Hugue Dufour Is Coming Home After New York

This article was produced in collaboration with Banque Nationale, sponsor of the gastronomic programming at Montréal en Lumière.

“Listen, these kids are cool,” an old friend told Chef Hugue Dufour. “If you want to do something with them, I think it would be a good fit.” This friend was Denis Ferrer, who produces trout in Western Quebec at Pisciculture Kenauk. The “kids” were the team behind the Mile End seafood-forward bistro Molenne, Dufour—often referred to as the first Quebec chef to get a Michelin star—was intrigued.

Dufour is in between gigs, having closed his much-lauded one Michelin star restaurant M Wells in Long Island City on December 31 last year. His new restaurant in Baie-Saint-Paul is still a few months away from opening. An alum of Toqué! and Au Pied de Cochon, he remembered the Molenne address from when it used to be Café Mei; he and a colleague would stop in for peanut butter dumplings.

That in-between moment brings him back to Montreal this week as part of the Programmation gourmande Banque Nationale, presented during Montréal en Lumière, which runs through March 7.

Dufour closed his Michelin-starred Long Island City restaurant M Wells on December 31. The Molenne collaboration is his first major appearance back in Quebec since.

You’re speaking my language

“These kinds of events bring a certain camaraderie between chefs,” Dufour says, taking a break between mise en place for the upcoming event. “I remember participating in events like this in Montreal before. It’s an opportunity to see people from elsewhere, see different things and sensibilities, and exchange techniques. Even as a young chef, it was very nourishing.”

Dufour didn’t know the Molenne team, but they have friends in common. As the latter specialize in a raw bar with seafood platters, there was a natural affinity between them: Dufour has been working with seafood for years, stretching the boundaries of what’s possible.

The five-course menu leans into winter comfort: a seafood choucroute with smoked Quebec sturgeon, fish sausage, and lobster-stuffed gnocchi in beurre blanc.

Highlighting a city and its season

The menu for the Montréal en Lumière evenings is all about comfort in winter. “It’s a longer experience than a tasting menu, with five courses,” he says before describing a course featuring a seafood and fish choucroute with smoked Quebec sturgeon, fish sausage, and potatoes—gnocchi stuffed with lobster—in beurre blanc.

“Choucroute is a dish that usually refers to pork and meat,” Dufour acknowledges. “I want to bring you to a place where you feel so comfortable that I can pervert it!” he laughs. “And without calling it surf and turf. The idea is that we can treat seafood in a comforting way. It might not be something that people would say ‘Oh, I’m craving this,’ but that’s where I want to go with it.”

They’re also making a macaronade de moules, a pasta casserole from southern France reimagined by Dufour and Rochefort with shucked raw mussels stuffed with Toulouse sausage, cooked in tomato sauce with Herbes de Provence.

“That’s a shoutout to my late grandmother,” Dufour says. “For some strange reason she always had salt, pepper, and Herbes de Provence on top of her stove. I don’t know where that came from and it made no sense to me (back home) in Lac Saint-Jean, but it was part of everybody’s pantry back then.”

Molenne's raw bar and seafood-forward approach made it a natural fit for Dufour, who has spent years pushing the boundaries of what Quebec seafood can do on a plate.

Before the summer opening of Le Relais des Florents in Baie-Saint-Paul, Dufour is calling the Molenne collaboration what it is: "A PR reboot for me in a Quebecois landscape."

While much of the inspiration for his cooking—and all of the seafood for the collaboration dinners—is from Quebec and Canada, Dufour readily admits he’s not an ideologue about eating solely seasonal and local.

“It’s a pretty drab season now in terms of produce,” Dufour says. That’s one of the reason that cabbage and canned tomatoes are on the menu. “I don’t need tomatoes that came from here that we preserved ourselves. At some point, you have to have some give and take for that kind of thing. But things have to make sense; you don’t want to have asparagus now, you want to wait for the first asparagus of the season.”

A macaronade de moules (bottom left)—mussels stuffed with Toulouse sausage, cooked in tomato sauce with Herbes de Provence—is a nod to Dufour's late grandmother, who kept the spice blend on her stove in Lac Saint-Jean.

The good old company

Being in Montreal gives Dufour a chance to be with friends, enjoying company of old colleagues while doing mise en place together and going out to some other Montreal en Lumière dinners. It’s also a chance to get his name out there again before the Baie-Saint-Paul, Le Relais des Florents, opens up in the summer.

“It’s a PR reboot for me in a Quebecois landscape,” he says.

He’s happy to be back in Quebec and starting the new project, but there’s that element of having left something behind with the closure of M Wells.

“You always miss what you don’t have,” he says. “I would always be nostalgic for things (from here) that I wouldn’t have in New York, but I do miss it a bit, even its music. It’s a duality that makes things exciting for me.”

Dufour is looking ahead, though, excited about the collaboration and working with the Molenne brigade.

“When you walk into a place like this, you see the way they organize their stuff: it’s different dance,” he says, adding “I want to learn their dance, and I hope they want to learn mine, too.”

“I want to learn their dance, and I hope they want to learn mine, too.”

The Programmation gourmande Banque Nationale for Montréal en Lumière runs through March 7, bringing chefs from across Quebec and beyond together for one-off collaborations across the city.