What It’s Like to Forage with a Two-Michelin Star Chef

When booking a reservation at Québec City‘s two-Michelin-star restaurant La Tanière³ one thing is made clear: you will not know what’s on the menu until the dishes appear in front of you. But, what you can surmise from the restaurant that’s shrouded in mystery (it’s hidden behind a rather non-descript door that unlocks only with a secret code given to you once you secure your reservation), is that the dishes will incorporate ingredients from the area’s Indigenous boreal forest.

“I feel that what we do is really about ingredients and not recipe,” says chef-owner Francois-Emmanuel Nicol. “So for me, it was important to work with what we have from the land and to push every menu a bit further on new plants that we’ve never used before.” 

Of course, that means treating the relationships to Indigenous ingredients and the local Indigenous nations with as much reverence as he does with the food—and that’s especially clear on a foraging expedition I find myself taking in collaboration with La Tanière³ and the Wendat Nation up in Québec’s Foret Montmorency this past summer. 

Foraging in la forêt

It’s a particularly warm day in mid-June when Nicol along with Wendake Tourism and members of the Huron-Wendat Nation are guiding a group of journalists—myself included—around the forest, pointing out forage-able goods growing just off the well-kept trails. Wild blueberries are just starting to form, as well as “heartberry” (strawberry) flowers. We pull clumps of edible reindeer moss and leafy threads of wintergreen to pile into little pockets made of bark—a traditional method of foraging for this nation. 

Once we’ve rounded up our finds for the day, we’re led to a tent where we’re lunching on some of that same spirit: a mix of French technique cooking with Indigenous flavours and ingredients in a collaboration lunch between Nicol and Chef Anora Collier of La Traite, an Indigenous restaurant in Wendake, Quebec.

There’s a buttery scallop crudo, bathed in wintergreen oil and fresh-from-the-forest blueberries, and a beautifully charred, tender slice of elk that appears later. Wild game isn’t available to restaurateurs on the regular, but for this meal—in the outdoors with the Wendat Nation—Nicol and the nation have come to an agreement. There’s also maple whiskey-soaked salmon and matsutake mushrooms. 

The delight and surprise of ingredients during this collaborative lunch, inside the traditional tent, seems unending. Later that evening, back in Québec City, a visit to the stunning La Tanière³ reveals a few of those ingredients again. 

From the forest to the den

Once we’re inside the doors of La Tanière, our motley crew of writers begins the journey in its cavernous, underground bar where inventive drinks are made. Stone walls meet the ceiling in a curved formation. It’s just room one of a four-room dining experience that’s been exceptionally curated by Nicol and his team, all set inside a former fur trading den (incidentally, tanière translates to den).

As amuse bouches and the first cocktail are finished, we’re swept away into another room: this time, the ceiling opens a little more, and seats are all placed around a central bar—this is where culinary students learn their craft. In the third room, dining gets serious. Red-orange velvet benches flank the middle of the room, tables are complete with locked drawers. There’s a crew of eight of us dining together, and it feels as though there’s a server for each of us.

Service is never overbearing nor hurried, taking pace exactly with how long it takes for us to devour (or linger over) our dishes—yet nary a wine glass goes empty.  I’m starting to understand those little, almost imperceptible features that separate a damn good restaurant from a Michelin-starred one. Nay, a two-Michelin starred one. At some point, each of us is delivered a key, meant to unlock those drawers we noticed earlier and, inside the drawer, a limerick printed on a small piece of paper meant to give us a clue as to our finishing course. 

The clue leads us to a maple-infused crème brûlée, expertly baked inside of a caviar tin. An Acadian sturgeon caviar is pressed atop half of the potted dessert. The only way this could have been more decadent is if it were sprinkled with gold flake, but that’s where Nicol shows his restraint.

The timing of La Tanière³ is like a ballet: structured and yet artful, hitting every beat and yet fluid; done so exquisitely well that you didn’t realize you were holding your breath the entire time.  

By the time dinner—a veritable avant-garde art show of a meal—is finished, the sun has set and the funicular that would scale us right up that steep cliff back to Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, where we’re staying that night, has closed. The time has come to lose my breath in another way—by making the steep ascent from the cobblestone streets of Le Petit Champlain up to Fairmont Le Château Frontenac by foot.

The climb is sobering, until I reach the top of the cliff, just to be intoxicated by a view of the St. Lawrence River. I have to wonder what ingredients growing around the river itself might show up in La Tanière³’s menu by the next time I’m in Québec City.