Have chefs replaced movie stars in America’s pantheon of cool? For magazine writer Julian Sancton—who covers movies and pop culture for Esquire and Vanity Fair—profiling a famous chef was an easy transition. Bring on the foie gras!
François Rabelais once wrote, “Appetite comes with eating, and thirst departs with drinking.” If that is the case, then why am I sitting, eyes glazed over, in front of a half-finished plate of stuffed pigs’ feet with foie gras over mashed potatoes and yet still quaffing beyond the point of inebriation? The reason I keep imbibing is because Martin Picard, the rotund chef and owner of Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon, keeps toasting: “À la vie!” (“To life!”)
Already I have been served eight courses. As for the pigs’ feet, they are expertly prepared: browned in lard, then cooked sous-vide, stuffed with a mustardy bread mixture, draped with a seared brick of foie gras and slathered with an exquisite sauce of mushrooms, onion, garlic and rosemary. But as a whole, the thing is gout on a plate. I exhale heavily. Picard pats me on the back as if to say, “Save room for dessert.”
There is no place on earth like Au Pied de Cochon. Picard is the patron saint of gourmands, and his restaurant has become a shrine to indulgence since it opened two months after 9/11. Picard boasts that Au Pied de Cochon sells the most foie gras of any restaurant on the planet—70 kilos every week, he estimates, which amounts to more than four tons a year. It is served in every form imaginable: raw, fried, seared, in a pâté, in a terrine, with stuffed pigs’ feet, over meatloaf, in a pie. It’s no wonder patrons emerge from Picard’s doors feeling like freshly gavé ducks themselves.
If he were an actor, Picard—with the outside paunch he likes to expose, the scraggly au jus–encrusted beard and unkempt receding curls—could play Falstaff. If he were a writer, he’d be Rabelais. Even among chefs, perhaps especially among chefs, he is a legend. Chef Donald Link, whose New Orleans restaurant Cochon shares with Picard’s the totem of the pig (Picard’s logo is a chef raising a meat cleaver while riding a pig), calls Picard crazy. Fergus Henderson of London’s revered St. John calls him, with British understatement, “spirited.” Daniel Boulud lovingly calls him the ultimate glutton.
I had to meet him. When I visit his restaurant with my friend the writer Alex Shoumatoff, Picard tells me a story, pretty much unprompted, to illustrate how unbound he is by any sense of proportion or deference to a higher power. “Every night, Jesus gives me a blow job,” he says in his Quebecois twang. “And he keeps coming back because I always forget to say thank you!” Picard believes in earth things. He is among those Saint Paul warned the Philippians about, saying their “God is their belly.” Taking the Lord’s name in vain is the least of his sins. Over the course of my evening with Picard I keep a tally in my notebook:
Picard sins by proxy dozens of times a night by expecting his customers to eat and drink with the same hunger and thirst as he. From the exterior, on a quiet side street, Au Pied de Cochon has an unassuming elegance. It’s bustling and brightly lit. But inside it smells like a musketeer’s tavern—the aroma of pork fat, duck fat, butter and onions wafting from the stoves at the center of the room, behind the bar at which we sit. From that vantage, we overlook the kitchen and the team of young cooks. Picard, 43, is sweating over a stove, searing foie gras, drinking, laughing, playfully shoving a comely 20-year-old cook.
During the four-hour dinner and evening that will follow, I will drink enough—on Picard’s insistence—that I would surely have died of alcohol poisoning had the beer and wine and champagne and vodka and assorted shots not been soaked up by 14 unfinishable courses. The dinner begins simply, with an unaccompanied pickled bison tongue (the tongue is not always bison; it depends on the deliveries), followed by a cochon-nailles platter (including a perfectly seasoned pâté de campagne, more tongue and a dark black meat gelatin reduced in stout), then by foie gras cromesquis, which are cubes of foie gras breaded and deep fried. In the heat, the foie liquefies. We are instructed to put them in our mouth whole and be sure to close our lips lest the liquid squirt out when we bite down.
Vodka.
Even this early in the game we find ourselves begging for the refreshment of vegetables. The beet salad is piled four inches high, with beet discs alternating with slabs of goat cheese, and the endive salad is slathered in enough blue cheese to suffocate Mr. Creosote. Next comes a platter of flavorful duck carpaccio, likely from an animal whose liver we will soon be eating, topped with a raw, pepper-flaked egg yolk. Then arrives a dish of deep-fried headcheese croquettes, redolent of tarragon, over a bed of sautéed sea snails in gribiche sauce. To round out the appetizers—for these are still technically appetizers—Picard sends out an off-the-menu Japanese-style hand roll with spicy raw bison wrapped in rice and seaweed sheets.
More vodka.
At exactly 10 P.M. a bell rings. The cooks whoop and holler and put down their spoons: It is beer time. (They will all share a second one after the last seating, along with a staff dinner that, I’m told, is mercifully lighter than anything on the menu.)
On to the main courses. First, an off-the-menu croquet-ball-size pork-and-veal meatloaf on a bed of gnocchi; the dainty herbal subtleties of the meat are offset by the brick of seared foie gras draped over it. Then come those pigs’ feet.
Double vodka shots.
Picard joins us for dessert. He orders us a bottle of champagne and toasts again: “À la vie!” Though the desserts are rich and outsize, they’re comparatively the most delicate courses of the evening. All of them are sweetened with maple syrup collected in the forest around Picard’s new establishment, Sugar Shack, open only in the spring. (On the restaurant’s wall is a painting by Marc Séguin of a woman with syrup taps in lieu of breasts.) We share a raspberry pie, a pecan pie, a panna cotta and a maple pudding chômeur, which translates to “unemployed pudding,” a throwback to a dessert popular during the Depression.
By the end of the meal, our back teeth are bathing, as the French expression goes. Thoroughly mellowed by fat, sugar and booze, we discuss Picard’s upbringing in Repentigny, Quebec; his two kids; how, as a lost youth, he decided to study hotel management, then switched to cooking; his apprenticeship in France, Italy and Montreal. And we discuss his philosophy of food. “Fat comforts,” he says. “Fat is the vector for taste. If you have fat in your mouth, the taste will develop.”
Champagne.Vodka. Mix.
To Picard, the real sin in both cooking and economics is waste—he is a firm disciple of Fergus Henderson’s “nose-to-tail” approach, which calls for using the entire animal, offal, bone and all. Another sin is incompetence. “You need to know how to cook the pig,” he says. “You might be trendy, but at the end of the day you need to take responsibility. I’ve worked hard, I’m competent, and I’m qualified, and that allowed me to personalize my style and convince people I could become a reference for others.”
Picard gets angry at anything that isn’t concrete, tactile, sensuous, of the earth. That includes food blogs, which he calls marde. (“Do you mean merde?” I ask, referring to the French word for “shit.” “No, marde. It’s the Quebec version. It’s like merde but more fatty.”) His wrath is also aimed at Wall Street. He sees the collapse of the financial sector as a good thing: “There are two economies. There’s the economy where I work, where I employ people, and it brings in money directly. And then there’s the economy Wall Street created, where they make money with money. Today the second economy has deflated, and people have become more grounded. They may have less money, but at least they feel things. Before they didn’t feel.”
After dinner I join Picard, his chef de cuisine, his maître d’ and his beautiful hostess (all the women who work at Au Pied de Cochon are thin, stylish, attractive and likely not eating à la carte at the restaurant) for a night on the town. Our first stop is a high-end strip joint called Kamasutra. Montreal is riddled with churches, and almost every street is named after one saint or another, but since casting off conservative Catholic rule during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, it has become one of the most permissive cities in the world. In this Olympus of hedonism, Picard is Dionysus, recognized and back-slapped wherever we go. “Ehh! Martin!”
A stripper once told me that food and sex are the only two human activities that stimulate all five senses. Picard, who by this point has unbuttoned his shirt entirely, agrees. “It’s a similar pleasure,” he tells me. “Fucking is always with someone. It’s concrete. And food is always concrete too.”
Bottle service arrives.
The same stripper also said that, in terms of the excitement that both food and sex can provide, “less is more.” From my foggy recollection of my night with Picard, it’s hard to imagine him agreeing with that part. My most distinct memory of the evening—confirmed in my greasy, progressively illegible notes—is sitting on a VIP-room banquette next to Picard as his maître d’ pours a bottle of champagne down my throat and two gorgeous, fully naked young Quebecoises go bilingual on each other, in every permutation, on the chef’s lap.
He raises a glass: “À la vie!”
That leaves three capital sins of which Picard is most certainly not guilty. When he’s not sweltering over a stove at one of his restaurants or writing a cookbook or tending to his pigs or visiting her purveyors, Picard hosts a show on Canadian Food TV, The Wild Chef, which follows his gastronomical journeys across the country. (He recently cooked up an impromptu dish of mussels and seal fat when dining al molto fresco among the Inuit.) So much for sloth. As for greed and envy, no one can accuse a man who serves such copious portions, who relishes the company of others, who gets hurt if you don’t drink with him and who gives such enveloping drunken bear hugs ... of hoarding and withholding.
Gluttony had been tested to its limit that night, as had my stomach lining. I didn’t feel quite like the guy who was fed to death in Seven, but I wasn’t far. A night with Picard is a test of endurance, even for Picard: “You can’t just eat fatty in life,” he says. “You can’t just eat only for pleasure—you need nourishment as well.”
Indeed, no evening is more riotously, competitively gluttonous than when famous chefs get together. Daniel Boulud, who makes a point of visiting Picard every time he’s in Montreal, recalls many such indulgent affairs, when Picard would open the best wines in his cellar. “These Quebeckers,” says Boulud, “always taking their shirts off.” He recalls the most outrageously excessive night of eating as being his own 50th birthday, when he hosted a $2,200-a-plate charity dinner for 24 friends, including many of his former sous-chefs who had gone on to run their own restaurants and who each supplied a course. Robert Parker, the world’s foremost authority on wine, provided the booze.
Over the meal’s seven hours, according to Boulud, they ate 16 courses and drank a million dollars’ worth of wine, about 85 bottles spanning the 20th century. On another occasion, this one also from the peak of the flush times, circa 2004, Boulud hosted a white-truffle tasting menu for Japanese friends, movie producers and journalists. Halfway through the dinner, chef Masayoshi Takayama—who now owns Masa, the most expensive restaurant in New York—showed up. After everyone had shaved about five grams of a glorious $1,500 one-pound truffle onto their dishes, Takayama whiffed the mushroom and ate the whole thing like an apple, to the stupefaction of the table. Perhaps he had been drinking?
Two days later Takayama returned to Boulud, tail between legs, to apologize, with a new white truffle in a plastic can as a token of expiation. “I think he wanted his friends to be stunned,” says Boulud. That level of conspicuous consumption, both financial and esophageal, was testing the limits, even in this culinary subculture.
Yet perhaps Picard himself defines gluttony best by throwing Catholic dogma on its head. Instead of defining gluttony as deriving excessive pleasure from food and drink, Picard says true excess begins “when pleasure is no longer there.”