Mireille Silcoff Got Mon Lapin to Spill More Than Their Recipes

The Mon Lapin team are experts at turning pre-conceived notions on their head. This neighbourhood restaurant with a worldwide reputation doesn’t call itself a fine dining restaurant, but a ‘fun dining’ restaurant. No reservations (at first, anyway), no fancy tablecloths, no formality, no standing on ceremony.

As for that old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth, well, that couldn’t be further from the truth at the Little Italy restaurant where each of the five owners consistently gives credit to the team behind the scenes. Their new cookbook: De Toute Beauté! From Montreal With Love, is equally a team approach, written by Mon Lapin’s chefs and co-owners Marc-Olivier Frappier and Jessica Noël, sommelière and co-owner Vanya Filipovic, and Montreal-based writer Mireille Silcoff.

Silcoff made her career as a music critic for the Montreal Mirror and a columnist for the National Post. She’s also a fiction writer and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her newest book (based on a viral New York Times magazine article about the sex lives of Gen-Xers) entitled The Joy of X is anticipated in 2027.

We sat down with Silcoff to find out more about how she came to write the book and how it deepened her understanding of what she found on her plate.

How did you get to know the Mon Lapin folks in the first place, and how did this writing gig come your way?

I was a real club kid in the ‘90s. Through Joe Beef and what ended up being Vin Papillon, I met Marco and Jess, and Vanya, who I adore. Montreal is a small scene in a funny way, so we have a lot of mutual friends.

More than being a food person, I’m a host—I love entertaining in all different kinds of ways, from running salons (like Hot Chain Salon) to parties for my kids, and dinner parties, and cocktail parties, and I love wine. When Vanya approached me, I think she was looking for someone whose sensibility about beauty and style and a place for that kind of thing might jibe with theirs.

In my writing life, I’ve written a lot about how people live, and in a way the book is about how the Mon Lapin people live and how they want to enhance the way other people live. So the stars aligned in a way.

Was it easy to get into the mindset of the chefs?

I approached it extremely journalistically, much to the annoyance of the chefs not used to sitting and being interviewed for hours and hours on end! We created the structure of the book, and then before getting to work on any of the chapters, we would convene a meeting at the restaurant so I could immerse myself in as many of their words on the theme as I could possibly squeak out of them.