Don’t get me wrong, I actually think the outdoor food counters that were set up for a few weeks at the Place des Festivals in Montreal during the Just for Laughs comedy festival were ground-breaking and of very high quality in general. This was not processed pig parts and pink sludge on sticks. This was gourmet fare mixed with potato chips and soft serve ice cream; una tartare with just enough green onion and salt contrasted with good-looking pulled pork on a sesame seed store-bought bun; burgers with processed cheese versus homemade marshmallows and dark chocolate dipped bonbons. Oysters versus…yet more pulled pork. That poor pork just wanted people to stop pulling on it. How would you feel slow-braised and shredded? I’m not vegetarian – just saying there were a heck of a lot of stretched and limber porkers involved.
And as a lactose intolerant and gluten intolerant person, my options were limited, even more than the average consumer. Most of the food trucks belonged to restaurants with much larger menus, but the point of having a wide selection of trucks at the festival grounds is to offer more options to consumers. At some places you maybe saved a little money, but mostly the prices were around the same or higher than at the restaurant. You don’t have to tip for service, but you’ll probably end up spending as much as money on the same amount of food unless you rein in your appetite in relation to the amount of grease in the your poutine or butter in your lobster roll. Comfort food, I remind myself, justifies fat and the occasional splurge. Unfortunately, one man’s comort food is another (wo)man’s stomach sickness. So out of all the options at the souk all I could eat was:
Oysters (Malpèques, which I’ve had a lot of, and think they’re just fine, but an outdoor, 35 degree Celcius streetfood strip is not where I wanted to have them again), the bread-free gazpacho from Pas d’Cochon dans mon salon, the tuna tartare from Marché 27 with gluten-free Ms. Vickies chips and the blueberry and strawberry slushes from the Martin Juneau milk bar. No maple syrup soft serve for me. I also got the friendly people at the salad cone place to jury-rig a radish and cucumber cone with olive oil and vinegar. It tasted like overpriced, market fresh vegetables and not much else, which was fine and tasty, and made for lighter fare for the rest of the souk vendors when they didn’t feel like yet more pulled pork, but for me, I was left grateful but underwhelmed – the story of my gluten and lactose-intolerant life.
So I went twice to the souk, and that was enough. It’s heavy food that gets away with being expensive because the high volume of fat is filling. It didn’t branch out much ethnically (minus some less-than-revolutionary samosas and butter chicken), but with all the colours and textures and options, it impressed. Unfortunately, I don’t really want to ingest all pig all the time. And pig ruled the day here. Here are the pictures. Sorry you can’t go check it out since this is late coming up, but I didn’t really know how I felt about it all until after the fact. It took a little time to digest, so to speak.
The pulled pork sandwich was the big draw of this truck-only (no restaurant) grill, which my brother got (below). He liked it. It didn’t seem like a whole meal in itself, but it was a fair amount of meat. I generally think pulled pork at a restaurant is the biggest scam ever, because it’s so simple to make at home and costs so little. Pork butt, roll, barbecue sauce and optional iceberg lettuce. But then again, there are people who buy ham and cheese sandwiches on factory-made white bread instead of buying three ingredients at a grocery store and a tupperware container, and this is why restaurants survive. And a great BBQ sauce almost justifies it, or stellar meat. Almost.
This was one of my two favourite items of the souk. Doesn’t seem like anything special, but the smoky chipotle in adobo sauce (I know “smoky chipotle” is an oxy moron – chipotles are smoked red jalapenos) make it perfect. Not too oily (traditional gazpachos often use up to a 1/2 cup of oil per batch – about 2 tbsp per serving, which is good if that’s all the oil you’re eating for the day…but it probably isn’t if you’re at the souk), with fresh green onion and peppers. It was sweet, spicy summer in a cup.
I was very happy to see sustainable albacore tuna tartare at Marché 27’s stall, where it would have been cheaper just to offer the unsustainable, ubiquitous Atlantic salmon tartare (they did offer it, and it’s first on the menu, but I couldn’t have had it even if my sustainable food-loving heart had strayed from the path, because of the soy sauce and gluten). Tartares are a sketchy thing to be serving at hot, open air markets of any kind, where food safety is a big issue, but these guys were safe. They come from an upscale restaurant that I trust. And they’re actually the only restaurant that, now having been to the souk, I want to go eat at in Montreal. I really liked the chips that came with the tartare because they gave the fish the salt and oil it needed. Not that the fish didn’t already have enough lubrication (another fairly rich dish), and it was a very generous portion, but it didn’t feel heavy. It felt like a good restaurant not cutting corners to make a ton of money on tourists. Maybe in 5 years they’ll become jaded they’ll use lower quality because they’ll realize that most people don’t care or can’t tell, but for now, they’re A+. And I hope they stay that way. Because green onion that you can actually taste in the middle of a week of serving the same thing means ingredients weren’t all prepped days in advance and shipped in like a cafeteria counter to serve the masses.
Attach a high end chef to a non-fancy, crowd-pleasing product that everyone can afford and enjoy (it helps if there’s sugar involved) and you’ve got a recipe for success. Martin Juneau’s name wasn’t on the maple sundae food truck, but everyone in the media knew it was his. “A big chef doing soft serve? In a truck?” people thought. JoeBeef does it at that restaurant. Its gourmet whimsy. Throw in a local product – maple – and it was a wonder it wasn’t Martin Picard doing the truck. Unfortunately, the soft serve machine ran out of soft serve the moment my brother got in line. And even more unfotunate was the fact that something in the slushies (dairy-free – made with syrup and crushed ice) knocked me out. As in 10pm and I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and barely made it home, narcoleptic that I became. I tested this again two night later to make sure it had been the slushie. Same result. It’s a little creepy actually. Corn syrup? Too much sugar? I mean, what do you put in syrup that can do that to someone?
But the soft serve with maple syrup looked delicious – A little crumble on top, a touch of gourmet.
BBQ doesn’t get hotter than a flame-decorated car. Except they don’t make the BBQ in it. That would be a fire hazard…I never did make it there when there was smoked chicken on the menu, unfortunately.
My mom liked this. Another generous portion of raw protein with fresh herbs and salty chips. Styrofoam meat-packing plates turned the whole thing pretty industrial and very un-green, but the flavours were right.
Some things I didn’t try: Grumman 78’s Tacos, because they have a store-front now in the Faubourg, and the lines were always too long, and I can’t eat cheese, and I don’t eat antibiotic-laden meats generally, and they kept selling out of what I would want to try (lamb, mostly), which shows that most people love them and I am an exception to the rule.
Nouveau Palais: Also have a store-front with a lot more options, and I prefer my diner food in diners. And I prefer my processed cheese in someone else’s stomach. Huge line-ups, though, so I’m glad other people love them and they’re doing well. Good people running it.
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