Warming up to Winter-peg

Excerpt...

Affordability, of course, is also about space, and the restaurants and hotels and occasional shops of the Exchange District have plenty of it. At Mirlycourtois, on the second floor of a Princess St. warehouse, I ate one of the best French meals I have had in Canada, and I needed to put up neither with pretentious waiters nor bad-tempered chefs working their shtick nor a rude emptying of my wallet to have it.

Sarah ordered coq au vin, a dish I am generally afraid to taste (or even make) as it reminds me of a cherished moment I had, when I was but eight, at Chez Allard, one of the most celebrated restaurants of Paris's Left Bank, with my late father Mordecai who had started writing in that city.

So fragile, some memories are, but I tasted my wife's rooster, and it was moist and savoury (the eponymous chef, Bernard Mirlycourtois, acquires his birds from Manitoba or, in a pinch, from Québec), its sauce dark and delicious. Perfectly cooked, just as my Northern pike in a beurre blanc with capers was.

Mirlycourtois, it turns out, moved to Winnipeg from France in his early 20s. When I asked him why he stayed, he said "for the fishing." Manitoba, he went on, had everything he could possibly want – good produce, great hunting and, in a couple of months, morels.

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