by Unknown
I trusted, and the food was nearly perfect. The sushi rice seemed a F O R K I T O V E R
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delicacy, even though no attention went into molding it into the perfect oblong shape found in punctilious sushi establishments. Most of the fish came in a variety of light, beautifully balanced sauces that tasted like ponzu, sweet vinegar, or honey. The salmon bore a sprinkling of sesame seeds.
When I returned the next day to introduce myself to Kusuhara, he told me that when he started out as a fish salesman in L.A., one of his early clients was Nozawa. “I was curious; maybe if I learned to make sushi, I would be able to sell fish to sushi restaurants better than anybody else.”
Nozawa taught him, and in 1980 he opened his first sushi restaurant.
Seven years ago, he and his wife, Ryoko, his high school sweetheart in Japan, opened Sushi Sasabune after finding the inelegant building they now occupy, located a few blocks from the San Diego Freeway. “When I saw it,” he said, “I thought it looked terrible, but I knew that not many people would come in and I could start slowly, only my wife and I.” He’s forty-eight now, and for the past thirty years he’s been going to the fish market every day it’s been open, waking up at 4 a.m. and sometimes helping to unload the trucks. That’s what happens when a man gets to the fish market before the fish.
No restaurant could differ more from Sushi Sasabune—in style, in locale, and especially in price—than Ginzo Sushi-Ko, located on a pedestrian walkway at the foot of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. A friend and I took an elevator to the second floor of a tiny building, ducked under some annoying cloth flaps shrouding the doorway, and were politely shown to a semiprivate room containing two tables, each of them large but not particularly ornate. The base price of dinner here is $300 per person, and a nonrefundable deposit of $100 is required to guarantee a reservation. I couldn’t imagine what they did to make raw fish that pricy, except sprinkle it with gold. And indeed they did.
I’ll say this about my $850 meal for two, which included tax, tip, and a couple of tiny pots of cold sake: it was real good. In fact, considering that most $850 meals for two served in America today consist of two martinis, two jumbo-shrimp cocktails, two sirloin strips, creamed 1 3 4
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spinach, hash browns, and a $500 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, I’m certain it was better than most. The service was surprisingly casual but polite and almost perfect. The glasses, plates, and utensils were made of ceramic, porcelain, or lacquered wood, all lovely but probably not valuable. Our waitress told us the reason we didn’t have one of the bright-red lacquered toothpick boxes on our table was that ours had been swiped by a previous customer.
There were nine courses, all chosen by the chef. (I count the sequence of sushi that concluded the dinner as one course.) Most fun was the foie gras–and-lobster shabu-shabu; least fun was being instructed to drink the seaweed-flavored shabu-shabu broth in which we’d cooked our foie gras and lobster. We ate Japanese “risotto” with white truffles—the oddly delicious rice reminded me a little of Italian risotto and a little of marshmallow fluff.
The sushi was magnificent, even though I had no real interest in eating some of it, such as the dangerous-looking red clam. (Although terribly chewy, it was otherwise harmless.) We had squid, Japanese mack-erel, abalone, needlefish, and herring. The tuna and the toro here were the best I’d ever eaten. Chef Masa Takayama’s raw toro was even better than Matsuhisa’s, and his rich, fatty, melting, knee-weakening barbecued toro was superior to grilled Kobe beef.
Yes, we also ate fugu, the fish of death, which, if not prepared properly, can kill you. It came sprinkled with gold. The first fugu course consisted of raw fugu parts in ponzu. The second was a bite or two of fried fugu and reminded me of crab. That first course included baby chives wrapped in fugu intestines—very nice—as well as the liver of the fish, which I’d always thought was the deadly part. The chef came out to explain why we should eat it. I’m not sure I got this right, but I believe it had something to do with the fish being young and healthy and having eaten a balanced diet and the liver not having turned dark and evil and bloated and virulent.
Anyway, I ate the liver and survived. You think for $425 a person I wasn’t going to clean my plate?
GQ, march 2001
“ A S L O N G A S T H E R E ’ S A M O I S H E ’ S , T H E R E ’ L L A L W A Y S B E A M O N T R E A L ”
“Françoise!” I exclaimed. “You have not changed a bit.”
“William,” she replied, averting her eyes and concentrating on Le Paris’s brandade de morue. She coughed delicately, pretending to choke on a morsel of the sublimely creamy puree of salt cod and not on her obligatory lie: “Neither have you.”
Twenty years had passed since we had last seen each other, twenty years since we were secret agents in the culinary world, restaurant critics writing under an alias for the Montreal Star. Together we had posed as a married couple named William and Françoise Neill, a well-bred, literate, and somewhat quarrelsome team of reviewers.
In reality she was (and still is) Bee MacGuire, a writer with impeccable epicurean credentials. I was (but in 1977 ceased being) the sports columnist for the Star, then the dominant English-language daily in Montreal. The reputation of the newspaper would hardly have suffered had Françoise Neill been unveiled as Bee MacGuire, but public disclosure that a sportswriter—a sportswriter!—had described the sole à l’Armoricaine at the beloved Castillion Restaurant of the Hotel Bona-venture as “a colorless dish . . . both for eye and palate” would have caused an outrage.
Admittedly, I was always looked upon as an odd sort of sportswriter, the kind of fellow who paid a little too much attention to the tea sandwiches served in the Forum press lounge between periods of Canadiens 1 3 6
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games and not enough attention to Guy Lafleur’s shots-on-goal statistics.
Still, nobody ever guessed that I was William Neill.
None of it lasted. Not our professional arrangement. Not Montreal’s stellar dining reputation. Not even the Star, which went out of business in 1979. By then I had left to take a job in Boston, but I returned regularly to Montreal, faithful to a city that was so foreign and yet so comfortable and so close. And when the great restaurants started closing, as they did, I mourned.
Worst for me was the disappearance of Au Pierrot Gourmet, a tiny second-floor French restaurant on Notre Dame Street, whose chef and proprietor, Jean-Louis Larre-Larouille, had served as a bodyguard for Charles de Gaulle during World War II. Jean-Louis owned no shoes, only bedroom slippers, and he never left his restaurant.
By day he peeled tiny potatoes and watched televised soccer. By night he zealously patrolled his fiefdom, a mad monarch behind his ramparts, growling at customers who did not speak French or, even worse, did not order his daily specials. If a patron complained that the soup was too salty, which it often was, he’d reply, “This is not a hospital, monsieur.” Then he’d throw him out. Even today I can recall the garlicky taste of his Gaspe lamb, cooked on a wood-burning stove. And I grieve that Jean-Louis returned to France and died penniless.
Had Au Pierrot Gourmet not closed, it is surely where Françoise (I’m more comfortable with the pseudonym) and I would have ren-dezvoused. A more than satisfactory alternative was Le Paris, a storefront bistro on Saint Catherine Street where we had eaten our first meal together as a reviewing team—and, for that matter, one of our last. The truth is that we rarely dined with each other while working, even though we pretended we had, because we agreed on nothing. We took others to dinner and wrote as though we had dined together, a faux spin on a faux marriage. I always thought of it as the culinary equivalent of separate bedrooms.
Le Paris was then and still is totally bourgeois, a place one might find across the street from the train station in an arrondissement of Paris where tourists do not go. It has dark red tablecloths, a linoleum F O R K I T O V E R
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floor, and a wo
efully inadequate coatrack by the front door. (Regulars know there is a supplemental rack by the toilets.) My eye was immediately drawn to a single significant change: the curtains on the broad picture windows, once resolutely drawn to deter the eyes of passersby, were open. After our meal, I asked Guy Poucant, the proprietor and son of Maurice, who opened Le Paris in 1956, what event had brought about such a cosmic alteration. He explained that several years ago the curtains came down to be washed, and hundreds of potential customers suddenly took notice of the new restaurant in the neighborhood.
For me, Le Paris has always been irresistible, and it has become more so over the years. Its cuisine, which was already out of fashion in the seventies, returned briefly as “comfort food” a few years ago, but it may well be slipping from popularity again. Automatically, we ordered celery remoulade, mayonnaisey food that nobody asks for anymore. When I asked Françoise to remind me why we had, she replied, correctly,
“You eat it to remember, not because you like it. It’s a forgotten food.” In that spirit, we began with a wine called Pisse-Dru—it translates literally as “piss hard”—a thin and acidic Beaujolais that I have never seen anywhere but in Montreal. We recalled that it was equally thin and acidic twenty years ago. I suggested to Françoise that we quaff something more agreeable with our main courses.
“Anything you wish!” she exclaimed. Clearly, the years had soft-ened her.
From the small wine list, I selected a Guigal Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
“No,” she protested. “It’s too much a slap in the face.” As always I let her choose the wine.
My pot-au-feu—boiled beef with turnips, potatoes, and cabbage—
was savory and properly accompanied by sour little cornichons and mustard so good it should be in ballparks everywhere. Françoise selected calves’ brains, though I begged her not to. I abhor looking at brains while I’m eating. Nonetheless, she had brains. Reluctantly, I tried them, and they tasted like capers and lemon juice floating on cotton candy.
This meal, as well as Le Paris itself, evoked the motto of Quebec, 1 3 8
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the one that is stamped on every provincial license plate (perhaps by English-speaking prison inmates jailed for running afoul of the province’s ludicrous language laws): Je me souviens (“I remember”). The slogan can be thought of as sinister, fraught with political nuances and the promise of social unrest, but a gentler interpretation is also possible. That’s what I prefer. To me the glory of Quebec and the wonder of Montreal is that they are both of a particular time.
By the 1970s, New York City already boasted the Four Seasons, Lutèce, La Côte Basque, La Grenouille, and La Caravelle. Today it is clearly the preeminent restaurant city in North America, but to my taste Montreal had the better dining twenty years ago. The restaurants were more egalitarian, more economical, and more French than those in New York, and back then French was the only serious way to dine.
Montreal’s most esteemed establishment was Chez Bardet, which was absurdly located at the end of a subway line and served (as did all the finest Montreal restaurants) a menu of items punctuated by a sur-feit of proper nouns. At Chez Bardet, there were quenelles de brochet Nantua and gratin de volaille à la Bardet—the latter, I believe, was ham, cheese, and roast chicken. There was Dover sole Waleska at Chez Delmo, rabbit Archiduc at Chez la Mere Michel, lobster tails Saint Denis (as well as a trio of strolling violinists) at Le Castillon, snails Château d’If at Le Mas des Oliviers, and, my absolute favorite verbiage, coeur du charolais soufflé aux splendeurs du Perigord at the Beaver Club, in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
To recall these places is to remember a Montreal that was filled with promise, a city that then-mayor Jean Drapeau, part visionary and part megalomaniac, boasted was “on its way to becoming the greatest city in the world. I can hear it as clearly as a composer hears a symphony.” What he should have heard was a note of caution, as he nearly bankrupted the city with his arrogant and grandiose schemes, particularly the ruinous 1976 Olympic Games. In the seventies, however, fiscal reality was still a few years away, and the restaurant culture was so energetic it seemed invulnerable.
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Even if the food served in many of my favorites is now out-of-date (it seemed that every dish was layered with cheese, finished with cream, and brought to the table in flames), it was perfect for the times. Nouvelle cuisine had not yet overturned classic French, and Montreal restaurants were fashionable as well as admirable.
The impending decline did not, for the most part, emanate from the kitchens. The chefs were not to blame. It came about as a consequence of Drapeau’s mistakes and the policies of a new political order.
Quebec (which started out as New France) is about 80 percent French-speaking. That means 5 to 6 million Quebecers are living on a continent where hundreds of millions of neighbors don’t understand a word they’re saying. For decades, Quebec’s English-speaking minority dominated the province, both culturally and economically. Then in 1960, in an attempt to reverse this situation, the so-called Quiet Revolution began. This reform movement turned into an independence movement, and the outcome was the Parti Québécois (PQ), which today rules the province and is committed to the separation of Quebec from Canada.
While the idea of secession might seem abhorrent to Americans schooled in the lessons of the Civil War, it’s not nearly so bothersome to Canadians, because the federal government recognizes the right of Quebec to separate. It just doesn’t want it to happen.
In 1980, when the first separatist referendum lost by a few percentage points, the late and beloved PQ leader René Lévesque stood before his weeping acolytes, many of them draped in Quebec flags, and said,
“If I understand you well, you said, ‘Wait until next time.’ ” That time came last year, when separatism lost again, by a much closer vote, and the Parti Québécois suggested that they’d get it right the next time.
Michael Boone, a former sportswriting colleague of mine on the Star who now writes a column for the Gazette, Montreal’s last remaining English-language daily, explains it this way: “They’re like frat guys. They won’t take no for an answer.”
Between the referendums came the Quebec language wars, with the ruling PQ passing unpleasant little laws mandating the use of French in the workplace and establishing an enforcement arm called L’Office 1 4 0
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de la Langue Française. This resulted in the creation of a funny little Quebec sublanguage invented by bureaucrats—the most infamous was the transformation of hamburger into hambourgeois. It could have been amusing, but it was not.
All of these burdens—financial, political, and social—caused Montreal and Quebec to decline economically. The culinary consequences were startling. I recall, early in the eighties, a fine dinner at a restaurant above La Brioche Lyonnaise, a candy store on Saint Denis Street selling uncommonly good chocolate-covered orange peel. On my next trip, the restaurant was out of business. Once I thought I had discovered a treasure in the working-class East End of Montreal—one with, of all things, a wonderful wine list. On my second visit, a transvestite stripper was performing. I quickly gulped my sweetbreads and my 1986
Château Sociando-Mallet, then departed, never to return.
Recently, I have sensed a comeback. Even though “The Situation,” as the long-standing political unrest is known, is as discouraging as ever, and even though the city lacks money and leadership, the restaurants have a great deal to offer. The infatuation with nouvelle cuisine—that movement toward artistic, unsatisfying food that faltered quickly in France but hung on tenaciously in Quebec—seems about over. (Even today, should you see a menu découverts, or menu of discovery, in a Montreal restaurant, throw down your napkin and flee.) Indeed, there are too many bistros, too many imitators of food made in New York, too many menus découverts, but now it is possible to visit Montreal and eat nothing but good food, food boasting of authenticity and p
repared with passion. After two decades of waiting and watching, William Neill has returned.
When I asked Françoise to recommend the best restaurant in the city, she hesitated. I assumed this was because we never had agreed on much when we were critics for the Star, but I was wrong. Reluctantly, she told me about a storefront restaurant called Le Passe-Partout, located on Decarie Boulevard, a few miles from downtown. She warned me that the chef was a monster; the last time she went there they F O R K I T O V E R
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argued, and he threw her out. The chef is James MacGuire. If you recall, Françoise’s real name is Bee MacGuire. They are brother and sister.
Le Passe-Partout (which has several meanings, including “pastry brush”) is small, seating only about thirty, and open not nearly enough.
MacGuire offers lunch four times a week and dinner only three. I found it difficult to get a reservation—I sure wasn’t going to drop his sister’s name—but I finally got a table on a Saturday night.
Entering the restaurant, I passed through a small retail shop offering wondrous baked goods, breads as flavorful as any in North America, plus all manner of extravagant luxury foods that nobody really needs, like wild-berry preserves from Saskatoon. In the dining area, the tables are dressed with damask cloths, the walls are a soothing peach-salmon, and a towering fresh-flower arrangement imparts luxuriousness. It’s all perfectly charming, except for a perfectly awful chrome-and-glass front window that shatters any illusion that you might be in the countryside of France. The food, however, is the sustenance of such fantasies.
I started with a mussel soup so extraordinary in flavor and so modest in quantity that I had to restrain myself from ordering a second bowl. The broth was smoky, the potatoes firm. My main course was a venison preparation conceived at least a half-century ago, thick slices from the loin matched with a pale-yellow peppery grand veneur sauce that has been used with venison as long as the French have been hanging antlers in their hunting lodges. MacGuire, I was learning, is an absolute classic French chef.