Restaurant Le St-Urbain
96 rue Fleury West
Ahuntsic, Montreal
French
There are many reasons I don’t smoke, but I was reminded of one of the biggest today at Le St-Urbain, Ahuntsic’s best fine dining destination.
I sit down next to a table of 4 men and 2 women finishing up their first course, enjoying a bottle of red wine, and savouring huge hunks of freshly baked bread. It’s lunchtime, 1pm, and the restaurant is packed. I come in with a huge winter coat, a bike helmet and a bag, and try to sit down on the long bench that lines one wall of the restaurant, next to one of the woman from the party of six at the next table over. It’s not happening. Her bag is overflowing into my space and try as I might to squeeze in there’s just no wiggle room. So I stealth my way back out into the open, remove my coat, and try again to seat myself back on the long bench comfortably. The woman whose bag is in my way notices me on her right, sees me looking at her table while trying to read the menu, and doesn’t realize I’m actually explaining with my eyes that the polite thing for her to do in this situation would be to move her bag.
Instead she nods at her table’s plates and says, “It helps you to decide what to have, doesn’t it?” All their plates look tempting, it’s true, but if I eat anything I’m going to expand onto her handbag. She’s not getting it.
So I already don’t think she’s the smartest person in the world, but any respect I could have otherwise mustered for this woman is lost when she excuses herself along with her female companion to her left just as the main course arrives at her table.
Hot food getting cold. Brilliant food waning. Art turning to garbage, kind of like Duchamp’s fountain, except the fountain actually used to be amazing, instead of just being a toilet. And worse. It’s scallops. Seafood is unforgiveable. A piece of slow-braised meat is maybe acceptable. It gets cold, but it doesn’t get any less tender. Scallops turn from perfect to slightly over-cooked in a matter of seconds, and get exponentially less good as time ticks on. That first bite makes the meal. In my eyes, walking out as your scallops arrive hot on your plate is like spitting in the face of the chef who stood over a frying pan for exactly the right number of seconds to make that scallop perfectly seared. From years of experience he or she knew when to pull it off the heat so that it hadn’t yet cooked through, knowing that it would keep cooking just a little bit, and by the time it got to the diner’s table it would be perfect. The chef knew. This woman, this smoker, had no idea.
And worse, the rest of the people at her table were not smokers, and they had all also ordered the scallops. Those 4 men, and being polite gentlemen, sat there staring at their scallops, ever cooling, not eating them, knowing it would be rude to start before the ladies returned. They made strained conversation with each other, took a few nervous sips of wine, looked toward the door, and went about preparing to eat…all without touching their plates of hardening mollusks, or the accompanying beds of red and orange cherry tomatoes.
I couldn’t watch. There’s a palpable feeling of anxiety in these moments, when you’re cheering for one of the poor men to make the first move, because you know that once one of them has broken the etiquette code and started to eat, the others are off the hook. And they know it too, but still, not one of them wanted to do it.
But the ladies wouldn’t know. It would just be between them. Or if they all started to eat at about the same time, the guilt would be much more manageable – the load split between 4, a lesser weight on each individual.
My heart pounded as I saw them begin to eat without the ladies, agreeing silently that this would be okay. The scallops were already past their prime, but still good. Tender, plump, juicy, the insides retaining their warmth just long enough. But if they had waited for the women to return the scallops would have been room temperature. The women should have given permission for the men to start eating before they left to smoke, since the plates had already arrived, but they hadn’t been so thoughtful. That thoughtlessness, fortunately, persisted, as they didn’t even notice that the men had started without them. And, sadly for them, they didn’t even care that their scallops were stone cold. They probably didn’t even notice. What with their taste buds being muted by smoking – the other main reason I don’t smoke. Yes, there are health problems, and it’s expensive, and it’s disgusting, and you get yellow fingers and teeth and you perpetually smell awful and are chewing gum or sucking mints, but those are definitely less important than not being able to taste properly.
After seeing the women leave to smoke instead of eating their perfect scallops, and after realizing how they had men the men suffer, however unintentionally, I had no qualms about moving the handbag out of my way. Politeness and etiquette be damned, I thought, as I – much more comfortable now – tucked into my own huge hunk of freshly baked bread and extra-virgin olive oil.
Instead, I’ll give my respect to the chefs, who cooked the most tender squid I’ve had in a long time – done confit, slow-cooked completely submerged in oil like my favourite duck legs, tomatoes and eggplants. The sesame and soy dressing was a bit sweet right after the delicious bitterness of the olive oil, but it’s my own fault I couldn’t eat their sweet butter.
And having seen the searing work on the scallops, I had high expectations for the sustainable salmon on French beans with pistachios, cucumbers, and pickled pearl onions that I ordered. They didn’t disappoint. And it wasn’t the kitchen’s fault the fish just didn’t taste that amazing, sustainable though it was. The pistachios didn’t do much, and the green beans were just fine, but the little pickled onions added just enough of a surprise sweetness to win me over again, as I was already theirs from the perfect searing. It was a generous portion of fish, and by the end it had come to room temperature, which didn’t help the flavour, and destroyed the perfect crispy seared texture that turned to creamy, moist flesh on the inside, but I had my heavenly first 2 bites, and that was enough to make me happy.
Those poor men. Those poor, poor men.
Where: 96 rue Fleur West, Ahuntsic, Montreal
When: Tues-Fri 11:30am-2pm, 5:30pm-10pm; Sat 5:30pm-10pm
How Much: $26 at lunch including tax and tip (plus $13 for a glass of wine)
514-504-7700
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