MacGougan at Large

Notes on a Trip to Québec City - 6

Fancy-Fancy Dinner

There is plenty to eat in Québec City, most of it very good. Options range from that most humble of comfort foods - poutine - to the fanciest haut cuisine concoctions you can imagine.

We ate simple breakfasts at excellent coffee shops. During each day, we’d stop for lunch pretty much wherever we were. There are good, non-chain, regular-food restaurants all over the Old Town. But we decided to splurge on our dinners.

We were curious to see what would be served at a fancy Québequois restaurant. Our first night, we went to a hip-fancy restaurant with a wide-ranging, locally sourced menu. On our second night, we went to a romantic-fancy restaurant with lots of flambé dishes. This was billed as a romantic restaurant because nothing says I Love You like a dinner on fire.

On our third and final night, we went to a fancy-fancy restaurant that made us very grateful for the favorable U.S. to Canadian dollar exchange rate. This restaurant had a single, multi-course dinner offering. The only real choice was what to drink.

The starter was an elaborately decorated shell full of caviar.

I don’t remember what this is, but I think it was some kind of fish. The inclusion of multiple interesting accompaniments and foam will become a recurring theme.

The next course included a long list of ingredients, but the headliner was fois gras.

Celeriac and pasta.

Sablefish.

Stuffed rabbit saddle.

Tomato tatin with focaccia.

Safroned apple.

The second dessert had mousse under whatever those flakes are.

It was all very good, but also a little disorienting. Was I in a position to appreciate all the subtleties that went into it? Certainly not. Was I feeling sheepish about having such a fancy meal during a week when the leading news story was millions of Americans not getting food assistance due to the government shutdown? Absolutely.

It was, of course, a privilege to experience. And there was something encouragingly human and quirky about the artisanal craft of the whole enterprise. Clearly, a meal like this is the product of a small group of obsessives monomaniacally pursuing the Platonic ideal of what a dinner can be.