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Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon
By Malcolm Jolley
"It's very simple. I tell this to the people that write about us in Montreal: if it's bad, I will kill you."
And I almost believe him for minute before he smiles and shrugs his shoulders.
I am having lunch with Martin Picard, co-owner and Chef at Au Pied de Cochon,
Montreal's shrine to foie gras and all things porcine. He is in town because he cooked at The Drake Hotel's James Beard Foundation dinner (see Ivy's excellent piece on it here) on Wednesday. On the Thursday he gave more than half a dozen media interviews, mostly about the English version of his Au Pied de Cochon Album "cookbook" (the term is applied loosely, it's more a work of art than a collection of recipes). I have picked him up, and the restaurant's charming manager, Gaëlle Cerf at Food Network Canada's offices on Bloor Street. An English version of his hit Quebec TV series is coming this fall. From there we headed west, past Bathurst, to Koreatown to meet up with friend and photographer Jamie Drummond for a detoxifying bowl of pork bone soup.
Translated explanations of the ingredients, or rather part of the pig used, for pork bone soup generally refer to the animal's "neck". There are certainly vertebrae involved. How much of that is above the shoulder or not, I couldn't say. It's the chilli and ginger infused broth, flecked with soupy bits of kim chi and a potato or two (which seems exotic in an Asian dish) that brings us to Koreatown. I have surmised, correctly as it turns out, that Chef Picard and Gaëlle have been lured out and entreated to enjoy alcoholic beverages by their Toronto culinary hosts over the past few nights, and are ready for a quick detox before flying back to Montreal, for an evening working in their resto. This suits Drummond and me as well, though I make sure to choose the soup joint that also sells beer, so as not to shock the system.
Toronto's Koreatown, or at least the downtown one that stretches from Palmerston to Christie along Bloor Street, is relatively new. It services the local immigrant community, but also a large contingent of Korean students who come over to Toronto to learn English for a year or two. Canada is considered safer than the U.S. and cheaper than Britain. The upside for the local omnivores, like me, is authentic Korean food at student prices. At Kai Chi, the four of us each order the pork bone soup special: an iron bowl of soup, a steel bowl of rice, condiments including kim chi and an ‘O.B.' beer. For about $8 each.
Chef Picard's signature dish is the namesake of his restaurant: a pig's trotter stuffed with foie gras. The Album, or L'Album, is themed with a recurring cartoon of a happy pig being tortuously prepared in all manner of ways, nearly always missing a leg. What I mean to explain is that the man is really into eating pig. And not just pork tenderloin. Or not at all pork tenderloin (unless maybe it was stuffed with foie gras). The publicist for his English-language publishers, Douglas & McIntyre, had set up an interview around lunchtime, so I thought it would be fun to dine out, rather than sit in a boardroom somewhere. I thought of the pea meal sandwiches at Carousel in the Market as a possible porcine lunch, but they're actually pretty lean, they don't have a license and I'm pretty sure you can't get foie gras on top.
Chef Picard's lunch would have to be succulent, piggy and emblematic of Toronto. The last point, of course, refers to my ingrained Toronto-born sense of culinary inferiority to les Montrealais. The idea of sitting down with Picard only emphasised the fact that his restaurant was there and not here. I am not a self-hating Hogtowner: I've lived in both cities and we do okay on many points of comparison… just not so much in the fun one. We're still terribly serious about going out to eat. Picard is not so much. So I thought he might enjoy the big bony pig bits in the soup, the bare formica tables and room full of twentysomething Korean students. Plus, if Montreal has the tradition, Vancouver the ingredients, we at least have the people from all over the world.
And at first things went well enough. Picard and Cerf were quite tired but revived a bit with tea, then beer. Drummond always enlivens things and soon we were chatting away amiably about Toronto, Montreal, love lives, good places to eat in a cheerful franglais, switching between broken versions of each language. We started with some fried dumplings and a savoury pancake and any pretence of formal "interview" was quickly abandoned in favour of topics marked firmly off the record.
Then the trouble began. It may well have been fatigue, but my guests struggled with the chopsticks a little, and red chilli-dyed splashes of soup began slosh a bit. The tiny tables were soon filled with another round of beer bottles, half a dozen little plates of condiments and the thing with pork bone soup is, like mussels with their shells, you need another bowl to put the bones you've picked clean in. It took me several visits and careful observation of surrounding Korean patrons before I got the hang of using my chopsticks in one hand and my spoon in the other to dig the succulent piggy morsels out of the angular vertebrae bones. And even then, I come out of a pork bone soup lunch with a significant amount of it on my shirt. But that's ok, and every one was still game. Each was working out the meat any way they could and slurping the fragrant broth.
It was when I looked over at Chef, after a few minutes with my nose in my bowl, that I realised he looked a little uncomfortable, even flushed. Um, glowing, even. This round of soup was hot. Hotter than the usual. Way, way hotter. This can happen: the stock bowl simmers and simmers, and since no one chilli is the same it can be a bit of a crap shoot how hot the final brew gets. Chef and Gaëlle were generous and good hearted, and though I noted their rate of consumption declined, and the rate of cold beer intake increased, they kept smiling. Until I got warned about the writing bad things.
The joke, was actually part of a more serious question: what exactly was I going to write about? Chef wanted to know. Good question, I replied. Eric Vellend has written about Au Pied de Cochon experience at Gremolata before: I think we get the concept. And if we didn't the book is a wonderful distillation of the spirit of the place.
"Ah the book…" Chef looks at me again intently, "it took more than a year to make."
Gaëlle nods seriously and makes a Gallic expression that makes me understand it was a rather long year.
"It would never have happened," Picard continued, "if we didn't publish it ourselves. I was not interested in just a cookbook. I wanted a book of the restaurant. But no one would have let us do this."
The book comes with a CD, which among other treats includes a tour of the "Route de Poutine". It has one numerous awards, including the Canadian Culinary Book Award, the 2007 IACP award for design. It's the coolest cookbook I've ever seen. I think you'd have to go back to White Heat for anything remotely as original. This is really why the "interview" went nowhere: it's all rather complete. I had no real questions. I just really wanted to hang out. Less a journalist, more of a fan.
Once Chef and Gaëlle had recovered (I hope), they soon had to rush back to The Drake and their bags, to catch a plane in time to be back for evening service. Said Chef, "People need me back. They want to drink."
Amen.
Photo credit: Jamie Drummond
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