Chef J.C. Poirier
Home away from home.
It’s 1:00 p.m. on a Friday, and the kitchen brigade of St. Lawrence restaurant is a study in quiet efficiency. Chef J.C. (Jean-Christophe) Poirier cleans endive leaves for a salad with apples, pecans, and blue cheese. His chef de cuisine Ashley Kurtz works on foie gras mousse to be sandwiched between choux pastry for the show-stopping Paris-Brest while his sous-chef Colin Johnson butchers lamb for braising with gnocchi à la Parisienne. There are herbs being picked into tubs, sauces gently simmering, and waffle-cut potatoes being fried. A heroic amount of mise en place goes into preparing Poirier’s elegant interpretations of classical French and elevated regional Québécois fare at St. Lawrence, but the five cooks work together in a loose, easy rhythm; this same synchronicity carries them through dinner service for a fully booked restaurant five nights a week. It’s a beautiful dance, the kitchen team working as a cohesive unit toward a delicious goal.
Poirier’s initial forays into cooking were born out of his love of eating. As an 11-year-old in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, he’d come home from school and fix himself something to eat. “My favourite snack was escargots with garlic butter on toast. But there was no one at home to cook it for me because Mom was still at work, and there was no Food Network or YouTube to teach me how to do it. So I had to figure it out by myself.”
A year of culinary school at age 19 was his next step, though he demurs on that route in hindsight. “If I had to do it again, I’d choose more wisely and go directly to working at a good restaurant with a solid chef, starting at the bottom … I’d have learned so much more than I did by going to school.”
Les Remparts in Old Montreal was Poirier’s first stint in a professional kitchen, in an utterly classical French restaurant. “Sweetbreads with peeled grapes, venison with huckleberry sauce—the old-school dishes really resonated with me.” Two years later, he transitioned to Toqué! under the expert tutelage of Normand Laprise. He progressed through the brigade from commis to chef de partie, learning every aspect of Laprise’s playful, ingredient-driven expression of Québécois haute cuisine, firmly rooted in seasonality and terroir.