STILL HUNGRY FOR MORE?

Dishes to the right not so appetizing? We’ve got a whole page devoted to Au Pied du Cochon and sugar shack master Martin Picard on

It’s a sticking point — perhaps the sticking point — of certain members of the Canadian culinary community that the Great White North is without a culinary identity. Martin Picard is here to change that.

“I’d been travelling a lot, in France, Italy and New York, learning in kitchens,” Picard says of his kitchen origins. “I did it for two years. After a while, you forget who you are. I came back here and I had no job, and I met a girl who had a restaurant, so I [started] cooking there. I realized that we have everything [in Canada], but we’re a young country, so there’s a lot to do. I realized that my part is to promote it.”

If you’ve never heard of Picard, watch the Montrealset episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations to get a taste for his first restaurant and temple of excess, Au Pied du Cochon, where the Quebec chef has an entire section of the menu devoted to foie gras and will also serve you duck in a can. It’s not healthy, but it draws on a culinary tradition that has roots but is new enough that there’s a lot of wiggle room. The same description can be applied to Cabane au Sucre au Pied du Cochon, a sugar shack Picard opened up in rural Quebec some three years ago, and its offshoot cookbook, released earlier this year.

“I realized that we were always trying to do something new, but we had this — this was something very Canadian,” Picard says, drawing comparisons between the traditional Québécois cabane a sucre to an Alsacian brasserie: the location dictates the food, and vice versa. And in the case of Cabane au Sucre (or any traditional Québécois sugar shack for that matter), that food centres on maple syrup.

Picard’s Cabane has enjoyed unparallelled success since its opening — reservations for the season opened on Dec. 1 this year, at midnight, and were full by 10 a.m. “We received over 10,000 requests,” Picard says, grinning. “I’m happy, but I try not to be proud, you know? You have to stay humble.”

“Our first objective is that we’re not there to please the customer,” he adds. “We’re there to do some research, to learn about the syrup, how to cook with the syrup. And we realized there isn’t a book — a cookbook — about a sugar shack on the market, so we decided to do it.”

The book, which shares a name with the restaurant, collects recipes from the sugar shack’s run thus far. And if you’re wondering whether the restaurant’s relatively short life means Cabane au Sucre is a relatively thin book, you’d be wrong: It’s a glossy doorstopper of a tome that compiles three years’ worth of ever-changing menus. But developing all those recipes was no small task.

“The hardest thing — it’s like speaking French for you, if you speak English — is dreaming in maple syrup,” Picard says of developing the book’s recipes. “Sometimes when you translate, it doesn’t work. It took us three seasons before we were thinking, speaking, dreaming maple syrup instead of, you know, white sugar.”

The time Picard spends dreaming his way out of culinary norms isn’t just for a cookbook, though — it’s part of his strategy to put Canada on the food map. And why not? After all, he’s sort of starting from the ground up.

“We’re young, but it’s heavy to have tradition. There’s a lot of fighting in France — not real fighting — because people there want their chefs to be very traditional,” Picard says. “Us, we don’t have that. We can do what we want. Isn’t that beautiful?”