Squash Stuffed Pasta with Sage and Parmesan, Au Pied de Cochon’s Harvest Season Sugar Shack
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.
I had never eaten a proper Sunday roast. Not once. For someone who has spent a considerable portion of his life eating things on purpose, this seemed like a fairly serious oversight.
So I decided to fix it.
A quick search led me to The Cheshire Cat in Carp, about a 30 minute drive from home. I enlisted a few friends because if I was going to finally eat a Sunday roast, I wanted witnesses. Or accomplices.
The pub is tucked away in Carp, just off the highway, in a setting that feels a world away from the city. It is not exactly where you expect to stumble upon a memorable meal, which made discovering one there all the more satisfying.
We started with drinks in the outdoor lounge before moving to the patio. September had begun making its presence known, so the overhead heaters and blankets were a nice touch. The place was bustling, but the staff never seemed rattled by it. The servers were funny, kind and attentive without hovering, a quality that should be easier to find than it is. They made us feel less like customers and more like people who had somehow been invited over for dinner and were now expected to eat everything.
I have a complicated relationship with nostalgia. It usually shows up wearing a greasy paper hat and calling itself pizza.
For years in Ottawa, pizza meant one of two things. Chains doing their best impression of melted sadness, or what people insist on calling Ottawa style pizza, which is usually a dense, heavy crust that feels like it was designed to survive a winter storm and a small building collapse. It is filling in the same way a brick is filling. I grew up on it. After sports games, late nights, whatever was happening when nobody cared what they were eating, it was there. But it was never something you went looking for on purpose.
Then something shifted. Slowly, quietly, and without asking permission, better pizza started appearing around the city. Not perfect replicas of New York, but places that understood what made those slices memorable in the first place. Pizza should be light enough to fold, sturdy enough to hold, and delicious enough that you briefly reconsider your entire personality after the second slice.
The first time I went to New York, I finally understood the mythology. The slice makes sense there in a way it never fully explained itself anywhere else. It is not trying to impress you. It is just good at being itself. Since then I have been chasing that feeling without expecting to ever fully catch it.
Schoolhouse Pizza has figured out something important. It is not pretending to be a shrine. It is not over explaining itself. It is just doing the work, quietly and consistently, in a way that feels closer to New York than most places that advertise that connection.
I went to the New Edinburgh location, though there is also the Preston Street spot at 348 Preston Street in Ottawa. The space does not demand your attention. The pizza does.
What I like most is that they let you split a pie. This should be standard everywhere and yet it is still treated like a favour. It means you can live two lives in one meal, which is about as close as food gets to generosity.
I ordered the Classic New York Pepperoni and the Tomato Pie.
The pizza arrives split down the middle, giving you two personalities on one 18 inch pie. One half is the Classic New York Pepperoni, built on tomato sauce, mozzarella, and cup and char pepperoni. The bottom has that proper structure, not too thick, not collapsing under pressure. It bends the way it should. The pepperoni curls and crisps at the edges, pooling just enough oil to remind you that restraint is not always the goal. It tastes like something I have been trying to remember rather than something I am discovering for the first time. (more…)
Hai Phong crab spring rolls from La Nhau Viet Kitchen & Bar, at 108 Murray Street, Ottawa, ON
Every month there is usually one dish that refuses to leave my brain. Not the most expensive thing. Not the most elaborate thing. Just the thing that keeps resurfacing days later, nudging aside newer meals and reminding you who actually won the month.
This month, it was nem cua bể, the Hai Phong style crab spring rolls, at La Nhau Viet Kitchen & Bar in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.
A friend had read an enthusiastic online review, which I decided to follow as a guide. Normally, I prefer making my own mistakes, but this seemed like a reasonable exception.
One of the first dishes to arrive was the spring rolls. I thought little of it. Spring rolls rarely announce themselves as the best thing you will eat all month. Then these arrived.
