There were 12 courses at Au Pied de Cochon’s Harvest Season Sugar Shack in Mirabel, and I can tell you exactly which one I would drive two hours to eat again. It was the squash stuffed pasta with sage and Parmesan. Not the most elaborate dish of the meal. Not the biggest. Not even remotely the sort of thing you would expect to be thinking about weeks later. But here we are.

A friend managed to get us a reservation at the sugar shack of celebrated Quebec chef Martin Picard. Located in Mirabel, about an hour outside Montreal and less than two hours from home, it is a destination for people who take their eating seriously, or at least seriously enough to spend a good chunk of a day doing it.

The sugar shack operates on the principle that a meal should be an event, not merely a way to get from one part of the afternoon to the next. You reserve a time slot, everyone sits down together, and the courses arrive in succession. Twelve of them, in our case. The plates begin to accumulate, the table becomes a small archaeological site of things you have already eaten, and you start wondering whether the kitchen has confused your reservation with that of a small wedding party.

The menu follows the harvest season, drawing on local ingredients and the kitchen’s considerable appetite for turning them into something more interesting than their original forms. The atmosphere is festive, the food plentiful, and the service refreshingly enthusiastic. Our server was so genuinely delighted to have us there that I half expected her to pull up a chair and join us for the next course. She wasn’t just telling us what we were eating. She was letting us in on something good.

But the dish that won October was a plate of squash stuffed pasta with sage and Parmesan.

I know. It sounds like the sort of thing you order when you want to be sensible at an Italian restaurant. Squash, sage, Parmesan. Somewhere, a recipe developer is typing the word autumnal into a headline. There is nothing particularly shocking about the combination, and no ingredient here needs a publicist.

Yet this pasta was extraordinary.

The pasta was tender and buttery, the squash silky and sweet, the sage earthy and fragrant. The Parmesan brought everything into focus with its salty, savoury depth. The flavours didn’t simply sit beside one another like guests at an awkward dinner party. They merged and deepened with every bite.

It was a small portion, sensibly calibrated for a meal that still had plenty of ground to cover. Sensible, yes. Welcome, no.

I wanted more. Not a polite little extra spoonful, either. I wanted the sort of second helping that requires a brief negotiation with the kitchen. If the other 11 courses had been cancelled and someone had announced that the restaurant was serving nothing but this dish for the rest of the evening, I would have considered that an entirely satisfactory outcome.

The other dishes were hardly failures. The meal was full of delicious things, and the whole experience was worth the trip. But a long tasting menu has a peculiar way of revealing the difference between food that is very good and food that gets under your skin. One course can be clever, another generous, another memorable for its sheer extravagance. Then something arrives that makes you forget to take notes because you are too busy eating it.

At a restaurant associated with abundant menus, big flavours and a certain joyful disregard for restraint, I loved that the dish I wanted most was not some towering monument to excess. It was a few pieces of stuffed pasta built around a combination of ingredients that have been getting along perfectly well for centuries. Apparently, all that was required was for someone to get them exactly right.

The Harvest Season Sugar Shack is worth visiting for the entire experience: the parade of courses, the lively atmosphere, the warmth of the service and the pleasure of surrendering an afternoon to people who clearly understand that eating can be entertainment.

As for me, I ate that pasta weeks ago and am still thinking about it. Which is a long time to carry on about a few pieces of pasta. Then again, if you are going to spend two hours getting somewhere to eat, you might as well find something worth talking about on the drive home.