when the fighting started with you-know-who, quebec city was the french stronghold. until the bitter end, when the french fell at the plains of abraham. the french may have lost that one, but some things french have stayed firm, unbowed, resiliently unchanged by trends or history. le continental is the kind of place about which i am unreservedly sentimental. [ david speaking french ] when i was younger, i ate here with my grandparents and my parents. man: oh, yeah. man: well, that s older restaurant in town, it s open since 1956. anthony: classic, un-ironic cuisine ancienne, meaning dishes you haven t seen since, like, forever. a hipster-free zone of french continental ocean liner classics, such as caesar salad, tossed fresh to order tableside. and beef tartare, also prepared tableside, as one must.
potatoes inside. [ man speaking french ] salmon pastrami. anthony: and wait a minute. this is super classic. david: oeuf en gelee. anthony: and this, oeuf en gelee. egg in aspic. soft boiled or poached egg in clear gelatin-set broth, classically garnished with white ham, tarragon leaves, black truffles. oh, my god. i was pretty sure that i would live the rest of my life without ever seeing this again. delicious. but tonight, after a full week of franco-canadian full-on assaults on our livers and our lights, fred and dave thought it would be both delicious and merciful to take advantage of the somewhat lighter and insanely delicious fare by their brilliant chef, omar, who is from pakistan. amazing, authentic pakistani food. so what do we have here? fred: butter chicken crab. octopus tikka. little eggplants braised with, uh, anar seeds. pomegranate. little mushrooms.
world. across town another thing entirely. the younger, wilder l affaire est ketchup, which, i am reliably informed, means, everything s cool, in local idiom. [ man speaking french ] anthony: at this point in my life, i just don t know anymore. are these young cooks, these servers, these dedicated entrepreneurs, are they hipsters? or am i just a cranky old [ bleep ] who thinks anybody below the age of 30 is a hipster? i don t know. but i admire them. david: so, how much did it cost you when you opened? man: not much. anthony: look at this tiny electric four-burner stove. at no point in my cooking career could i have worked with one of these without murdering everyone in the vicinity before hanging myself from the nearest beam. how long did it take you to adapt to the to the
it is one of those lik like painful nolstagic thing. chocolate butter cream. omnivorh my god, look at tha. damn, it is good. for this guy, it is lunch. sunday is french play house. no way. tell me all about it. he s a dandy. on sunday is dandy. with creme fresh and huge key cheese cart. how many people are in your family? him and his wife and two young boys. so you and your wife and two-year-old and a four-year-old. they don t make it to the end
extent even today. journalist patrick lagacé meets me for lunch at bistro m sur masson to help me understand a little bit of what many québécois feel is at stake. so, i was going to talk about the whole history of french québécois identity, the separatist movement, all this, but i have to get right to the pressing matter of the day: pastagate. [ laughter ] patrick: pastagate. what do you want to know about pastagate? anthony: for those not up on current quebec politics, pastagate refers to an incident where local authorities notified an italian restaurant that they were in violation of french laws because they used the word pasta, which is italian. this is patrick: okay, stop apologizing, okay? [ laughter ] anthony: don t get me wrong. my last name is bourdain. i lean french, hard. i am enormously sympathetic to the language laws. patrick: you don t think it s preposterous? anthony: i do not think it s