Montreal Food in 1967

Average middle class families in the 1960’s didn’t often go out to restaurants. Restaurants tended to be on the fancy side:Bill Wong’s and Ruby Foo’s were two of Montreal's finest Restaurants in that era, both located on Decarie Boulevard near where I lived.

(Montreal’s Chinese community established itself early in Montreal due to the railroad, but generally kept to itself.)

Other restaurants on that strip included Miss Montreal, Piazza Tomasso (where CFCF’s Magic Tom (Tom Auburn) entertained parents and children every week)and the Stage Coach Inn that had floor shows. The Capri Hotel had a bar, The Guilded Cage,where a friend of my mother's played piano. The most conspicuous restaurant, one that is still there today, was Orange Julep, a tacky giant (four storey) orange ball 50’s style “Drive-In” Restaurant.. I suspect that these restaurants popped up in this West End location because of Blue Bonnets, the horse race track across the street. (The bar at Ruby Foo's stayed open until 3a.m. a friend, born in 1944, tells me.)

With the building of the Decarie Expressway for Expo the location lost its luster and with the advent of state controlled lotteries so did horse racing. Blue Blonnets just closed.

In the 60’s exotic restaurants were Italian and Chinese (we sometimes ordered take out from The HOUSE OF WONG on Queen Mary Road.)

Here's an article form the 60's showing how Mr. Wong supported his community, reading to hospitalized Chinese and then building a Chinese hospital.

1967 changed all that. Although extremely pricey (so I never ate out at Expo) the Fair offered the gamut of cuisines, traditional national dishes and the more experimental. Since there is no real traditional Canadian food, the Canadian pavilion chefs had to be creative, offering whale meat and maple syrup and the like (Today, they would just make a classy poutine.)

An article I have on hand has a visual with a group of Expo 67 chef’s displaying a plate of their fare: an Indian chef with samosas; a Japanese chef with Sushi; a Mexican chef with fahitas, etc. Hmm., in 2009 this is staple grocery store food. How times have changed!

The restaurant scene in Montreal changed with the immigrant scene, and still does in many ways. (An exception would be Caribbean food. Although many folks came from the Caribbean early and mid 20th century, they tended to work on the railroad or as domestics and not set up restaurants.)

I was surprised to listen to a BBC radio documentary that claimed London’s first Italian restaurant opened in the 50’s and that the owners had trouble finding fresh oregano. My mother says that Montreal had Italian Restaurants in the 30’s and her mother had no trouble finding oregano. Frank de Rice, I'm told was an early restaurant. My mother pronounced the RICE like the grain.

Hmm. A quick glance at the Gazette Archives shows that Mr.de Rice, who was also into boxing and horseracing,and even sponsored a marathoner for the Boston event, had a chain of 3 eateries, one on Metcalfe, one near Blue Bonnets (7450 Decarie,which had four fires in 1951 within a four month span) and a stand in Cartierville, which burned down in 1941 under suspicious circumstances. The article about the fire says that the man started the restaurants shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power (in 1933) and his slogan was "FDR wants to see you. Frank de Rice also sponsored many a charity event for sick and mentally disabled children." So my mom was right, although his stand "popular to thousands of Montrealers" sold hot dogs, according to the article at Frank de Rice's stand burns down 1941 Montreal Gazette

In the 70’s, while I was going to college, Greek restaurants opened up,on Prince Arthur near the ‘student ghetto’ which were bring your own wine and provided great value for the money. Students loved them.(There were already some psarotavernas (fish restaurants) and such in Park Extension. I ate at some of these when I worked at CFCF Radio (405 Ogilvy ave)in the early 80's) Vietnamese restaurants came to Montreal around then, and, later, Thai, of course.

In the mid 70's I got a first taste of Lebanese food at Bashas on Ste. Catherine. (I was a vegetarian then, and, boy, did I love those savory falafels. (I had never tasted the sweet, husky taste of cumin before. In fact, cumin smells a lot like 'armpit' doesn't it?) Today Lebanese fast food restaurants are a staple of all Montreal neighborhoods. Amir has spread far and wide and Adonis on Sources Road in Pointe Claire sells the food fresh. YUMMY. My cousin, from LA, loves Lebanese food and says there are few Lebanese restaurants there. Imagine!

Montreal is a great restaurant city, even if, due to immigration laws in Quebec, we’ve restricted who comes to Quebec to French Speaking populations.

My mother was a great cook as my story Looking for Mrs. Peel shows. Grocery stores in those days were different from today. We shopped at Steinberg's on Queen Mary, East of Decarie (state of the art) and the A and P on Queen Mary, West of Decarie. The A and P was old fashioned in that the aisles were narrow, the floors scuffed hardwood and the meat and produce section smelled suspiciously of rotting organic matter.

I have a 'disturbing' memory of Steinberg's. The store had an auto pick up door in the back and a man worked there whose job it was to hand you the large brown paper bags filled with your groceries. But I felt sorry for him. He wasn't a young man, maybe in his thirties, and he had a handsome weather-beaten face, but he somehow looked very sad or maybe humiliated. HE WAS POOR. Probably a poor family man I could feel his desperation, somehow as I handed him the paper ticket with the red number indicating our order. I suspected that he was an alcoholic.

There was also Grostern's corner grocer across the street at the corner of Queen Mary and Coolbrook (where we seldom shopped) and Young's, the Chinese grocer nearby on Decarie,who sold produce and flowers on the sidewalk.

(It was at Young's that I witnessed a spontaneous act of kindness that has stayed etched in my memory. A grizzly bedraggled 'bum' was passing by and a woman at the counter quickly packed a paper bag with fruits and gave it to him, completely unsolicited. The used car lots behind my house on Decarie 'housed' many a 'war-veteran' as they described themselves to us kids, who often played among the cars.

And, if recall there was a upscale private grocer on the south corner of Coolbrook and Decarie, with a French name - and it may still be there. Have to go check. Grostern's is, it is a florist.

Carrots, broccoli, brussel sprouts,and the ubiquitous iceberg lettuce: the produce available was pretty pedestrian. Meanwhile, I watched wide-eyed as the Italian widows, dressed in black, stooped at the side of the highway and picked dandelion greens (or something).

My mother, being French Canadian, didn’t buy into the advertising buzz about the latest ‘plastic’ food craze. We did eat Cheeze Whiz (UM that salty flavor) and Kraft Dinner, although my mother famously used the macaroni and put the aluminum cheese topping package aside and used her own cheese and shallots and cream.

We seldom ate canned spaghetti (no, my mother made a spectacular Spaghetti Bolognese), unless my older brother bought it for himself. We seldom ate canned anything but maybe peas. If I begged for any food I’d seen on the TV, it was probably some sugary cereal. I loved the chocolate ones. Imagine, 60’s mothers in those days sent their kids to school on a bowl of sugar and felt GOOD about it.

DIGRESSION:All ironic considering that the "breakfast cereal" movement was initially an 'health food' movement. But cereals soon morphed into an ideal consumer-society product: air in a box (as opposed to fizz in a bottle). Huge profit (for grains were cheap in the 70's)and sales propelled by advertising to kids.

If household cleaners supported the 'afternoon dramas (or soap operas) of the 60's; then cereal-advertising, supported children's and family prime time programs. Even Superman himself, George Reeve, shilled a cereal and we all know that Superman ate REAL food.

We lived in a neigborhood with many Jewish families, so I sometimes got to taste their excellent traditional dishes. And as I wrote, for a while I had a friend from India and I got to taste Jappatti’s etc. That food tasted weird to me. My husband, who grew up in Hudson, a fashionable country suburb, lived on canned crapola as a child. His mother, of Scots origin, did, indeed, buy into the advertising buzz. He seldom tasted a fresh vegetable during his childhood.

So sad as vegetables and fruits tasted SO MUCH BETTER in those days,and I don't think it is my childish imagination saying so.

On the other hand, a friend who came here from India in '67 tells me she craved Cheez Whiz and other processed foods because they were forbidden in her home.

My father, who was cheap, used to keep us from eating all the apples and pears and peaches in one day by saying we'd 'get sick' from them. LIE. Today, I can hardly choke down some of these perfect-looking specimens I can buy, at any time of year, in the grocery store. He sometimes tried to get us hooked on kippered herring, what he considered his national dish.

So, it seems, we have gained something in 40 years- and lost something.

Maybe that is why we are all hooked on Cajun and Indian and Thai food. The spices cover up the fact that meat and vegetablest today taste BLAND .

The CBC archive has a clip from May 11, 1967, with Pierre Berton ranting about the 'ersatz food' movement, propaganda, he calls it, trying to convince us that instant coffee is better than real coffee.' Berton only died recently, but BOY, was he onto something early!!