Frédéric Morin, David McMillan and Meredith Erickson

When you’re doing two hundred covers per night, it’s imperative to have a winner in your arsenal, one that is all prep and little cook time during service. At home, well, this is the least healthy but the most rewarding of all “night-after” cures.

Patrick Thibault, our gardener, is the James Underwood Crockett (erstwhile Victory Garden host) of Montreal; he dutifully tends to the daily greens and produce we harvest from the Vin Papillon and Joe Beef gardens, while also leisurely providing the end-of-season greens we might use to create a torte like this one.

“We are geographically well off in Montreal, sitting on the shores of the seafood superhighway that is the St. Lawrence Seaway. From the Gaspé Peninsula to Kamouraska, Montreal to Portland, Maine, the seaway has a tremendous influence on what we eat.” – Book One