Tag Archives: Paul Patates

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Join The Club

I have never been comfortable with the concept of clubs.

In school, I never joined the chess club, or the math club, or any sort of club for that matter. Clubs were for those who couldn’t make friends on their own. People who needed to constantly surround themselves with other people to feel validated as people.

Secret societies seemed even worse, the idea of initiation and ritual and adherence to arcane doctrines smacking of unnecessary conspiracy. If you want to be in a club, why not own it?

I would never be a member of any club that would accept someone like me as a member, the old saying goes. It’s often attributed to Groucho Marx, but Woody Allen stole it, and meant it. Now, there’s a club I wouldn’t want to join.

However, my most preferred type of sandwich has to be the club sandwich. In most restaurants, you don’t even have to show a membership card to order one.

A triple-decker, the basic club sandwich consists of sliced turkey, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise on three slices of toasted white bread, cut into quarters, toothpicks skewering the wedges in place. Some restaurants ham it up with ham and cheddar cheese, which is fine, but in my opinion excessive.

There is already such thing as a ham and cheese sandwich, which is perfectly complete on its own. I find that bacon plus ham is too much pork to put together on one plate. A good sandwich should only be constructed of a few constituent ingredients. And the beauty of the classic club is its simplicity. Less is more.

I have long searched Montreal for the best club sandwich, and a few old-school diners stand out. There’s Oxford Café on Sherbrooke in NDG. They’ve been around since 1944. Oxford makes their club sandwiches with real chicken, not prepackaged pressed turkey, so they score points for authenticity. A great club sandwich is worth travelling for. But unless you’re already in NDG, it’s a bit of a journey.

I also like Paul’s Patates in Pointe-Saint-Charles. They’ve been open since the mid-1950s and, depending on who’s working, you may receive your club sandwich in geometrically sliced segments that would impress Pythagoras. Paul’s has a distinctive neighbourhood joint vibe, with the stainless steel countertops and the (sadly non-functional) jukeboxes, which are nonetheless time capsules of Quebec popular music.

Another plus is their homemade Bertrand spruce beer. It smells kind of funky, but the original recipe is not too sweet, not too carbonated, and hasn’t changed much in over a century.

I highly recommend both these diners and the club sandwiches therein. But recently, I’ve been returning to Chez Nick in Westmount and ordering the club sandwich, fries, a side of gravy, and a ginger ale. The combination of that particular lunch in that particular place is perhaps my favourite thing in life right now. Chez Nick has been going strong for 103 years, and there is an unmistakable air of history there that is hard to ignore.

Nick’s is by far the most elegant of these diners, being on Greene Avenue, where bourgeois retirees congregate, and young upwardly socially mobile families bring their prep school kids. But there’s a down-to-earth atmosphere, too, that makes anyone feel immediately comfortable and welcome, no matter how fancy or how casual you might look.

Nick’s is already famous to most Montrealers. The author Louise Penny has written about it in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series, and frequently goes there herself for breakfasts when she’s in town. Other renowned writers have been regulars there, but I won’t name any names. Brian Mulroney used to stop in from time to time, and one of the staff recently told me that he once served Jean Chrétien.

Whenever I go to Chez Nick I feel like I’m part of this cast of illustrious and everyday characters. I’ve been visiting Nick’s for nearly 20 years, and it is the one restaurant in which I have never had a bad meal. I particularly love their club sandwiches which I customarily order dry, with a white paper container of mayo. That way, I can regulate the dressing in every bite.

There are lots of things that make Nick’s one of my favourite places in the city. The warm and long-time staff; the regulars, whom I’ve come to recognize and in some cases befriend; the ambiance; the legacy; the mythology. And of course, the club sandwich. But one thing I especially love about Nick’s is their gravy.

As a kid, it was a treat to go after school for a pre-dinner snack of French fries and gravy. My mom would habitually pick me up from class and take me to the local food court where we would order a basket of crinkle-cut fries and dip them in a tub of warm and salty brown sauce.

It was less routine that my dad would collect me, but I could usually convince him, too, to take me out for French fried potatoes. It was during one of these outings that I remember he gave me the news that he and my mom were divorcing. Certain things stick in your memory more than others, and that afternoon has embedded itself deeply into my experiential scrapbook.

I don’t recall it being particularly painful at the time, as one might expect of hearing such momentous news. Not to my 11-year-old self. It’s possible that the gravy and fries cushioned the blow. There’s a reason why we call some dishes “comfort food.” Disentangling sustenance from remembrance is an impossible task.

In my youth, I couldn’t wait to distance myself from my broken family. But I crave familiarity now, as the world appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Family comes in all different forms. It’s not just about genealogy. Long ago, my biological family was scattered to the wind. But I feel a sense of belonging at Nick’s, like I’ve found a club I want to be in.◼︎

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

HDYSH? Paul Patates

Now that the tourists have largely departed, shuffled back to their quotidian, boring, non-Montreal lives, those of us who live here can finally peek out from beneath our shells and once again begin to enjoy the bounty of beauty and treasure that this city has to offer. It is suddenly easier to get a table at the busier restaurants, the sidewalks are less congested, activity in the public squares has shifted down into a slower mode. ‘Tis autumn.

I am in love with Montreal in autumn. I mean, romantically in love. Montreal in autumn is a foxy lady, a hot beast, a graceful and ageless face, mother, Madonna, whore, lover. Montreal in autumn is a pretty French girl who lets you into her crooked apartment sometimes to drink tea and smoke cigarettes and spin dusty records whilst sat upon a dirty Persian rug, her cat rubbing up against you and the furniture and pretending to ignore the whole scene. You can’t have her. But you can hang out together in autumn.

The best places to enjoy in Montreal at this time of year are not necessarily those that come first to mind. Notre-Dame Cathedral and Parc La Fontaine, the Old Port and the chalet on the top of the mountain are well worth a visit any time. The usual brunch spots can be identified by the lineups of well-dressed queens and kings waiting to get a table. But the real gems are the places that kings and queens will never go to, that they don’t even know about.

I am one of those people who finds things right on the cusp of blowing up. I found Nirvana’s first album on cassette when Seattle was a city and not yet a sound. I was the only kid in school wearing Dr. Martens boots and was ridiculed for them — “Is your mom in the army?”  — that is, until Nirvana’s second album came out. I moved to Montreal just as Godspeed You! Black Emperor were becoming a thing, Spin Magazine running that article on how Montreal was about to emerge as the next sound that used to be a city. I worked at the Telluride Film Festival with Barry Jenkins before he won an Oscar. I graduated from Concordia before it ceased being a real university by offering a course on Kanye West.

Now I fear I’ve found another of those things — Paul Patates in Pointe-Saint-Charles. It’s not like I found it. It was there before, since 1958. I often rode by on my bicycle or walked past on a neighbourhood stroll across the canal during the pre-pandemic decade when I lived in Saint Henri. For some reason I never went inside. But ever since, this place is my holiday.

I occasionally peered in through the windows at the prototypical lunch stand and row of stools, the checkerboard décor and stainless steel countertop, the jukeboxes that denote an authentic neighbourhood joint, the sort you might see in a film noir, or recreated in Back to the Future, or fetishized in The Sopranos series finale. Paul Patates is better. We don’t need TV series or the movies. What goes on in life is far more interesting, far more important. And we get to play characters in the story. The colours we see onscreen only become really authentic in real life. Paul Patates is a real-life, authentic “joint” in the truest sense of that word — on the corner, a burger and poutine joint, a steamie joint, a community joint, full of life and local colour.

One of the unique things about this joint is their Bertrand Spruce Beer, the non-alcoholic house brew sold in 500 ml swing-top bottles. Its recipe has remained the same since 1898, and it smells a little funky, to be frank, but tastes remarkable — not too sweet, not too carbonated. There is something mythical about this beverage that conjures another Montreal, in another time, before the wicked world caught up with us and blew up the spot.

Paul Patates isn’t fancy. On any given Saturday afternoon you might see working folks, families, seniors, hipsters, speaking English and French, gathered together in relative peace over lunch at the booth. The staff are mainly kids with their own ambitions beyond the restaurant. One is an aspiring musician; another is training to work in construction. I eat my burger and French fries, listening to their stories, their desires, their memories, thinking of all the lives that have come and gone through this place. It seems we cannot see how good we have it at the time.

Canada has never been as adroit as America at mythmaking. Since we agreed in the 1930s to cooperate with the US film market, America’s iconic images have been ours, too. Children weren’t even allowed to see movies in Quebec until 1960. But more than Canada, or Quebec, Montreal is its own myth now, a city-state second to none. An abundant enough crop of homegrown talent has headlined world stages, recorded the world’s records, directed the world’s films, and influenced the world’s influencers. Leonard Cohen is a stamp now, stamped upon Canada’s love letters and utility bills winging their way side by side through the post. If that isn’t mythical, what is?

Sitting amidst the patrons and staff at Paul Patates, amongst the jukeboxes that hadn’t worked since Corey Hart sang Never Surrender, with Virgin Radio instead pumping out the jams in 2022 while French fries fried, the kind of fries that range ideally from crispy to greasy, and the kind of burgers and hot dogs that appear identical to stylized photos on a menu, and taste even better, I found myself in in the middle of a mini myth, and I, too, was a character, the observer, perched like a ghost at the lunch counter, charged with the albeit niche charge to experience Paul Patates in this season, specifically, and how recurrent pasts had accumulated and settled in this particular place.

How the kids who worked here were much like the kids in 1958, and again in 1998, and again and again every subsequent decade, fresh faced and restless, living their perfect moments at this moment, golden light falling through the window at an autumnal angle, a sedimentary accrual of history, languages and cultures taking shape, the city and a nation assuming form, a crystalized instant, etched like a frieze in the ceiling of some magnificent chapel, a Montreal chapel, a newer-world house of worship, divinely inspired, worshiping not those unattainable celestial European or American Gods, but humbler Montreal-made myths that reside closer to home, like spruce beer and all dressed steamies. How the jukebox selection insists, Never Surrender.◼︎

@nichemtl

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