One of North America’s great food city is pulling out all the culinary stops in the depths of winter. Long known for its sophisticated restaurant scene and frigid winters, Quebec’s cities attract lots of visitors in summer, but you need to be a little intrepid to pay a visit in winter. In either season visitors can explore Montréal’s myriad neighborhoods, eat in all kinds of restaurants and gaze at the St. Lawrence River.
In order to up the ante in winter, the city sponsors Montréal en Lumère, or “Light up Montreal,” launched in 2000 and now in its third decade. The multi-week festival features everything from themed to dinners and guest chefs to outdoor skating rinks and theater and drag shows.
The Stats
Montréal en Lumère is one of the largest winter festivals in the world. Since its inception in 2000, it has played host to 724 guest chefs, according to Julie Martel, the festival’s culinary director. This year the festival is slated to welcome more than 100 guest chefs, winemakers and sommeliers. Guest chefs will be cooking at 60 different local restaurants and 70 percent of them will be women.
The two themes for this year’s gathering are women and pastry. I can’t say that I found the dessert influence on the food to be so strong—which was a plus for me—but I did enjoy a lot of the chefs’ takes on winter favorites like carrot-based dishes including a carrot sorbet served at Ratafia in collaboration between the NYC-based chefs from Marble.
However, the female influence is felt loud and clear in terms of how many major female chefs and restaurant owners can be found in this city. They include Vanya Filipovic, who with her husband, just opened the Rotisserie La Lune, which focuses on stylishly bringing back Quebec’s rotisserie chicken tradition, the couple also owns Mon Lapin; and Mila Rishkova of Wine Bar Annette. Both restaurants hosted guest chef dinners.
These chef pairings generally come about as Quebec chefs come to know restaurant owners they like. Sometimes, according to spokespeople for the event, chefs can also be invited and matched with Montreal restaurants.
One of the most interesting chef collaborations happened between Wine Bar Annette and Senhor Uva, a vegetarian restaurant in Lisbon owned by a French-Canadian chef Stéphanie Audet. The impressive menu featured soft tacos stuffed with lentils and was followed by a ring of sunchokes, briefly in season, interspersed with radish and fennel; as well as maitake mushrooms with a vegetariandemiglace broth.
The Creative Factor
As someone who dines in small holes-in-wall as well as multi-starred restaurants, the overall food quality level of in Quebec knocked my socks off. It seems to benefit from all the best classic French food traditions while keeping the general vibe much more low-key and homier.
I suppose, not surprisingly, one of the best dishes I had was in the Bota Bota spa where—God bless francophones—a set menu comes with a glass of wine. All really great cooking needs are good primary products and a lot of love: something Quebecois chefs understand intuitively.
So, this incredible bowl of dark chicken meat was seasoned with Berber spices and topped with peanuts to give it an almost-Asian crunch at Bota Bota. Another favorite dish of mine was the duck confit at the Boulevardier: a classic business lunch place. Please keep in mind that the French Canadian dollar is trading low with the U.S. version: it’s another great reason to visit this culinary capital and enjoy all its delicious treats while paying so reasonably for them. Prix fixe at a dynamite restaurant for $60 or $70 U.S. dollars is not something we see much stateside.
The city unquestionably benefits from its French cultural—and culinary background—and the food influences of its immigrants: including Haiti and a number of sub-Saharan, French-speaking African countries. Montreal is also ramping up to welcome the Michelin Guide this May and several very ambitious restaurants—such as Mastard—seem to be on track to get some stars.