113 McNaughten, Hudson is sold!

113 McNaughten, Hudson is sold! Listed at $215,000.
Listed by Diane/Paul Laflamme and sold by Royal LePage Village. Buyers and Seller are thrilled! Congratulations to everyone!

Gordon Ramsay takes over Montreal landmark

MONTREAL — Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay arrived with what he hoped would be reassuring news for fans of the landmark Laurier BBQ restaurant he has taken over.

“The mocha cake is staying,” he announced Tuesday. Just don’t bloody ask that it be heated in the microwave, as had been the custom. “From a chef’s point of view, to stick a dessert in the microwave, it hurts,” he said. “God it hurts. It’s like sticking a knife in, twisting and putting it even further.”

For generations, Laurier BBQ has been an institution in francophone Montreal, where families dined on the same rotisserie chicken and mocha cake, served by the same waitresses, surrounded by the same folksy décor. Over the restaurant’s 75 years, a who’s who of Quebec society has slipped into its booths, from Pierre Trudeau and Robert Bourassa to Celine Dion and actor Donald Pilon.

The news last year that the Michelin-starred, foul-mouthed Brit was taking over the Outremont restaurant for his first Canadian venture felt a bit like the twisting of a knife to faithful customers. In the weeks before it closed for renovations in April, the place was more packed than it had been in years, with people sitting in for a nostalgic last meal.

As he prepared for Wednesday’s opening of the rechristened Laurier Gordon Ramsay, the chef described his initiative as a mere “repositioning” of the restaurant, but he made it clear that this is not anyone’s grandmother’s Rotisserie Laurier.

“Unfortunately businesses don’t survive on nostalgia, and this business was ignored for the last 10 years,” he told reporters. People pining for the old days should consider that the alternative was losing the restaurant altogether, he said.

“The business would never have survived. That’s the sad thing about it. Did I want to see it closed, knocked down and a shoe shop or clothes shop in the place of it? No. It’s got too much history.”

La Presse food critic Marie-Claude Lortie, who ate one of her first restaurant meals at the Laurier and took her own children there as babies, is among those nostalgic for the old Laurier BBQ. It is the place where Mr. Trudeau ate coconut pie and debated politics into the night during the 1960s, the restaurant of choice of her own father-in-law, the late Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan.

“A lot of the fun of going there was to be in that retro atmosphere and to feel it was exactly the same as when I was a kid,” she said. The menu preserves variations on many of the old favourites, including poutine and rotisserie chicken, but the interior has undergone a complete facelift, with a gleaming new bar and glassed-in wine cellar.

“It’s difficult to imagine that the spirit will continue, that you will still go there and find the university students and the grandparents and the young parents with young kids, who went there themselves as young kids,” Ms. Lortie said.

Mr. Ramsay made no apologies for targeting a new demographic, for whom an innovative cocktail list and bottles of Pol Roger champagne will be the draw as much as the comfortingly familiar chicken.

“We have our existing clientele that will be here at 4:30 in the afternoon, a little bite to eat before bed time,” he said. “Then at 6:30, when you finish work, we’ll have a nice hip, funky, moving bar in there.”

The pairing of Mr. Ramsay, whose restaurant in London’s Chelsea district holds three Michelin stars, the maximum awarded by the gastronomic bible, and a fairly humble chicken joint raised plenty of eyebrows when it was announced last fall.

Mr. Ramsay, who oversaw development of the Laurier menu but will leave cooking to Montrealer Guillermo Russo, said the formula is right for difficult economic times. Aside from a rib eye steak at $26, the most expensive main courses on the menu are $16.

“We’re not going fine dining. We’re not going Michelin star. We’re going for affordable glam,” he said. “In England, it’s called shabby chic.”

Mr. Russo, 31, who has previously worked at Lucien and The Black Hoof restaurants in Toronto, grew up a few blocks from the Laurier. He feels the pressure of taking over the kitchen of an institution and promises not to stray too far from its roots. “Montreal is in my heart and it’s in my mind when I’m creating the menu,” he said. He plans to buy as much of his food locally as possible. And he won’t be using a microwave.

National Post

Hudson mansion buyer not returning calls

MONTREAL - Desperate for a final sale, John Hooper was willing to accept an auction result that he felt undervalued his Hudson estate by millions of dollars.

But with the highest bidder no longer returning his calls, Hooper has been forced to put the luxury estate back on the market for the $3.4 million it won in Quebec’s first absolute auction last month.

“The final price, it wasn’t the best price but it allowed us to do what we wanted to do. We weren’t trying to be greedy. We just wanted to move on with our lives,” said Hooper, 70, an entrepreneur and scientist, who helped build the now defunct company Phoenix International Life Sciences Inc.

“Now it’s clear that the buyer hasn’t fulfilled her obligations. We don’t know what the cause is because we can’t reach her.

“They (the U.S. company that ran the auction) are unhappy. We’re unhappy.”

Sources familiar with the estate say the buyer, despite making a $100,000 cash deposit, didn’t have adequate financing to complete the transaction.

The auctioning of the sprawling eight bedroom estate, complete with an indoor pool, guest house and secret passage, generated national headlines.

While luxury homes have been successfully sold to the highest bidders in Montreal and Toronto, an absolute auction – where there is no minimum bid – is unheard of in Canada.

Even worse, Hooper’s spent money out of pocket on glossy brochures marketing the property and on expensive advertisements in papers like the New York Times.

To sell the estate that Hooper and his wife spent $5.5 million to develop in 2000, the couple are inviting prospective buyers to spend a weekend at the mansion on Main St., as an “innovative” way to close the deal.


http://www.montrealgazette.com/Hudson+mansion+buyer+returning+calls/5204187/story.html

U.S. debt situation defines dysfunctional government

By L. IAN MACDONALD, Special to the Gazette

Well, of course U.S. President Barack Obama and the Democrats on one side, and House speaker John Boehner and the Republicans on the other, came to an 11th-hour deal on the American deficit and debt crisis.

Obama agreed to cut spending by $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years, in return for Congress raising the federal debt ceiling by a similar amount over the next two years.

Obama and Boehner, along with senior leaders of both parties, reached a deal on Sunday. It passed the Republican-dominated House of Representatives on Monday, and cleared the Democratcontrolled Senate on Tuesday.

You don't see that every day. But then, it was no coincidence that Aug. 2 was the U.S. government's own imposed deadline for raising the debt ceiling. After that, the U.S. Treasury announced months ago, it would simply run out of money to pay its bills.

The consequences of failing to do so were unthinkable.

First, credit-rating agencies had already let it be known that they would downgrade the credit rating of the United States from gilt-edged AAA to AA, automatically raising the cost of issuing government treasuries.

This would only have aggravated the U.S. deficit and debt situation.

(Canada had its AAA rating renewed last month, reflecting a strong economy and a solid federal fiscal framework.)

Second, with no spending authority to pay its bills, the U.S. faced a potential default on its debts. The "good faith and credit worthiness" of the United States would have been in question.

Third, a run on the U.S. dollar was a real possibility. And that could have put the greenback's status as the world's reserve currency in question. One reason the loonie has been trading around $1.06 U.S. is that our dollar is a petro currency and oil is back to the $100-per-barrel range.

Another is a flight to safe havens like the Canadian dollar.

Fourth, even the possibility of any of the above could be enough to trigger another stock-market meltdown and global financial crisis.

Just last week, the Dow had five consecutive losing sessions on the prospect of no deal in D.C., losing four per cent on the week.

In an extremely volatile session on Monday, the Dow opened up nearly 150 points on the good news of a deal, only to plunge 250 points by the lunch hour, before rallying to close down only 11 points. Elsewhere, global markets were awash in red on Monday, and opened down sharply in Asia on Tuesday.

Deal or no deal, there's no shortage of challenges and uncertainty.

The U.S. unemployment rate remains close to recession levels, at 9.2 per cent in June, nearly two points above Canada's at 7.4 per cent. Ontario alone boasts of creating more jobs in June than did the entire United States.

The U.S. youth-unemployment rate, at 18 per cent, isn't just an economic issue, it's a social problem. Manufacturing jobs are going unfilled because of a shortage of qualified technical-school graduates.

The U.S. housing market has lost about 30 per cent of its value since 2007.


At a moment when the U.S. economy could do with some additional stimulus, it's no longer available to Obama. Part of his deal with the Republicans is no new taxes, so that's out. And even while he gets to raise the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion over two years, which gets him past the 2012 presidential election cycle without another such unedifying spectacle, he's agreed to cut spending by about the same amount over the next decade.

It sounds like a lot of money, but in terms of the U.S. deficit and debt, it's just a down payment on the deficit. The U.S. deficit of $1.6 trillion in the last fiscal year was 10 per cent of GDP. And this, in a country whose debt is now a shocking $14.3 trillion, up from $6 trillion when Bill Clinton left office in 2001. Think of more than doubling your household debt in the last 10 years.

The structural deficit problems of the U.S. can be stated in these simple terms: Washington spends more than $3 for every $2 it raises.

Part of the reason for that is systemic gridlock in Washington. There isn't really much accountability in a system that enables the president and Congress to blame one another for nothing getting done.

U.S. voters knew they were electing a divided government last fall when they gave Republicans, with the Tea Party insurgency, control of the House of Representatives.

But if they thought their government was dysfunctional then, look at it now.

imacdonald@irpp.org

All the home staging in the world won't sell an over-priced home.

“All the home staging in the world won’t sell an over-priced home.”

That’s what Nairn Friemann, a great New York home stager, told us during my first day of home staging training back in 2007. I was reminded of those words today as I went out to preview homes for sale here in Montreal’s West Island and saw a beautiful home that’s just come on the market. The home is gorgeous: not too country and not too modern, a well-renovated kitchen, nice lot, no loud colours to turn off buyers, no disproportionately large furniture eating up entire rooms, stylish accessories, lovely art and lots of light. But it’s over-priced…by quite a bit. And the agent knows it.

The owners of this home have undoubtedly heard from all of their friends that their house is absolutely stunning. And it is. But friends don’t tell you that the windows need replacing, that the garage floor is a wreck, that the roof is at the end of its life, that the low ceiling in the basement will be a problem for many buyers, and that the bathroom hasn’t been updated. (In the case of the bathroom, friends are impressed that you’ve actually managed to do so much with so little!).

But these are things that a real estate agent will consider and point out, especially a buyer’s agent.

Now, I'm both a Montreal home stager and a Montreal West Island real estate broker. So I loudly sing the praises of home staging and what it can do to help homeowners sell their home more quickly and for top dollar.

But what staging won't do is sell an over-priced listing. So sellers, when pricing your home, listen to your agent, not your friends – because all the staging in the world won’t sell an over-priced home.

Property Wire Canada

Jean Paul Gaultier - Fall 2011 Couture

Vogue
By Hamish Bowles

The hypnotic instructions of a ballet mistress and a ballet master to their classes, and the demand of the demonic choreographer in Black Swan to his hapless ballerina to embody the qualities of both the Black Swan and the White Swan, at the opening of Jean Paul Gaultier’s show, signaled the designer’s intention to explore a dark side of the fairy-tale world of tutus and feathered headdresses.

The jacket of his opening number—cut like a trench over a suave pantsuit—was given an explosion of tutu ruffles to create a bustled peplum, and romantic ballet-length skirts in sturdy tweeds had the unexpected embellishment of feathers at the hem that evoked the headdresses of ballet’s traditional swans. Gaultier used feathers with great imagination throughout the collections—tufts of multicolored marabou simulating camouflage prints or an Icelandic sweater; a feathered cockerel embellishing the sleeve of a black evening coat; and the bands of iridescent pheasant plumes streaking a full tulle skirt—with a bodice elaborately embroidered to simulate those feathers. Sadly, many of these refined effects are lost in the designer’s madcap and fast-paced show that made one long for a leisurely salon presentation.

And Gaultier continued to ring the changes on the iconic pieces that he loves. Trench coats were reenvisioned in liquid jersey, draped like the magnificent Madame Grès dresses currently on display at the Musée Bourdelle, and his biker jackets were transformed into masterpieces of elegantly tailored sobriety.

The smoky-eyed ghosts of Nijinsky and Nureyev also haunted the runway as Gaultier showed men’s couture for the fearless few—a Grès-draped white jersey cummerbund that cinched a tuxedo pant, for instance, or the sweeping capes that are emerging as a strong statement this couture season.

For a finale piece, Gaultier sent the flame-haired French pop icon Mylene Farmer, wearing a biker jacket with an exuberantly feathered and bustled net skirt that evoked the fantasy costumes that Gaultier’s idol Yves Saint Laurent created for the gamine French dancer Zizi Jeanmaire in the early sixties, out to the strains of Jeanmaire’s hit song “Mon Truc en Plumes.”