It is this tension – loving the acts of cooking
and running a restaurant but hating the dining
scene – that has earned McMillan and his long-time
co-chef and business partner, Frédéric Morin, an
international following, and something of a cult
status among fellow chefs.
The late Anthony Bourdain hung out with them
on an episode ofParts Unknown, and David Chang
has called Joe Beef his favourite restaurant. Their
first cookbook,The Art of Living According to Joe Beef,
has clocked close to 100,000 copies sold. Their recently
released second book, a hefty volume calledJoe Beef:
Surviving the Apocalypseand coming in at more than
300 pages, includes recipes for crisp frogs legs, pickled
deer necks, soap and cough drops, plus a lift-out
dedicated to correctly stocking a bunker.
The eccentric cookbooks defy formula, and
go some way to explaining how Joe Beef, a 75-seat
restaurant in Montréal’s Little Burgundy with an
obsession for French country cooking, hyper-local
ingredients and a whole-beast philosophy, has struck
such a chord around the world.
“We went in with these books and just started
ranting and raving and going off on tangents and
personal experiences and successes and failures,”
says McMillan. “We were giving people a more
personal glimpse of our personal hell: running
restaurants while trying to make something we
kind of hate, something that we like.”
“I wanted to write these books with Fred in
a way that people would understand that cooking
is not the only thing that defines us – we have many
other interests. Yes, we are cooks, and there are recipes,
and it’s our idea of how cooking should be, but it’s not
only that. We’re into welding, interior design, finance,
community, the First Nations community in our
area, fishing, hunting, fierce loyalty to the province
of Québec, and at this point, educating the young
people who come through our kitchens to maybe
not look at restaurants through the lens of Instagram.”
Since McMillan and Morin first opened Joe
Beef 15 years ago, the pair have opened four other
restaurants in Montréal (Liverpool House, Le
Vin Papillon, Mon Lapin, McKiernan). Each has
a different focus – Le Vin Papillon, for example,
emphasises plant-based dishes and deliberately funky
natural wine – but all have participated in drawing
attention to a place which is now considered one
of the great food cities of North America.
“The food scene in Montréal has always been really
great, but people outside of Canada didn’t know it for
a long time,” says McMillan. “Montréal is a particular
situation. It’s 90 per cent French-speaking – the
only place in North America with a majority French-
speaking population. There’s been a lot of popularity
in recent years with Nordic cuisine. Québec is asNordic a place as anywhere on that side of the world,
but it’s been shielded by the French language. Québec
stands alone in its frozen corner of the North American
continent, a French nation that eats French food,
speaks French and has a very advanced dining public.
It’s still something of an interesting lost culture.”
This unique dining scene is also one of the
reasons the chef is notoriously festival-shy. People
outside of Montréal, he says, are less likely to go
in for the sort of food he wants to cook.
“I don’t go to festivals because I can’t cook at
them,” he says. “I sell kidneys. I sell tongue. I sell ears,
brains, tails. I sell all the weird creatures in the ocean.
I like to cook out of my comfort zone. We cook in
a certain way so if I go to a one in a North American
city and everybody’s cooking chicken and steak there’s
nothing there for me.”
But if he avoids festivals, why has he decided to
give the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival a go?
For starters McMillan, a history buff, counts
Robert Hughes’s account of Australia’s European
settlement,The Fatal Shore, among his favourite
books. But he also cites Stephanie Alexander as
a major reason he and the team from Joe Beef –
Morin, sommelier Vanya Filipovic and head chef
Marc-Olivier Frappier – decided to make the trip.
“I was 17 when I first started working in
restaurants, and one of the first cookbooks that
I ever owned wasStephanie’s Australia,” he says.Clockwise from
top: Joe Beef;Joe
Beef: Surviving
the Apocalypse;
the team at
Liverpool House;
tripes à la mode
de Caen (white
tripe with cider);
and QC spring
seafood pie.78 GOURMET TRAVELLER