but no. these hardy culinarians of the north like to frolic in the snow and ice. more accurately, they like to obey their genetic québécois imperative to risk dental and maxillofacial injury by skating around, slapping at a hard disc, trying to drive it in each other s general direction. i believe they call this sport hockey. this is not in my blood. do you s do you skate? david: yeah, we grew up on rinks like this. anthony: does everyone in in quebec? uh, it s pretty much obligatory? here s your stick, kid. david: yeah. what else do you do? there s no reason to live here if it s no hockey. anthony: hockey rinks pop up all over this city to accommodate montrealers desire to risk teeth, groin, and limb. and right behind fred and dave s restaurant, joe beef, a pickup game of chefs, cooks, and hospitality professionals is underway. some of these guys, to put it charitably, are a little long in the tooth to be out there swinging sticks at each other and, uh, uh, skidding
anthony: it s one thing to have to work outside in this winteriness, but it takes a strange and wonderful kind of mutant to actually find it pleasurable. like, well, these two gentlemen. do you like the cold? i mean, by you i mean the québécois. fred: it cleans the streets of ebola. anthony: the cold? fred: yeah. david: yeah. the frigid cold keeps the riffraff out of the city, for sure. anthony: fred morin and david mcmillan. restaurateurs, chefs at the legendary joe beef, bon vivants, raconteurs, historians of their beloved great white north. princes of hospitality. and what do men like this do for fun when the rivers turn to ice three-feet thick? when testicles shrink and most of us scurry for warmth and shelter? if they were like so many other canadians, they would go ice fishing on the st. lawrence river. david: the cabin fever induces in the québécois family. because we are confined, perhaps, to spend so much time
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 preposterous. but here we have a situation. [ laughter ] patrick: it is stupid. uh, i agree with you completely that this this province, 40 years ago, was in some respect an english city. so we needed to have language laws for signage and stuff. anthony: now, signage, for instance, must by law be principally in french. french first in all things. patrick: but every bureaucracy produces byproducts of stupidity. and that was it. and you know what? it will not stand. anthony: the anglo-canadians treated french-speaking québécois like second-class crap for much of history. so, i get it. i d be pissed, too. i d want my own thing. and when i got it, i d want to make sure there s no backsliding
to the bad old days. patrick: when the parti québécois, the first, uh, sovereignist party to be elected, was elected in 1976, it didn t come out of a vacuum. it came out from a couple of decades of awakening and struggle. anthony: 50 years from now, will people be still speaking patrick: french. anthony: predominantly french in montreal? patrick: yes. anthony: no doubt about it? patrick: no doubt about it. anthony: french first is something most would agree with. how far and how rigorously you want to go with that, well do you think there was ever any possibility or real majority or a plurality of québécois who would have voted in separate nation status? patrick: you know, in english you guys say timing is everything. anthony: right. patrick: and timing was never better than in the period of 1990, 1991, 92. because in 95, this country came inches from being broken up. anthony: close. patrick: yeah. anthony: do you think it ll ever happen in the
16th century, but succumbed to the military might of great britain in the mid-18th. thus began a gradual but steady persecution of all things french. the québécois have struggled mightily to hang on to their french heritage and language. the issue of seceding entirely, a notion that persists to some 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.