Even when the yellow August sun shines its strongest, the air is cool on Cape Breton Island, and wind is a constant. It tugs at the washing outside Archie and Eva Murphy’s shingle-sided house and pulls at their red-and-white Canadian flag. It whips through their apple orchard and tousles the lettuces in the vegetable patch. It may blow in fresh and sweet off the Atlantic, but a local will tell you that it can roll an 18-wheel truck on the open road or carry a King Lear thunderstorm across the wet green fields of Nova Scotia’s eastern headlands.

The storm that rattled the Murphys’ house last night has made the kitchen feel all the cozier this morning. Water boils for coffee and tea, and Eva tips a jar of her crumbly oatcakes—just sweet and salty enough—onto gold-rimmed plates set out on the big pine table. Soon the kitchen is crowded with family; everyone slathers the oatcakes and pieces of toast with Eva’s rhubarb-strawberry jam. Two grandkids tear through the kitchen. “Scallywags,” Eva says, pretending to be put out.

Soon Eva is busy making her cod cakes, kneading the fish and potato filling by hand. “Fingers were made before forks,” she says. Later, she’ll fry up a few dozen and serve them for lunch with a sweet and sour relish and bowls of creamy corn chowder.

Now grown up, with families of their own, four of the five Murphy children live “away”—off the island—scattered across Canada like so many grains of wheat. But the tide turns in August when children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends, come home for a summer vacation. At this time of year, Cape Breton kitchens are busier than at Christmas. Eva spends her days rolling out thick dough for bannock bread and baking up cornmeal cakes. Five generations of Murphys have eaten in this kitchen, mostly off the land they lived on.

Archie gets up with the sun each morning, as his father and grandfather did before him. Now he throws on a green plaid shirt and trudges over the hill to tend his vegetable patch, trailed by his wide-eyed four-year-old granddaughter Lauren. They walk past the old forge where Archie’s parents used to shoe their horses, past the apple orchard, past the barn where Dolly, a 20-year-old mare, gazes balefully at the ginger barn cats.

Archie’s garden, just a quarter acre, produces more food than he and Eva could ever eat. The root cellar still holds a few odd jars of last summer’s pickled mustard beans and plenty of last year’s potatoes. Archie, like many Cape Breton natives, has a soft spot for his blue potatoes—the same kind his father grew. Corn and beans may have been the staples of New England, to the south, but for the Scottish and Irish settlers struggling to survive the harsh Nova Scotia winters, the potato was the staple. A meal still isn’t a meal without them. “I can never fill up on bread alone,” Archie likes to say.

Archie digs up some of the potatoes and plunks them into an old Maxwell House coffee can to take to his daughter Charlene, who lives two fields over. Later, she’ll turn the tubers into a colorful potato salad for the big family crab boil at her house tonight.

Charlene’s husband, Denis Cormier, will look after the crabs. While the Celts on Cape Breton Island were mostly farmers, the French-speaking Acadians (those progenitors of Louisiana’s Cajuns) were fishermen. Denis’s father used to row out to sea alone in his shallow wooden dory and haul in 200 traps a day. Back then, lobster and cod were king; these days Denis’s two brothers earn a living fishing mostly for mackerel and snow crab. Some locals prefer the latter, with its subtle sweetness, to lobster. Today, Denis meets his brothers down at the docks and then returns home to clean two dozen crabs and simmer a huge pot of dried red kidney beans and “pork scraps”, the thick-cut pieces of salted pork back sold at the market in the nearby village of Cheticamp.

Later, as dusk settles over Denis and Charlene’s sloping fields, Denis lights the torches on the veranda. Several generations of Murphys start to stream in. Before long, the house is packed. It’s impossible to get a sample of everything without going back for seconds: tender crabmeat served with nothing but salt, pepper, and just a drop or two of vinegar; potato salad brightened with scallions and radishes; the slow-simmered beans, sweetened with molasses.

The meal winds down late. The Murphy children slip into telling old stories, the same ones they told last summer. Eva and Archie sit quietly, smiling. At summer meals like this, it’s as if their children had never gone “away”.

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It’s damp and chilly outside, but it’s toasty in Wendie Poitras’ kitchen, where rendered pork skins sizzle and pop in a cast-iron pan. Poitras—a teacher and artist who has become a vocal advocate along with scholars and activists to help define and commemorate African Nova Scotian culture—is cooking traditional dishes for a few friends and relatives. She’ll eventually add the pork to boiled potatoes and flaked salt cod. Yellow-eyed beans bake for hours to a deep brown, the ham hock in the center of the pot falling softly apart. Oxtails swim in a rich sauce next to a pot of rice and beans and a pan of cornbread.

This is Nova Scotia, a vaguely lobster-shaped peninsula that juts, with its surrounding islands, east out into the Atlantic, one time zone farther than the rest of Canada’s east coast. We’re in Dartmouth, just across the harbor from Halifax, and in the windows, the fog is thick like milk. Evergreens stand out like emerald-robed figures in the gray-white mist.

I’ve come with my mother and daughter—my first time here since I was a teenager—in search of a connection to my ancestors, my roots. I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital, but my grandmother’s family had lived in the region until moving to Montreal in 1955. My mother returned at age 21, when she was a private in the Navy. It was then that she met my father, a Quebecois, in the forces, and after I was born, we left permanently for Quebec. My parents took us back to visit Nova Scotia every few years, a 12-hour road trip backward into my heritage.

In my grandmother’s adopted city, people spoke a different language and ate different foods, so many of the ingredients she was accustomed to were not available. Rather than cling to the past, she chose to adapt to her new life and encouraged her five children to do the same. They left behind many of the African Nova Scotian recipes she was raised on. Every now and then, she would crave something from home—fish cakes, or “boiled dinner” (an old Irish staple of corned beef and cabbage adopted throughout Nova Scotia), or the salt cod and pork scraps she was practically raised on—and seek out what was needed to cook up the memories.

Blacks have lived in Nova Scotia since the early 1600s, but Canada’s black history is unknown to most Canadians—even to many black Canadians themselves. “We’re in the process of documenting and collecting information about our history,” says Poitras, who likens culture to an iceberg: Food, music, and language are among the parts visible above the water’s surface, but the vast, deep bulk of it—values, beliefs, shared experiences—can be hidden beneath. In the case of African Nova Scotians, even much of what’s traditionally above the surface has been lost or obscured over the years. It can feel like we’re still, as Poitras puts it, “trying to legitimize the culture. We’re figuring out the food piece. We’re still working on the other pieces.”

I met Poitras after I’d read about her efforts to promote African Nova Scotian culture by sharing her family’s recipes. She has cooked for her third-grade class and helped design menus for African Heritage Month events. “There is no one dish that’s particularly African Nova Scotian,” she explains. “It’s the collection of recipes from all these different places that make up the cuisine.” Indeed, African Nova Scotian food is heavily influenced by the places black settlers came from, the landscape and climate of the province, even the cuisine of British colonialists and Irish settlers.

According to the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, the province has been home to 52 black communities. But over the generations, migration to cities such as Winnipeg, Montreal, and Toronto since the Great Depression has left only about a dozen intact today. These areas, mostly rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods, were settled in waves: slaves brought by colonialists, and eventually the black Loyalists who fled the U.S. at the close of the American Revolution. (In exchange for their service, the British had promised the Loyalists freedom and land in the northern colonies, which included “New Scotland”—or in Latin, Nova Scotia.) In 1796, a small contingent of Jamaican warriors, called Maroons, were exiled to the province after an uprising. Most left a few years later for Sierra Leone, where a group of African Nova Scotians founded Freetown. More blacks came as refugees following the War of 1812, and after slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, Nova Scotia saw an influx of escaped slaves from the U.S.

As a child, I’d see 60-second ads depicting snippets of Canadian history air on CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In one, I remember a young black man hidden in the base of a church pew was reunited with his family: an escaped slave who had fled safely across the border. The message was that Canada was a place of compassion and refuge, which reflects how many Canadians view their country to this day. What the PSA didn’t reveal was how poorly the man was likely treated upon his arrival. Slavery had been abolished, but racism remained. The land promised to black Loyalists, when that promise was even kept, was the least hospitable, least arable. Early black settlers relied on fishing, foraging, and what meager farming the barren land would allow, such as keeping chickens and pigs, or growing root vegetables. They salted their meat and fish to preserve them, canned wild fruits and berries for winter, and picked dried dulse—a pungent purplish edible seaweed that grows in northern climates—from the shore to survive.

By the early 20th century, institutions and businesses in Canada had adopted Jim Crow–style practices, and legislation to prevent racial discrimination didn’t appear until after World War II (and wouldn’t be enforced until even later). Early in 2018, when a new $10 bill was unveiled bearing the likeness of Viola Desmond, many Canadians had never heard of her. Several years before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Desmond had taken a stand against entrenched segregation in Nova Scotia, refusing to move from the whites-only section of a movie theater in New Glasgow. But her story didn’t make its way across the nation the way Parks’ did, so she never attained status as a civil-rights icon. It was heard in enlightened circles on both sides of the border, even capturing the attention of W.E.B. Dubois, but for the most part, it remained a local legend—until now. In recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars and grass-roots organizations, the stories of black Canadians—­particularly African Nova Scotians—are emerging. Last year, the United Nations released a report on Canada’s relationship with its black populations. Despite the country’s image as a multicultural haven, the report cited the country’s history of black slavery and disenfranchisement, as well as its failure to recognize those black communities that have existed since the country’s earliest days. Such revelations are a rude awakening for most Canadians. For the blacks in Canada, it is a pivotal time.

In Poitras’ kitchen in Dartmouth, stories from the past are reflected in the steaming pots of braised meat, in the bubbling tin of ham-hock baked beans. Peeling potatoes for the salt cod and pork scraps always puts Poitras in mind of her mother, who would expertly pare the skins off her spuds in one long, magical spiral. Poitras’ father—who worked the dockyards and held a pastoral role within the community—would cook oxtail and other special-occasion dishes; her mother did the everyday cooking. Poitras remembers the vegetable man passing through the neighborhood to sell his fresh produce; her mother would buy 50 pounds of potatoes at a time and store them outside the back door. The mackerel man also passed through, calling out: “Maaaaack-erel! Mackerel-mackerel-mackerel!” She can hear it when she closes her eyes.

The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking In Nova Scotia

My daughter is talkative, happily plying a piece of lacquered oxtail meat from a bone. My mother has grown quiet, savoring the pungent salt of the cod fish tempered by the fluffy, peppery potatoes. She’s elsewhere now: her mother’s kitchen, her childhood. “We had baked beans every Saturday. I hated the routine of it,” she says in a small voice, mostly to herself. “But they were so good.” Poitras, too, wouldn’t fully appreciate her parents’ cooking until later. At one of her first jobs, she often traded her home-cooked meals for a co-worker’s fast food, thinking she was getting the better end of the deal. It wasn’t until she became a mother herself that she understood just how valuable her family’s recipes were.

As guests cram into Poitras’ kitchen, a few of us find seats in the living room, plates balanced in laps, glasses of cold Scotian rosé and bottles of Alexander Keith lager, the ubiquitous local beer, leaving wet rings on the coffee table.

Talk turns to identity. “Remember that when we came from Africa, through the Middle Passage to the southern United States, our language was taken from us. Our names were taken. We don’t really know why we eat certain things or speak certain ways,” says Poitras, a thick mop of tight curls framing her face. “As a people, we collected recipes from Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South, and put our own spin on them.” Baked beans might get a dose of maple syrup. Instead of hot sauce, the main condiment on the table is often chow-chow, a tangy green tomato relish. Boiled dinner is sometimes made with pig’s tails instead of beef in black homes. Oxtails have Jamaican roots, but with Canada not being a land of hot peppers, the Caribbean spices became muted. For other dishes you might find across the Maritime provinces, such as fish cakes, typically made with potatoes and salt cod or haddock, the flavors are revved up. “We tend to like a little more spice than our fellow Scotians,” says Poitras. “And probably a little too much salt.”

On one damp, foggy morning, my mother, daughter, and I set out for a place that no longer exists. Africville, on the outskirts of Halifax, overlooking the Bedford Basin, was home to a tightknit group of families who kept a few animals, fished and swam in the basin, and performed their baptisms in its cold, brackish waters. Kids even played ice hockey on it when it froze, although few alive today remember winters that cold. Life in Africville, which existed roughly from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th, could be difficult. Despite paying municipal taxes, residents weren’t provided with plumbing, garbage pickup, or paved roads. In the 1950s, the city dump was moved nearby. A decade later, after years of threats to seize the valuable waterfront property Africville occupied, the settlement, at its peak 400 strong, was razed to the ground. Its residents were forcibly relocated, and most ended up in public housing. The city used dump trucks to remove people’s belongings, a painful humiliation still fresh in the minds of former residents. Only a few families were compensated for the full value of their home. The rest were given a paltry sum and expected to start their lives anew.

Linda Mantley, a former Africville resident who cofounded the Africville Genealogy Society, gives tours of the Africville Museum, housed in a faithful replica of the Baptist church that was once the beating heart of the settlement. It was established as part of the apology and compensation package issued by the city of Halifax in 2010 for Africville’s destruction. Former residents are still fighting for personal compensation for their homes. “Our parents kept all that from us,” Mantley says of the cruel evictions. Instead, she recalls an idyllic childhood in the rustic settlement many outsiders would have thought of as a slum. She and the other children would pluck the periwinkles that clung to the rocks by the sea, left behind when the tide went out, and cook them in a pot or a can over a fire right on the beach. A pin or needle served as the utensil to dig the tiny snail out from its shell. They also picked apples, wild pears, and blueberries from brambly bushes to take home for their mothers to make blueberry duff, a steamed dumpling that would be served as dessert, or maybe tossed into a pot of boiled dinner.

At 72, Mantley is wiry, high-cheekboned, with a terse manner that belies her warmth. “We were a self-sufficient community,” she says curtly, walking us through the one-room museum, pointing out black-and-white photographs of the community, naming the people she knew. Mantley’s tour of the exhibit—made up of text, images, and a few household artifacts—feels like sifting through a box of souvenirs. Afterward, she hugs me like we’re old friends.

Juanita Peters, the museum’s general manager and a filmmaker who has directed two documentaries on Africville, feels strongly about the importance of telling the stories of African Nova Scotians. She recently moved back to Weymouth Falls, a historically black community by the Bay of Fundy, about 160 miles from Halifax, where her people have lived for nine generations, and where she would spend summers with her grandparents (she herself grew up in Toronto). Those summer meals consisted mainly of salted fish—herring, haddock, halibut head, or the dried smelts her grandmother strung up herself behind the wood stove. “She would sear them right on the stove, not in a pan,” says Peters. “Then she’d peel and eat them with toast and applesauce. And that was breakfast.” When they weren’t eating fish, it was blood pudding, cow’s liver, tongue, or lights (lungs). Most people had their own smokehouses. Today, many of the homes in Weymouth Falls are vacant, and most of the farms abandoned. With little need to smoke or salt foods now that people have refrigeration, many of the old recipes risk being lost to time.

“My cousins say they won’t come down because it’s like visiting ghosts. But I love it because it’s like visiting ghosts!” says Peters. She still cooks some of the foods from her childhood—such as smelts, fried, with a side of potato and chow-chow. “Food is about nostalgia,” Saje Mathieu—a historian and author of North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955—tells me. “Migrant communities often stay stuck in the moment of the initial departure.” In such communities, food acts as a tether to a place of familiarity, of comfort. Food can be home. For African Nova Scotians, whose original home might be too far gone for them to remember, their foods can serve as a record, a map of the arduous journey of their ancestors. Mine came to Canada with little more than the traditions that fed and sustained them. But amid the emerald pines and damp, wet cold, a world away from their ancestral origins, they endured.

The post The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking in Nova Scotia appeared first on Saveur.

What is Syrian food? It is muttabal shamandar, a velvety dip fragrant with beets, tahini, and olive oil; it is baba ghannouj, a chunky riot of eggplant and bell pepper; it is kebab hindi, tender meatballs swaddled in spicy tomato sauce.

To Vancouverites, Syrian food is in part a way to support recently arrived refugees. And to the Syrian women who prepare the food, it is a way to find their footing in a new home.

One year ago, Nihal Elwan founded Tayybeh: A Celebration of Syrian Cuisine. With a $500 CAD grant from a local foundation, the Cairo-born international development consultant organized what was to be a one-off dinner to connect Syrians and Canadians. Today, Tayybeh (pronounced tie-beh) holds dinners every six to eight weeks, typically selling out the 150-seat feasts within hours. They’ve also launched a catering company.

“We want to create bridges with different communities in the city,” says Elwan. So far, they’ve cooked in a Palestinian restaurant, church halls, and a grade school cafeteria.

In September, I was one of 160 people at the largest Tayybeh dinner to date, held at the Vancouver Japanese Language School. “[The location] really resonated with us, given the Japanese community were newcomers and that they went through their fair share of adversity,” says Nihal, referring to a period in the 1940s when the government seized Japanese-Canadians’ property and sent them to internment camps.

Under the roof of one community’s resilience, we dug in to help another establish itself. I couldn’t stop spooning up mloukheye bil jaij, Middle Eastern greens with chicken. The first bite yielded a silky green reminiscent of tea—slightly tannic, with the texture of chard—that gave way to the richness of a Sunday roast chicken, then a punch of tomato and lemon. That night I dreamed of pomegranates, chicken stew, and nearly fluorescent beet dip.

When I meet Maha Almaarabani a few weeks later, her magenta headscarf and hot-pink Tayybeh apron echo the color of that dip. Originally from Damascus, she came to Vancouver in October 2016, and coincidentally, mloukheye is her favorite dish to prepare.

“The stew with greens and chicken?” I ask. My excitement needs no translation. With Nihal acting as interpreter, Maha explains that each Syrian city has a different way of preparing the dish.

A few feet away, Raghda Hassan pauses from stuffing rounds of dough with a cheese-olive mixture to wink at me.

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“You tried the recipe from Latakia [where Raghda is from],” says Nihal. As Raghda and Maha debate, she translates. In Latakia, the greens are boiled in water first, while in Damascus they’re pan-fried in ghee for a crunchier texture. In Vancouver, the ladies buy the greens dried, and can only find them in a few Arab stores—a far cry from back home, where Maha got fresh leaves and dried them herself.

Canadian cheese is challenging, too. Nihal says they’ve tried many different kinds, “but they keep saying, ‘it’s not right, it’s not right!’” Meat comes frozen from the halal butcher. When I ask about it, Maha makes a face. “She says everything tastes different here. The meat is almost dry,” translates Nihal.

Still, the ladies power through as best they can. The notion of a recipe, in the Western sense, seems foreign to them; Maha says she has a “breath” for cooking that doesn’t rely on instructions. Another Tayybeh chef, Hasna Shekh Omar, blends dishes and techniques from Idlib, Aleppo, and regions across the Turkish border.

For the ladies, the Tayybeh project is a natural extension of what they’ve done their whole lives: cook and welcome people to the table. It is especially fitting for Hasna, whose seven children are now spread among Canada, Turkey, and Syria. “You see how all these people come to our dinners and they love our food? This is the same that we had [in Syria],” she says through Nihal.

But it’s also something new. Raghda and Maha and Hasna have never worked outside their homes, never mind in a professional kitchen. For them, the company is a gateway, not just to a better income than they’d receive in other restaurant work, but to developing the skills they need in Vancouver: learning English, navigating public transit, and building up a resume.

So what does Syrian food taste like? It tastes like dried greens from the Arabic store, soaked in water like they do in Latakia, melded with stock from too-lean Canadian chicken, and stewed until silky. To Vancouverites, it tastes like a pop-up dinner in a community hall. To the ladies of Tayybeh, it doesn’t quite taste like home. But it tastes like home for now.

The post Vancouver’s Wildly Popular Dinner Series is Helping Syrian Women Settle Into a New Home appeared first on Saveur.

There should be certain dishes on one’s must-eat list when going to Montreal. Among them: a mile-high smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s, a chewy wood-fired bagel at Fairmount Bagel (or one of its Mile End neighbors), and a steaming, gravy-covered mound of poutine at any and every casse-croute. Never before would I have envisioned putting schnitzel on that list.

That was until I met Alex Cohen and Raegan Steinberg, co-owners of Montreal’s new Arthur’s Nosh Bar, and their phenomenal schnitzel sandwich.

Drawing from Ashkenazi and Sephardic cuisines, the pair do, in their words, “Jewish classics with a twist.” After cooking and working at spots like Joe Beef and Liverpool House, they claim owning their own restaurant was more or less a mistake. “We needed headquarters for a catering company we were running,” Steinberg says, “and ended up finding such a great location that we opened our dream restaurant in it.” That location, on the increasingly buzzing Notre Dame Ouest in Montreal’s suddenly hip St. Henri neighborhood, quickly found its following—and reliably long weekend brunch lines to follow.

The Ultimate Fried Chicken Schnitzel Sandwich

Cohen, the head chef who cooks and eats like a guy with a permanent case of the munchies, ups the ante on old-school dishes like matzo ball soup, borscht, and blintzes with unexpected touches like Moroccan spices (Cohen’s parents are Moroccan) and nostalgic childhood flavor combinations (jam and cheese). Case in point: he uses honey and pickles on his chicken schnitzel sandwich to evoke the sweet-sour quality of a McDonald’s burger, and calls it The McArthur’s Sandwich. It’s the schnitzel sandwich to end all schnitzel sandwiches.

The details are these: A gargantuan, buttermilk-soaked breast of tender pounded chicken is battered in a genius combination of breadcrumbs and instant mashed potatoes to give it both heartiness and crunch, then mounded with chile-flecked iceberg slaw, kosher dill pickles, honey, and a shallot vinaigrette. It’s all served on buttery toasted challah that squishes—but doesn’t buckle—under the sandwich’s weight.

On their challah French toast listed on the brunch menu, Cohen and Steinberg run a disclaimer about that dish’s playful, ever-changing preparation, but it pretty much sums up the schnitzel as well, not to mention Cohen and Steinberg themselves:

“Wherever the wind blows!”

Arthur’s Nosh Bar
4621 Rue Notre Dame Ouest, Montreal
(514) 757-5190

The Ultimate Fried Chicken Schnitzel Sandwich

The post This Over-the-Top Fried Chicken Sandwich From Montreal Will Steal Your Heart appeared first on Saveur.

The hottest new brunch in Toronto doesn’t come from a Michelin-starred restaurant, and it doesn’t feature a trendy pastry mashup. It’s a pop-up staffed by Syrian refugees.

Filmmaker Kelli Kieley has been documenting Newcomer Kitchen since she met its co-founder, Len Senater, earlier this year at the project’s beginning planning stages. “At the time it was just such a beautiful story,” she said. “I just started going, and I didn’t know exactly how amazing this project was going to be, but I knew that it was beautiful, and it has been growing so quickly.”

When Senater heard about the growing refugee population in Toronto, his first thought was about their kitchens. How could they cook for themselves, he wondered, if they were staying in hotels for weeks or months? Senater, who founded event and kitchen space The Depanneur, thought that he could give them access to a kitchen so they could cook for themselves and their families. “We invited these ladies, and they cooked this amazing food,” he said.

The food was so compelling he figured the rest of Toronto would love it. “I thought, what if these Syrian ladies could do Syrian brunch? It would be delicious and fun.” The pop-up saw its first customers in April for Thursday dinners, and the brunch is a recent addition to this popular project. They both sell seats through reservable tickets. Senater says every seating has completely sold out, and tickets for the newly added Saturday meals are almost all spoken for as well.

The pop-up is the first of its kind in Canada, and something of a rarity for Syrian restaurants anywhere. In Syria, women run home kitchens while men tend to operate restaurants, but at Newcomer, the women are decidedly in charge, and they bring dishes and perspective frequently lacking from Syrian restaurants overseas. That includes dishes like salutet sabaneh, a mix of spinach, chickpeas, mushrooms, and onions topped with a fried egg, and helawiyaat, figs and dates stuffed with walnuts and almonds, topped with syrupy grape molasses.

Of course, the endeavor isn’t without its challenges, including getting home cooks—albeit incredibly capable ones—to adapt to restaurant needs. Senater says, “When we tell them we need to make bread for 20 people, they just pour a bunch of flour into a container and say that’s enough for 20 people. They don’t know how much is actually in there, they just know that that’s enough for 20 people. We have to go and scoop it back out to figure out how much is actually there.”

Senater adds that even though the cooks are always exactly right in their portioning, he has trouble managing their inventory and ingredient requirements.

Kieley and Senater both have strong feelings about the positive impact of the pop-up. In Senater’s experience, the project has shown him a cuisine that he wouldn’t have otherwise found in Toronto, and he hasn’t only gotten to taste it, but also learn about its importance and place in global cuisine. “This is an incredibly ancient culinary tradition,” he says, which means that giving these women an outlet to cook and continue practicing their culture is all the more important. “What happens to all that accumulated cultural knowledge and wisdom if there isn’t a place where they can showcase regional differences…it’s important that they are allowed to continue.”

For Kieley, the takeaway is also about how people will view refugees more broadly. About her documentary, she says, “I certainly would like for it to open minds and hearts, so that you see the humanity of people and have the courage to open your door, open your eyes, be willing to reach out to someone.” She said that the news surrounding refugees can cause people to shut down a bit, but Kieley firmly believes action is needed. “Take the time to do what you can,” she said.

Kieley’s full film, Making Mamoul Without a Mold, will be released in 2017. Read more about Newcomer Kitchen here. To reserve tickets, check out this Eventbrite page.

The post People in Toronto Are Lining Up for Brunch at a Pop-Up Restaurant Run by Syrian Refugees appeared first on Saveur.

When Brittani Farrington volunteered to help throw a welcome dinner for a handful of displaced families from Syria in Hamilton, Ontario, she intended on preparing the food—until three of the refugees asked if they could do the cooking instead.

Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel, three women who had resettled in Canada a few months before, knew they couldn’t communicate in English, but they could introduce themselves with their pillowy homemade pitas and mutabal, a yogurt-thickened cousin of baba ghannoush. Moved by the meal, Farrington opened up Google Translate to communicate with the women, and she slowly gleaned that they were interested in selling their food. So in July, she created a Kickstarter to fund Karam Kitchen, a catering business run by the women, and set a goal of just over $4,900 USD to cover the bare-minimum basics. Start date: July 24, with 30 days to reach full funding.

Little did Farrington expect to see the project nearly half-funded in the first 24 hours, and fully funded in just four days.

“The women were so excited [when I told them it was funded], though they were much more excited about being on the front page of The Hamilton Spectator,” Farrington says. “They felt like they were famous.”

Marketed as a catering company that “seeks to empower Syrian newcomers to build a new life in Hamilton and contribute to [the city’s] vibrant community,” Karam, which translates to generosity in Arabic, currently has over twice the amount of money it projected as a goal and nearly 200 backers—and there’s still a week left. With help from business partner and co-founder Kim Kralt, who has catering experience and a degree in social work, Farrington has lead the women through all the necessary steps, like earning their food handlers’ certification, and the more exciting tasks, like creating their standard catering menu.

Kralt found herself running around the kitchen, scrambling to keep up with the women who cooked each dish by feel. After finally convincing the women to measure how many cups of yogurt went into their smoky mutabal recipe before mixing, she and the team settled on a menu with both recognizable dishes to locals, such as tabouleh and hummus, and others that are less so, like meat- and rice-stuffed eggplant and zucchini. Their first official catering gig is September 8th for a meeting of the city’s Task Force on Refugee Resettlement, a group of 25 to 30 people who have supported Karam Kitchen from the start. From there, Karam already has a few packed months ahead. It’s an impressive schedule for any catering business, let alone one that’s only half a year old—and to say nothing of the language barrier.

Just as Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel were new to Hamilton, a Canadian port city with a population of half a million, so was Farrington. Born in the Midwest, where she went to college and gained experience doing marketing for catering companies, she found herself uprooted a year ago to Ontario for her husband’s PhD program. Well aware of United States’ shaky reception of Syrian refugees, Farrington was shocked to find herself in a city with a global department dedicated to making the city welcoming to refugees, and with a large task force behind it. In the past year, Hamilton alone has welcomed 1,000 displaced Syrians.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in March 2011, the U.N. estimates that nearly 13.5 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian aid, and more than 50% of the population is displaced—but only 3.6% of those who are displaced have resettled in another country.

While the U.S. hasn’t been that receptive to Syria’s refugees, our neighbors north of the border have proven to be especially welcoming. In the past few months, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran features on Canada’s programs. According to Global Affairs Canada, the governmental department that manages the country’s diplomatic relations, Canada has taken in over 25,000 refugees since November 2015 and has spent over $1 billion in “humanitarian, development, and security assistance.”

“It’s been so refreshing here in Canada to be living in a city that is generally incredibly welcoming to refugees,” Farrington says, emphasizing that though displaced persons are obviously grateful to be welcomed in foreign countries, leaving their home is bittersweet. “Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel were always serving me cookies and tea [when I visited their homes], despite their limited resources, so I’ve been so pleased to see the city rally around newcomers.”

Now that Karam has exceeded its $4,900 USD goal, they’re hoping to reach just over $11,600 by August 24th, an amount that will allow them to purchase more equipment and packaging, as well as fulfill all rewards for Kickstarter donors. But beyond supporting the women, Farrington stands behind the food; she doesn’t want people supporting Karam solely because of the cause, but also because she believes in the crisp-fried falafel, the savory-sweet cabbage and pomegranate salad, and every other dish on their menu.

“We believe so strongly in the women, which might be why someone initially orders from us,” Farrington says, “but it’s such quality food that we feel confident that if we can get people to try it, they’ll be hooked.”

Read more stories from Ladies First, a column about people doing amazing things in the food world who happen to be women »

The post An All-Woman Team of Syrian Refugees Has Become Canada’s Hottest New Catering Company appeared first on Saveur.

Montreal, which famously has the largest number of restaurants per capita of any North American city, is many things to many people. It’s the taste of salty confit de canard backdropped by cobblestoned streets. It’s a deli haven with a beloved smoked meat tradition. And it’s the casse-croûtes, the local diners and snack bars, that fill the gaps left between all other restaurants and champion the night after everything else has closed.

Casse-croûtes have a long and fond history in Montreal, which trace their ancestry from the city’s varied cultural traditions. And they’re everywhere: these all-purpose local hangs gather around the city’s six universities and 12 junior colleges, and sit well-snuggled in the recesses of golden memory of anyone who has passed through Montreal.

You never have to travel far if, in a drunken haze, you find yourself jonesing for souvlaki piled high with garlic sauce, Jewish deli-style smoked meat, poutine, steamé hot dogs topped with mustard and coleslaw, a slice of pizza, or any combination of greasy breakfast stuffs. And at a time when greasy spoons across North America are facing harder and harder odds to stay open, Montreal has emerged as one of the last great diner cities.

There are plenty of reasons why Montreal’s diner scene has succeeded where others have not. Until 2013, a long-held ban on street-food vendors and trucks meant that Montrealers looking for fast, cheap food were driven into corner snack counters for their food on-the-go. Many older casse-croûtes own the buildings in which they operate, and for those that don’t, a slow-moving economy has meant stable commercial rents.

“The recession really gripped the city for much of the past three decades due to the political situation,” says David Sax, an ex-Montrealer and author of Save the Deli, referring to an ongoing political instability that can be traced back to the ’60s. “Until recently, it froze real estate prices in place.” The same cannot be said of rapidly developing Toronto, or prohibitively expensive New York and San Francisco.

The casse-croûte is more than just an old fashioned place for burgers; it represents a culture that’s distinctly Montreal. Sax calls the city’s casse-croûte landscape “a reflection of modern Quebec”, saying, “Every culture that comes in through that business leaves its mark, and every culture that comes in through that city leaves its mark, too.”

Those cultures fuse seamlessly today; souvlaki is served with french fries; shredded smoked meat sits atop of a shimmering mound of poutine; fries ladled over with spaghetti sauce, cheese curds, and Italian sausage becomes poutine italienne, and a steamé topped with meat sauce and chopped onion is embraced as a Michigan hot dog.

You could say the only similarity between these foods, other than the relatively ease of preparing them, is that they’re the kind of dishes that one would only consider ingesting if they were completely, fall-down, loaded off their faces. And this is the last key to Montreal’s casse croûte success: their clientele, which hasn’t changed much in the last century.

From the turn of the 20th century and through to the ’60s, Montreal became a hub for gamblers, jazzers, and boozers, establishing its carefree and racially integrated nightlife during a time when America faced Prohibition followed decades later by the Civil Rights Movement. Snack shacks sprouted to feed these revelers’ hunger, accommodating travelers from across the border by serving burgers and fries with a Quebecois twist.

The waterfront and the former red light district came alive in these decades: neon panels were stacked, row by row, beckoning night owls into jazz clubs along St-Antoine and Notre Dame streets. Between the clubs, snack bars and cheap diners awaited, helping bar hoppers sober up before moving onto the next cabaret, gambling den or brothel. Diners became well known for their celebrity night owls: longtime Montreal residents still remember the regular sight of Leonard Cohen at Ben’s, les glorieux Montreal Canadiens at Moe’s Corner Snack Bar, and everyone else at Schwartz’s.

By the ‘70s, a crime crackdown struck most of the sin from the city, but the formica diners remain, as do their hungry, sometimes hungover patrons.

Casse-croûtes still sit on every corner along Rue Notre Dame in Oscar Peterson‘s old neighbourhood of Little Burgundy, though their more illicit neighbours have vanished. On St-Catherine Street on any given weekend, groups of young Americans drive in from out of town to take advantage of the lower drinking age of 18, and to pop into decades-old strip clubs, stopping into Mr. Steer for a quick bite as they did 50 years ago.

They remain cheap sources of bacon and eggs, where you follow the crowd after a show at Club Soda, where you taste your first poutine and, decades later, have another one for the memories.

Five Casse-Croûtes You Need to Visit in Montreal

Wilensky’s
Established in 1932, Wilensky’s Light Lunch has earned a legendary reputation for its Wilensky Special, a salami and bologna sandwich topped with mustard in a flat kaiser roll, best paired with an old fashioned fountain soda. They moved down the street in the ’50s, and since then, the only thing that’s changed is their prices.

Wilensky’s
34 Avenue Fairmount Ouest +1 514-271-0247

Orange Julep
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium isn’t the only Big O in the city. Also established in 1932, this three-storey-tall orange has made an indelible mark on Montreal’s skyline since its carhop days, when aficionados would gather in the huge parking lot to show off their classic rides. They serve everything a casse-croûte should, from souvlaki to smoked meat-topped poutines, but they’re most famous for the Orange Julep drink, a frothy orange beverage somewhat akin to an Orange Julius, but with a mystery recipe.

Orange Julep
7700 Boulevard Décarie +1 514-738-7486

La Belle Province
The most ubiquitous chain in Quebec, La Belle Province might not be most Montrealers’ most nostalgia-draped diner, but its 125 strategic locations ensure that everyone has had at least one inebriated rendezvous with the instantly recognizable fluorescent orange gravy that tops its 26 kinds of poutine. Sometimes sketchy, often pretty and always cheap, you’ll never find a more tempting offer than a $1.45 steamé hot dog at 3 a.m. after last call.

La Belle Province
Locations around Montreal

Déli Sokołów
A new player in town, Déli Sokołów has been open for a year and has settled comfortably among the trendy juice bars and upscale restaurants west of the train tracks in St-Henri. A Polish-inspired casse-croûte, Déli Sokołów’s menu is total comfort for people looking for everything from Montreal Jewish deli fare, perogies and borscht, or just a scoop of strawberry ice cream. Their latke poutine isn’t to be missed, and there are plenty of vegan and vegetarian options as well.

Déli Sokołów
4350 Rue Notre-Dame O
+1 438-228-0265

Montreal Pool Room
No longer a pool shark’s haven, the 1912-established Montreal Pool Room is mostly known for its steamés and potates frites. Located in the former Red Light District (currently the Quartier des Spectacles) in the heart of downtown, it moved across the street in 2010 but you can still see the marquee lights emanating from the old Café Cléopatra strip club across the street.

Montreal Pool Room
1217 Boul St-Laurent
+1 514-954-4487

The post Inside Montreal’s Unbeatable Diner Culture appeared first on Saveur.

To get a taste of European culture in North America, head to the city of smoked meat, dense woodfire-baked bagels, and poutine: Montreal. Thanks to the French-Canadian city’s booming culinary scene, visitors these days can now expect a heaping helping of continental food and flair, as well as a generous sampling of what makes Quebec’s native cuisines worth a trip of their own. Maple syrup and game meats practically merit their own food group, while the city’s cocktail culture—though slow on the uptake compared to America’s imbibing revival—has matured at a brisk pace over the past five years or so. Meanwhile, Montrealers who prefer their own dining room tables to those in restaurants also take eating seriously, as demonstrated by the city’s many farmers’ markets, cooking-supply stores, and other must-see, food-minded destinations. From where to get the best foie gras-topped pancakes to the hotel with the cushiest beds, check out our guide below.

Where to Eat

Joe Beef
Dinner at this always-a-party eatery from buzzy restaurateur David McMillan that Momofuku founder David Chang calls “my favorite restaurant in the world” is worth the hype. The business, named after a legendary 19th-century barman, pays tribute to traditional French and Quebecois fare. For example, the restaurant is home to the over-the-top “foie gras double down,” which smooshes bacon, cheddar cheese, and maple syrup between two slabs of breaded and fried duck liver. With its insistence on hyper-local provisions and creative takes on rustic fare—pressed duck with seared foie gras! duck eggs with pommes frites! bacon-wrapped horse filet!—Joe Beef offers an over-the-top dining experience.

Joe Beef
2491 Notre-Dame West, Montreal, H3J 1N6
514-935-6504

Le Club Chasse et Peche
Montreal’s a meat lover’s town, and since 2004, its carnivorous epicenter has sat behind a nondescript stucco facade tucked in a cobblestone street at the edge of the tourist-laden Old Port neighborhood. Inside, dimly lit small rooms with a lounge-y feel provide the perfect covert setting for eating your fill without worrying about what your fellow patrons might think. The cheeky menu is chockablock with hybrid meat dishes: veal with lobster tail, partridge with Serrano ham, and the house-named Chasse et Peche (which translates to “hunting and fishing”), a surf-and-turf spread often featuring sweetbreads and lobster in multiple forms. Don’t miss the cocktails.

Le Club Chasse et Peche
423 rue Saint-Claude, Montreal, H2Y 3B6
514-861-1112

Au Pied de Cochon
Chef Martin Picard is the jovial-giant poster boy of traditional Quebecois cooking, and his signature restaurant’s menu is so larded up with syrup, fat, and foie gras, it almost reads like a dare. Foie gras, in fact, gets its very own section on the bill of fare; it’s available on top of a hamburger or a mess of poutine, pressed into a salted pie (tarte de fois gras cru au sel), or as part of the “plogue a Champlain”: a towering dish comprised of a buckwheat pancake, potatoes, a fried egg, Canadian bacon, and foie gras, drenched in a maple syrup reduction. The restaurant’s space is bistro-like, cozy, and narrow.

Au Pied de Cochon
536 Duluth East, Montreal, H2L 1A9
514-281-1114

Hotel Herman
Small plates, elegant cocktails, hipster-chic vibe: Partners Ariana Lacombe, Dominic Goyet, and Marc-Alexandre Mercier hit all the requisite cool points when they opened their soignée eatery in 2012. What’s great about Hotel Herman, though, is that along with its swankiness, it also knows how to have fun. A massive, rectangular bar stands in the center of the room, which keeps the on-goings airy and saloon-like, while exposed brick, tiled surfaces, and a pressed-tin ceiling boost the storefront space’s amiable din. And then there’s the menu, which is punctuated by idiosyncratic dishes like deer tartare, raw fluke, and blood sausage with button mushrooms and spaetzle—and for dessert, white chocolate with sea buckthorn and pine.

Hotel Herman
5171 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal, H2T 1R9
514-278-7000

Park
Calling Park the best sushi restaurant in Montreal is an understatement because it’s probably one of the best sushi restaurants in all of North America. Chef Antonio Park’s globally inspired menu stems from his identity—a Korean Montrealer who grew up in South America—and he serves up dishes like nigiri with chimichurri, duck breast with a foie gras croquette, and Korean shaved ice dessert patbingsu. Thanks to several special permits obtained by the restaurant, customers can try truly unique seafood, such as snapper that’s given needle treatments by fishermen to lessen the bodily trauma of death. For the best experience, order omakase-style; or for something less formal, go for lunch and get a bento box or bibimbap.

Park
378 Victoria Avenue, Montreal, H3Z 2N4
514-750-7534

Maison Publique
Anglophilic food isn’t particularly common in French-speaking Quebec, but this inspired iteration of a classic British pub (which counts Jamie Oliver among its backers) has been warmly embraced by locals for its friendly vibe, smart cocktails, funky-meets-homey decor, and modernized comfort food. The kitchen is in full view behind the bar; from it come delicious dishes like Welsh rarebit, meat pies, crispy pig ear salad, baked oysters, and a ravishing T-bone steak for two. And in a city that loves brunch almost as much as it loves hockey, Maison Publique offers everything from pancakes, bacon, and eggs, to blood sausage and smoked sturgeon.

Maison Publique
4720 rue Marquette, Montreal, H2J 3Y6
514-507-0555

Au Kouign-Amann
The bakery culture of “la vraie France” can be found at this adorable, old-fashioned patisserie and boulangerie. Its namesake specialty is a traditional Breton sweet: Picture a croissant as big as a whole cake that’s been slathered with a mind-boggling amount of extra butter and sugar. Kouign-amann is served in triangular slices; with one of the bakery’s café drinks, it makes for an excellent midday stop while strolling the Plateau. Au Kouign-Amann also serves a Gallic lunch menu featuring croque monsieurs and quiches. If you’re lucky, you can snag a seat at one of three small tables and bask in the bakery’s weathered wood and exposed brick interior.

Au Kouign-Amann
322 Avenue du Mont-Royal East, Montreal, H2T 1P7
514-845-8813

Where to Drink

Le LAB
Fabien Maillard’s dark corner bar is easy to find but still feels like a speakeasy with its vested staff, clandestine vibe, and innovative takes on pre-Prohibition cocktails. Every month, a new crop of libations highlights different ingredients—anything from chiles to Canadian rye whiskey. But, perennial potables reign supreme, such as the Jerky Lab Jack, a Jack Daniel’s-based cocktail mixed with house-made bitters and syrup, served on the rocks and garnished with a strip of beef jerky pinned to a mini-clothesline. Also, LAB-tenders (as they prefer to be called) are renowned for their love of pyrotechnic bartending, so hunker down for a show.

Bar Le LAB
1351 rue Rachel East, Montreal, H2J 2K2
514-544-1333

Big in Japan
First, some helpful taxonomy: There’s Big in Japan the eatery, a greasy spoon-style izakaya featured on a 2011 episode of Anthony Bourdain’s The Layover; and then there’s Big in Japan the bar, the restaurant’s offspring, located a few blocks north. Open the nondescript door marked with miniscule Japanese lettering, and pass through a long, narrow corridor, and you’ll arrive at in a room with rococo-yet-minimalist candlelit bar tops with sake and Japanese whisky bottles hanging from the ceiling (high-rolling regulars purchase their own bottles and stash them there.) Funny enough, the cocktail menu steers toward Western-world staples: Manhattans, Negronis, Sidecars, and the like. Come on weeknights or early on the weekend to avoid the velvet-rope-and-bouncer treatment out front.

Big in Japan (no website)
4175 boulevard Saint Laurent, Montreal, H2W 1Y9
438-380-5658

Le Rouge Gorge
Le Plateau is a boho Montreal neighborhood made for people-watching, and since opening there this past spring, this wine bar has attracted the see-and-be-seen crowd in droves. When the warm weather arrives, Le Rouge Gorge’s floor-to-ceiling windows offer a breezy view of the area’s foot traffic, as does its cute sidewalk terrasse (a summer amenity to be enjoyed at many local bars and eateries, and one of Montrealers’ favorite things about the city). Designer Zebulon Perron renovated what was previously a divey pool hall into a provocative establishment with a trapezoidal, marble-topped bar and an apparatus suspended above that holds wine bottles and glasses. Don’t miss the charcuterie, cheeses, and pickled nibbles.

Le Rouge Gorge
1234 Avenue du Mont-Royal Est, Montreal, H2J 1Y1
514-303-3869

Dieu du Ciel
This Montreal microbrewery is the Montreal microbrewery; hands down, the best brewpub for its selection, ambiance, price, and most importantly, taste. On any given visit, you’ll likely find 15 to 20 different beers handwritten on the chalkboard menus; the alcoholic content of each will be meticulously noted and everything can be ordered in tasting-sized pours, allowing you to smartly strategize your session drinking. There are too many great beers here to list (and the lineup rotates regularly), but try the Disco Soleil (IPA aged with kumquats), the Route des Epices (pepper-flavored Siegle ale), the Rosee d’Hibiscus (white beer infused with hibiscus flowers), or the Aphrodisiaque (cacao-and-vanilla-flavored stout).

Dieu du Ciel
29 Avenue Laurier Ouest, Montreal, H2T 2N2
514-490-9555

Le 4e Mur
Its name means “the fourth wall,” which is what you’ll pass through, seemingly, to reach this subterranean speakeasy. Located on a block of the Quartier Latin that’s run amok with college-kid hangouts, Le 4e Mur’s unmarked door is manned by a gentlemanly bouncer who will check your reservation on his smartphone, let you into the pitch-black vestibule, then leave you to figure out which brick (hint: it’s on your left) must be manipulated to magically open a second door leading to the basement bar itself. Once you’re there, you’ll be treated to smart takes on classic cocktails like Boulevardiers and Negronis. Since opening in July 2015, Le 4e Mur has scheduled free burlesque shows on the weekends. Enter your e-mail address at their website to make a reservation and find out the bar’s address.

Le 4e Mur
Address given out through the website
No phone number

Le Mal Necessaire
Montreal was late to the tiki-craze party but caught up big-time when Le Mal Necessaire finally debuted in the summer of 2014. Locate the bar’s neon-green pineapple along the streets of Chinatown and descend into a hip-yet-welcoming lounge serving tiki drinks that are as over-the-top as they are on point. Classic cocktails include mai tais, pina coladas, painkillers, and Singapore Slings, available in either monster-sized individual portions—many drinks here come served in hollowed-out pineapples or coconuts—or, in a few cases, by the group-friendy pitcher. Patrons can also order food from the Chinese eatery upstairs.

Le Mal Necessaire
1106B Boul St Laurent, Montreal, H2Z 1J5
514-439-9199

Where to Stay

Hotel de L’Institut
One of Montreal’s best accommodations is also a best-kept secret: The four-star Hotel de L’Institut, operated by Quebec’s government-run tourism and hotel management school, is located in the lower Plateau, where lodging can be hard to come by compared to Montreal’s tourist-heavy downtown. Every one of its 42 rooms comes equipped with its own balcony; other niceties include bamboo bath linens, goat’s-milk moisturizer, waffle-knit robes and a bounteous breakfast buffet. Guests and non-guests can make a reservation at the penthouse restaurant for an incredibly good and low-priced weekday lunch, while the ground-floor Restaurant de l’Institut holds its own among the city’s fine-dining standouts. L’Institut is also the rare Montreal hotel that provides underground parking for only a modest surcharge.

Hotel de L’Institut
3535 rue Saint-Denis, Montreal, H2X 3P1
514-282-5120

Hotel Le St-James
Housed in a restored bank building from 1870 (the hotel spa is located in what used to be the vault), Lucien Remillard’s boutique property features individually designed and decorated rooms outfitted with hand-ironed Frette bed linens, marble bathrooms, blackout window shades, and museum-quality curios that Remillard personally selects on his travels. The staff even helps guests tailor their accommodations by selecting their own musical playlists and room fragrances. Expect to see a few famous faces traipsing through the small, beautiful lobby; Le St-James is renowned as the celebrity hotel of Montreal.

Hotel Le St-James
355 rue Saint-Jacques, Montreal, H2Y 1N9
514-841-3111

Hotel Gault
Hotel Gault’s location—on a corner of Vieux-Port that borders the more modernized, centre-ville portion of downtown—serves as an allegory for its distinctively Old World-meets-New aesthetic. Housed in a five-story Beaux Arts warehouse from 1871, its 30 loft-like suites are furnished with floor-to-ceiling French windows (that you can actually open!), Flou beds, Mondrian custom cabinetry, flat-screen TVs, and heated bathroom floors. With work spaces provided in each room, a user-friendly lobby, library geared for meet-ups, and free use of the hotel’s iPads and Wi-Fi, Hotel Gault is also a great place to get some work done—but with a check-in desk that doubles as a bar, why would you?

Hotel Gault
449 rue Sainte-Helene, Montreal, H2Y 2K9
514-904-1616

What to Do

Marche Atwater
Montreal takes great pride in its system of public markets (which those in the U.S. would recognize as farmers’ markets, with a focus on locally grown and raised produce, meat, and dairy). Located along the banks of the Lachine Canal (a lovely spot to enjoy a market-purchased picnic), Atwater’s year-round set-up makes a visit worthwhile no matter the season. The indoor/outdoor facility boasts several gourmet specialty shops inside its circa 1932 Art Deco edifice. What really makes Atwater recommendable, however, is its unparalleled selection of ready-to-eat victuals, with stalls surrounding the building that sell everything from Reunionese cuisine to Singaporean street food.

Marche Atwater
138 Atwater Avenue, Montreal, H4C 2H6
514-937-7754

The Wandering Chew
This two-woman collective, founded by law student Sydney Warshaw and food writer Katherine Romanow, promotes and preserves Montreal’s Jewish food culture through two main endeavors. Their “Beyond the Bagel” walking tours focus on the culinary history of the adjoining Plateau and Mile-End neighborhoods, making pit stops at such landmarks as Schwartz’s (a Jewish deli beloved for its smoked meat), Wilensky’s Light Lunch (a luncheonette counter that’s barely changed since the 1930s) and rival bagel-makers Fairmount Bagels and St-Viatuer Bagels. The Wandering Chew also hosts dinners and other sit-down events like “Makhn A Piknik: A Yiddish Poet’s Feast,” “A Southern Jewish Thanksgiving,” and “Killer Cheese and Girl Power: A Chanukah Party.”

The Wandering Chew
No address
No phone number

Dante Hardware and Mezza Luna Cooking School
If you’d get a kick out of shopping for Laguiole knives and Le Crueset Dutch ovens in a store where firearms are wall-mounted behind the register, then this is the kitchen specialty shop for you. Since 1956, the family-run business has imported hard-to-find cooking and baking supplies from Europe; since 1994, Elena Faita-Vendittelli has run the Mezza Luna cooking school a few doors down to further impart her family’s love for old-world Italian eats. Students can take classes in everything from bûche de noël to sweet-and-salty apples, then head over to Dante to pick up the supplies they need to recreate those dishes at home.

Dante Hardware and Mezza Luna Cooking School
6851 St-Dominique Street and 57 rue Dante, Montreal
514-271-2057 and 514-272-5299

The post Foie Gras Pancakes and the Ultimate Poutine: How to Eat Montreal appeared first on Saveur.

After a week in Tofino I’ve pretty much adopted the diet of a sea otter.

Crustaceans and bivalves, naturally: gnarly gooseneck barnacles at Wolf in The Fog; decapods in the form of Dungeness crabs, sweet and simply boiled, devoured right on the beach beside The Wickaninnish Inn; and palm-sized beach oysters broiled beneath a toasty shell of miso mayonnaise and salmon bacon at Sobo. I’m getting my greens mainly from marine algae: slippery pickled bull kelp at Picnic washed down with Tofino Brewing Company‘s Kelp Stout. It’s all remarkably good, and my fur has never looked better.

Tofino is a tiny and remote place—the first road was built in 1959—on the extreme west coast of Vancouver Island. Sail west from here into the Pacific and there’s nothing but ocean until you hit Japan. The year-round population is around 1800, but that number swells by several times in the summer when tourists flock here for the picturesque marine beauty and wildlife, the surfing, and, more frequently, for the food.

Culinary tourism in Tofino is relatively recent; the story begins in 1996, when the Wickaninnish Inn opened the Pointe Restaurant and built their menu almost entirely around local ingredients—unusual for this time and place.

That local-first practice is still in place today, and a meal in the Pointe’s great octagonal dining room, preferably at a window table overlooking the sweep of Chesterman beach or nestled up beside the copper fireplace, doubles as a lesson in local flavor. Chef Warren Barr pairs plump, briny clams and soft Humboldt squid with horseradish yogurt and melons from the nearby Okanagan Valley. Potatoes are cooked in beeswax, imparting a mellow sweetness, while wild salal berries (a sweet little black berry that’s been a part of the local diet around here for 5000 years) do the same for a nutty brown butter cake.

While the Pointe is the most formal way to experience the best local ingredients it’s not the only. At Sobo, chef Lisa Ahier, a Texas import who moved here with her husband Artie a dozen years ago, cooks an idiosyncratic and delicious menu that makes use of local suppliers in dishes that lean from Spanish (halibut and scallop ceviche) to Asian (braised duck ramen) to West Coast (cedar-planked salmon) in spirit.

The most sought-after reservation in town right now, though, is the restaurant of former Pointe chef Nicholas Nutting. Wolf in the Fog opened in 2014 to almost immediate national acclaim for its playful but refined cooking. There, you can order an entire duck served with lasagna and blood oranges, while you watch couples sip punch from crystal bowls and sing along to old-school reggae.

So intense is the appetite for Tofino’s food right now that the town can barely contain it. Even a rather unlovely industrial park on the outskirts of town now houses Red Can Gourmet, the local fancy pizza joint, plus Picnic, a terrific little charcuterie and preserve shop, and the chilled-out tasting room at Tofino Brewing Company. The so-called “hippie mall” on the highway, home to Wildside Grill, an excellent fish and chip hut featuring fresh local salmon, ling cod, and halibut, and Tacofino, a colorful taco truck with a permanent lineup and Chocolate Tofino (purveyor of the chocolate starfish), is bursting at the seams.

There might not be a better small town to eat in anywhere right now for people or for otters.

Chris Johns is an award winning food and travel writer. After crossing Canada from British Columbia to Newfoundland with friend Derek Dammann, owner of Montreal’s renowned Maison Publique, to meet with farmers, fishermen, winemakers and chefs (basically the people who make Canada so delicious) for a book project, he’s returning to his favorite places from that trip for SAVEUR—plus visiting a few he never got to—for a second helping of Canadiana.

The post Visit the Small Canadian Town That’s Putting Big Food Capitals to Shame appeared first on Saveur.

When we walked into Papillon Bleu, a Chinese banquet hall restaurant around the corner from Basilique Notre Dame in Montreal’s Old Port, the sole waiter on duty looked surprised to see us. At 7:45 on a Saturday night, at the height of tourist season, just one young white family sat in the palatial dining room over a plate of General Tao chicken. We walked past them to a table in the back, Chopin drifting quietly from the speakers into the certain shade of dim light that only Chinese restaurants seem to have. At our seats, bright yellow napkins, impeccably folded into fans, rested on a blue tablecloth next to cutlery. Sometime in the last 18 years of operation, Papillon Bleu stopped bothering with chopsticks.

“How did you find out about us?,” our waiter inquired. I told him that my family used to own a Chinese restaurant that served peanut butter dumplings and I wanted to taste them again. Papillon Bleu has come up when I googled “Best Peanut Butter Dumplings in Montreal.” He shook his head and told us that while it might have been the case a few years ago, they had switched peanut butter brands to cut costs. “We use Kraft now, not Skippy.”

Perhaps more discerning palates might have been able to tell the difference between peanut butter dumplings made with Kraft and those made with Skippy, but the significance for me wasn’t which brand they used, it was that they served peanut butter dumplings at all. Commonly known as Hunan dumplings, this specialty exists neither in China, nor anywhere else in North America. Instead, Hunan dumplings are a uniquely Quebecois tradition, and a slowly dying one, found in basementy second-generation Chinese family restaurants and take-out places that service hungover or still-drunk college students.

Peanut butter dumplings taste exactly how they sound, but also unlike anything else. The premise is simple: pork wontons, swimming in a rich sauce made from full-fat Kraft-or-something-like-it peanut butter, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Szechuan peppercorns. The result is a dumpling that coats your mouth with a distinct store-brand quality, a little too sweet, a little too doughy, but buttery, and luxuriously warm, perfectly suited to combat the bone-chilling effects of a Montreal winter.

The dumplings are a reincarnation of a dish found in Szechuan, in southwest China, a region known for its fiery, fragrant cooking style. The original dumplings contained a pork mixture topped with a ground mix of chopped, roasted peanuts, chili oil, and Szechuan peppercorns. But like most plates from this region in southwest China, it was considered too spicy to serve when it made its way to Canada. Peanut butter dumplings, as Montreal knows them, debuted in the ‘80s at le Piment Rouge, a restaurant in the opulent Windsor building, when Szechuan-style cuisine, no matter how adjusted it was to Western tastes, was considered exotic and decadent to Canadians who still identified Chinese with take-out chop suey.

Lesley Chesterman, the highly esteemed and longtime fine dining critic for the Montreal Gazette wrote this of the now shuttered Piment Rouge: “Tuxedoed waiters dished up plates of glistening food, and displayed proudly at the entranceway were various awards: Wine Spectator, DiRona, a CAA Four-Diamond, Mobil Four-Star. It all looked so promising.”

As a child I made frequent trips to Montreal in the golden years of this Szechuan-style cuisine. In the ’90s, my parents joined in with some relatives and friends to take over two Chinese restaurants, one called the Crystal Palace. The Crystal was a two-story banquet hall in the suburbs, with sumptuous purple decor and tablecloths. Every month or two, my family would load up in the car, drive six hours from Toronto to Montreal and arrive just in time for dinner. They would seat us in the table at the back and plop a heaping plate of peanut butter dumplings in front of my face, followed by a Shirley Temple and a glass full of maraschino cherries. I never had these dumplings anywhere else, so I assumed they were my uncle and aunt’s secret recipe. It was even published in the Gazette in 1994, photocopied and disseminated among my family members. At five years old, even I knew that Kraft wasn’t part of Chinese cooking, but they perfectly suited my Western-Chinese sensibilities. The adults would chatter on about the restaurant business while my cousin taught me how to fold napkins into fans.

Growing up, we made fewer visits to see my relatives and the taste of peanut butter dumplings faded into memory. The Crystal Palace closed down in the early 2000s, following the decline of the rest of the Szechuan-style family restaurants. There were too many owners; not enough customers. So it goes in the restaurant world. Restaurants changed, too: more authentic Chinese ingredients became available, and rudimentary North-Americanized Chinese dishes evolved into more complex, diverse, and authentic offerings.

Our waiter has worked at the Papillon Bleu since day one, eighteen years ago. Before that, he was at Papillon de Szechuan. He remembers the Crystal Palace, le Piment Rouge, and the others. We chatted about the old recipes, traded half-remembered details of my family’s restaurant, and about new, more authentic mainland Chinese places that have sprouted up downtown, run by people who would not know what to make of wontons slathered in Kraft (or Skippy, for that matter).

After he left us with two fortune cookies, we exited the Papillon Bleu into the cool night with our bellies warmed, and I could not help but think, like Lesley Chesterman, that it must have all seemed so promising. Thanks to the efforts of today’s Chinese restaurateurs, I can now enjoy Xiaolongbao from Shanghai, Xinjian lamb skewers, and Langzhou soup noodles in Montreal. But, to me, Kraft peanut butter still tastes like home.

Make Crystal Palace’s Hunan Dumplings with Peanut Sauce »

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