August 26, 2007 Archives

On an entirely different register, we went to Chinese restaurant Mr Ma, an expensive joint for business types, on street level of Montreal's business quarter landmark Place Ville-Marie. I've been seeing Mr Ma since forever, but only very recently knew that 1- Mr Ma indeed existed (and he is not an elderly cook, but rather the owner), and that 2- my uncle Bernard worked with him when both were of student age and had part-time jobs at Montreal's only Mr Sub in the late 70s.

I often discarded Mr Ma as being in the same category of Piment Rouge, as Chinese food for White People (namely a fest of General Tao-ish cuisine, and an orgy of sweet and sour flavours, over the more diverse, complex sets of flavours and aromas of Chinese cuisine. Both places happen to serve so-called "Szechuan" cuisine. I am not an expert, but my usual suspiciousness tells me that it is nothing like what's eaten in China's Sichuan province, where food is indeed really spicy, but characterized by the unabashed addition of dried chili pepper, and the use of the numbing type of Sichuan pepper (a flavour called "ma la"), a definitely acquired taste.

It was not wrong to associate Mr Ma with Piment Rouge, since both were formerly acquainted (and I cannot remember whether what I was told was told around the family table, or read in a newspaper). Last week, at Julie and Colin's wedding reception, Piment Rouge did the catering, and I was hugely surprised that they could do good authentic-ish (anything not Soup and Noodles - even if it's ideologically wrong / trashfoodingly good) Chinese food which included a lotus leaf-wrapped chicken with medicinal herbs.

Now for Mr Ma, same biases from a food snob, and cultural imperialist such as myself. But again, I discounted the fact that the chefs, being Chinese, presumably could make Chinese food for Chinese palates. He told us that it was Chinese food with Western influences (therefore, a CBC like myself n'y voit que du feu).

Pictures ahead:

Famed poutine place on Rachel, on the north-west corner of Parc Lafontaine (next to bike shop, facing a police station), La Banquise serves twenty-something variants of the Quebec delicacy (and adopted by the rest of Canada, even found in expat areas of HK and China). I had a poutine with merguez sausages, while my guest, content with poutine served at Montreal Chinatown's L2 bubble tea cafe (!), took the original (fries, gravy, cheese curds). There you go for your Canadian/Quebecer-Chinese take on poutine! (When's the char siu poutine for? - eww)

I liken La Banquise to Crif Dogs, a place in East Village, NYC, that I visited in February and that serves hot dogs fried with a bacon wrap, as they are both late-night fast food joints with a specialty "dish" (La Banquise is in fact open 24 hours).

I will write this entry (after this paragraph) in French, because it concerns a French-speaking audience. On Linux, people typically use the mplayer browser plugin to read ASX playlists. Perhaps like other sites, when a playlist is read, the plugin doesn't take into account that it may point to other ASX playlists, thus stopping before it played the media clip of interest. That is the case on Radio-Canada's excellent audio-video zone, which unfortunately makes it virtually unaccessible to Linux users with a standard setup (there must be ways to use other plugins or hack your mplayer to bypass this). In fact, some clips are read correctly since a couple of weeks, because of a change in the syntax of ASX files, and they are the ones with only one ASX under the playlist.