971 to 2005.
With its lavish food, formal service and 3,000-bottle wine cellar, Les Halles was a popular destination for both Desmarais and Bronfman families as well as visiting French chefs like Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel and Michel Guérard. Grand Prix weekends were legendary. Dominique Crevoisier, Les Halles’s last chef de cuisine, who worked at the restaurant for 20 years, notes: “There was an expression at one time that went, ‘Ça venait à Montreal, ça venait à Les Halles.’ ”
A seminal figure in the Quebec gastronomie scene, Landurie was president of the Association des Restaurateurs du Québec from 1985 to 1987, and was made a Knight of the French National Order of Agricultural Merit in 1989. His restaurant was considered one of Montreal’s top tables for the 34 years it was in operation.
Born in Paris, Landurie immigrated to Canada in 1951 and began working as a waiter at Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he met his future wife, Ita. He later moved to the Laurentians to work at the Alpine Inn, before eventually settling back in Montreal as director of the popular À la Crêpe Bretonne restaurant chain.
In 1971, Landurie opened Les Halles with partner JeanPierre Beauquier, but became the sole owner of the restaurant in the ’90s. Les Halles started out as a casual French bistro, but in 1979, Landurie brought his chef on a tour of France’s starred restaurants, after which he decided Les Halles should feature a more refined menu. This came at a time when French gastronomy was experiencing a Golden Age on the Montreal restaurant scene, with establishments like Chez Bardet, Chez la Mère Michel, Les Chenêts, Le St-Amable and Café Martin serving dishes like lobster bisque, sole amandine and tournedos Rossini to well-heeled locals and tourists alike. Les Halles quickly rose to the top of that list, and between lunch and dinner services was catering to about 400 customers daily.
“When I applied to work at Les Halles, it was well known in the industry that Mr. Landurie was difficult to work for, very strict, and exacting,” Crevoisier said. “I had a European background, so I was ready. And indeed he was very demanding, but he knew the profession well. He had his ideas. We had a lot of meetings.”
Les Halles staff counted 35 to 40 people; in the kitchen there were 15 to 20 cooks, the majority from France. Many members of the service staff worked at the restaurant for its entire 34-year run.
Chef Dennis Johnston, owner of the Halifax restaurant Fid, moved to Montreal in 1980 specifically to work at Les Halles. “I’ll never forget my first day working there. They put me in the pastry department and had me make a raspberry tart. My hands were shaking, so half the raspberries ended up being upside down. Later in the day Mr. Landurie came into the kitchen, stormed up to me and said, ‘When you make the raspberry tart, you make sure the holes are down!’ ”
Johnston describes Landurie as a workaholic, but a true bon vivant. “I learned about management from him,” Johnston said. “He was hard on us, but he was good. The restaurant was his baby. His way was the only way. But he knew what to say to a group to stimulate them. And I learned that when you own a restaurant, you have to be there every night. In the dining room, he was there, going from table to table, often on crutches (Landurie had a degenerative hip problem), talking to everyone. He was a consummate host.”
He also helped set the scene for the next generation. Toqué!’s chef-owner Normand Laprise applied to work at Les Halles when he moved to Montreal from Quebec City in the mid-’80s, but opted for a job at a competing French restaurant Le Lutétia instead. “If Montreal is regarded as a gastronomic city today,” Laprise said, “it’s because of men like Jacques Landurie. They built Montreal. I ate at his restaurant twice. It was good, classic French cuisine. Well done. It’s sad that in the end, no one took over Les Halles.”
And yet Crevoisier said it was a challenge to keep motivated in the restaurant’s final years. “In the late ’90s, we closed for lunch, which used to be a booming business. But then people started having lunch delivered to their office. After Sept. 11 in 2001, the Americans stopped coming to the city, and the European tourists dried up. Local customers weren’t willing to spend, and we needed those customers to make a restaurant like ours work 12 months a year. But my lasting memory of him will be that of ‘rigueur,’ that person pushing us to go further every day, saying we could always do better.”
During Landurie’s era, the hospitality industry transformed radically. Today, the French gastronomic restaurant is all but extinct in Montreal, and rare are the restaurants that last a decade, let alone three.
“Times have changed,” Landurie said of the restaurant scene the year he closed Les Halles. “When I see a restaurant like ours, I know they’re struggling. Today, it’s about music and pretty girls. It’s sad there’s no longer that level of quality, service and pampering.”