Quebec, the French Language, and Quebecois Identity

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

Or, being Toronto, the best jerk Peking duck.

Which might be great but as I said, there is nothing Torontonian or Canadian in the mix.

It’s as if I got my Quechua wife pregnant in Tokyo.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Which might be great but as I said, there is nothing Torontonian or Canadian in the mix.

It’s as if I got my Quechua wife pregnant in Tokyo.

The mix would be the Torontonian bit, istm.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

The mix would be the Torontonian bit, istm.

Having Chinese and Jamaican people and their cuisines in the same city is unique to Toronto?

Btw a restaurant in my city makes an awesome jerk chicken poutine.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Follow-up:

In Montreal the finer and mid-range cuisine uses Québécois and also French cuisines as jumping-off points for their creations.

This is not the same as in Toronto where the goal is often to create the very best Peking duck outside China in the world or the best jerk chicken in the world outside Jamaica.

I think this is mostly true though Montreal has a lot more authentic cuisine than Paris though Paris is improving. Toronto is on a whole other level and certainly ahead of London which still has a palate that will accept mediocre knock offs of many cuisines. Fine Dining in all genres it can of course still hit it out of the park (that's good for the Europeans interloping on this thread).

Where Montreal also excels in the mid range IMHO is making the whole experience fun. The staff just seem to be enjoying themselves more and it shows. Maybe the customers are also less banker burning through an expense account and more lover of good food though that's probably projecting stereotypes a bit.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Acajack

A city like Paris affords a greater place to national cuisine traditions in its finer cuisine offerings, even if it’s obviously not all jambon butter and bouillabaisse.

Hopefully people get my point.

Bouillabaisse would actually be considered exotic cuisine in Paris (like foreign cuisine), and jambon beurre is not restaurant cuisine, it's boulangerie stuff (and on the decline as I've said).

People in general have a hard time defining French cuisine, because it is so very diverse there is not ONE dish that could sum it up as often happens with other cuisines. Also, the fact there were very few French emigrants to the new worlds means there was not historically a French community that could have developed a stereotypical French dish to their American/Canadian/Australian customers that would immediately be associated with "French cuisine" now, the way Peking duck may be associated with Chinese cuisine, or chicken tikka masala with Indian cuisine, or pizzas with Italian cuisine.

Usually among Anglophone people the default thing when "French food" comes to mind is "croissant", but it's not even a dish.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Acajack

In Montreal the finer and mid-range cuisine uses Québécois and also French cuisines as jumping-off points for their creations.

Québec restaurant cuisine, at least what they show us on French TV, seems to be a lot about using local produce, like berries from the wildernesses of Québec, stuff like that. I tend to equate it with Scandinavian cuisine a bit, kind of young and fresh (and simple, perhaps too simple), organic and minimalist, kind of Québec Solidaire type of food if I might say, eco-conscious, cycle court, produits locaux, back to nature.

We also have that genre of cuisine in some regions of France (particularly in the Massif Central), but it's not the dominating genre in France.

[Acajack]

As an example of what I am talking about, Au Pied de Cochon which is one of the top restos in Montreal proposes a poutine au foie gras for 35 dollars.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

I think this is mostly true though Montreal has a lot more authentic cuisine than Paris though Paris is improving. Toronto is on a whole other level and certainly ahead of London which still has a palate that will accept mediocre knock offs of many cuisines.

A lot of it has to do with the restaurateurs also. I once had a conversation with a Cambodian woman in Paris, I asked her why she did not prepare real Cambodian food (her restaurant essentially offered a dumbed-down version of generic Vietnamese and Chinese food, with nothing Cambodian at all in it), and she said "people wouldn't like it". I was like, WTF? Try, and you'll see! But they are often like that in Paris, they feel clients wouldn't like it if they trekked off the beaten paths.

Fortunately the Asian scene has improved a bit in the past 15 years. You do find a few Cambodian restaurants now (but not that many). Chinese food has improved a lot, due to the very numerous Chinese students we have now, who have brought their tastes from China. There are restaurants offering regional Chinese cuisines that would have been impossible to find 15 years ago (like cuisine from Gansu, which has mysteriously become kind of popular now, think Lanzhou noodles, whereas it was totally unknown 15 years ago). But Paris is especially great for South-East Asian food, especially Laotian food (which is extremely rare to find in the West, except in Paris). There also exist some very good and authentic Japanese restaurants (but they tend to be expensive).

Some other countries' cuisines are almost impossible to find. For example a Singhalese guy from Sri Lanka was telling me it's impossible to find a single restaurant in Paris serving authentic Sri Lankan food, despite the fact Paris has many Sri Lankan immigrants (we have more Sri Lankan immigrants than Indian immigrants in fact, but most of them Tamil refugees and not Singhalese, so perhaps the Tamil from Sri Lanka prefer to open South Indian restaurants, I don't know).

The worst is Italian food. Living so close to Italy, and the French liking Italy so much, you'd think Paris would have lots of great Italian food. Well no. Most Italian restaurants in Paris I find incredibly bad (and expensive). It's beyond me why people accept eating in all those fake Italian restaurants. We do have some good Italian delicatessen stores though. But Italian restaurants, I never eat in them (but they are always full, so go figure, people apparently like "mediocre knock offs" of foreign cuisine as you call it).

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Acajack

As an example of what I am talking about, Au Pied de Cochon which is one of the top restos in Montreal proposes a poutine au foie gras for 35 dollars.

Au Pied de Cochon is of course the name of one of the most famous brasseries in Paris, in Les Halles.

But I wouldn't go there (the one in Paris) because I think it's too expensive for what it's worth.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Au Pied de Cochon is of course the name of one of the most famous brasseries in Paris, in Les Halles.

But I wouldn't go there (the one in Paris) because I think it's too expensive for what it's worth.

Yeah we also had a Pied de Cochon in my city of Gatineau until last year. It was not high end like the one in Montreal and was unrelated to it.

[New Brisavoine]

^^Have you actually ever had pied de cochon? It's one of my father's favorite dishes. Personally I could never eat it. But the connoisseurs greatly like it.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

^^Have you actually ever had pied de cochon? It's one of my father's favorite dishes. Personally I could never eat it. But the connoisseurs greatly like it.

I don’t think so.

Ragoût de pattes de cochon is a classic Quebec Christmas dish. But it involves the jarret so the part just above the feet.

I have had it a few times but my family doesn’t make it.

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

I don't think you realize the density of street markets in Paris.

This map shows all the street markets just in the City of Paris (89 km²), which is like zone 1 of the Tube in London.



For London I could find this map, which covers a territory roughly as large as the City of Paris. Not all of these are food markets, and you can see they have considerably less than Paris.



In Paris the suburbs also each have their food street markets, so if we took a territory of 1,572 km² (land area of Greater London... note that most of the street markets in your Wikipedia list are way beyond zone 1 of the Tube, which would correspond to the banlieue in Paris), you'd probably have around 280-300 food street markets in such a territory (I get that number because 1,572 km² in Paris corresponds to City of Paris, which has 84 street markets, and 200 suburban municipalities, and I assume each municipality has 1 street market, but some large municipalities have in fact several street markets).

London is much less dense than Paris so yes, the markets are more spread out, but I really don't understand how you could have lived in London without encountering a street market. I mean, last time I was in London it was only for two days and I still visited six different markets.

[Kilgore Trout]

Jumping onto the food discussion, I agree that one of the reasons Montreal's fine-ish dining scene is better than Toronto's is because it's locally rooted. You have a number of good restaurants that use local and seasonal ingredients, with a foundation in French cooking but with a Quebec twist, and they've spawned a whole galaxy of restaurants run by various chefs who trained up at those foundational restaurants. It's a very organic ecosystem that leads to some very refined but affordable and accessible food.

That said, Toronto is far, far better when it comes to family-run, grassroots immigrant restaurants offering faithful representations of the food from their home countries. And eventually that will lead to something very interesting when it comes to higher end dining.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

London is much less dense than Paris so yes, the markets are more spread out

It's not just that they are more spread out, it's that there are less overall. You don't have 300 street markets in Greater London.

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

I really don't understand how you could have lived in London without encountering a street market.

Well, what can I say. That's real life experience, as opposed to theory. In your everyday life, you're not going to travel more than 15 minutes one way to go buy food (unless it's some exceptional stuff). And there wasn't any street market in a 15 minutes radius of the places where I lived in London. And neither have I ever heard of anyone buying their groceries at a street market when I lived in London.

In Paris there's nowhere where you wouldn't find a street market within 15 minutes from your place. And you can hear people speaking about street markets in their conversations. I often see my middle-aged female neighbor returning from the street market with her wheeled basket full of groceries. I've never seen a similar scene in London.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

Jumping onto the food discussion, I agree that one of the reasons Montreal's fine-ish dining scene is better than Toronto's is because it's locally rooted. You have a number of good restaurants that use local and seasonal ingredients, with a foundation in French cooking but with a Quebec twist, and they've spawned a whole galaxy of restaurants run by various chefs who trained up at those foundational restaurants. It's a very organic ecosystem that leads to some very refined but affordable and accessible food.

That said, Toronto is far, far better when it comes to family-run, grassroots immigrant restaurants offering faithful representations of the food from their home countries. And eventually that will lead to something very interesting when it comes to higher end dining.

Typical Anglo-Saxon vs Latin Europe cultural divide. I wish we had more "grassroots immigrant restaurants offering faithful representations of the food from their home countries" (but then it's even worse in Spain, Italy, Germany).

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

^^Have you actually ever had pied de cochon? It's one of my father's favorite dishes. Personally I could never eat it. But the connoisseurs greatly like it.

Best of all - pickled pigs feet!

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Typical Anglo-Saxon vs Latin Europe cultural divide. I wish we had more "grassroots immigrant restaurants offering faithful representations of the food from their home countries" (but then it's even worse in Spain, Italy, Germany).

There is no lack of restaurants in the GTA and elswhere in Ontario that offer locally-sourced foods.

[Nashe]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

^^Have you actually ever had pied de cochon? It's one of my father's favorite dishes. Personally I could never eat it. But the connoisseurs greatly like it.

I remember it being available around here when I was young (in New Brunswick). Ironically the last time I ate pigs feet was actually in Paris in 2016. Actually it was a hock, because they ran out of feet. I misinterpreted the waiter and thought I was getting a tenderloin. It was served on a bed of stewed lentils and the meat was rather tender and lightly salted, though cutting through the centimeter of jellied fat to get to it was a bit weird. I was more surprised to look over and see that the next table had eaten their entire cross-section down to the bone, boiled fat and all.

My favourite meal in Paris was actually a Beef Bourguignon with a pastry top shell. Not exactly pushing the envelope, but very nice "soul" food for a cool October evening.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

There is no lack of restaurants in the GTA and elswhere in Ontario that offer locally-sourced foods.

If you mean "ingredients" when you refer to locally-sourced foods, then of course you are right.