Omnivore World Tour hit Montreal last month and my favourite presentation of the fest was from chef Aaron Langille, formerly of Cafe Sardine and soon-to-be of a new market-fresh, locavore-inspired Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. There isn’t a drop of Chinese in this guy, but he sure knows how to handle a crab.
He steamed the spiny thing dumpling style, explaining that is was traditionally deep-fried but at his new restaurant they’ll be steaming it (an art he perfected at the small kitchen of appropriately named, Cafe Sardine), and plated it with Quebec chrysanthemum flowers, sunflower “buttons” (they taste and look like artichoke hearts), a rattail radish and corn salad, and a court bouillon with ginger, garlic, birds eye chilies, and chysanthemum in a soy and elderberry syrup.
Whoa. That’s a mouthful.
The odd sounding ingredients all came from Société l’Orignal, a local distributor of Quebecois foraged, farmed, and prepared foodstuffs.
Go steam some crab and stop composting sunflowers. Eat them. Also rattail radishes, which have nothing to do with rats and everything to do with radishes that come in a green pod like a bean or pea. Eat those too.
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