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
