By: Rebecca Harris
[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]he story of how a Campbell River, B.C.-raised chef came to open a British-inspired gastropub in Montreal begins in November 2002, during the lunch rush at Jamie Oliver’s newly opened Fifteen restaurant in London, England.
Derek Dammann had arrived in the capital city a month earlier and was running out of money. Deciding to cut his trip short, he changed his plane ticket and planned to spend his remaining funds eating at great restaurants.
Just before his departure date, Dammann was having a coffee in the upstairs trattoria at Fifteen, since the restaurant was fully booked. “The hostess came upstairs and said, ‘We just had a no-show if you want the table,’” recalls Dammann. “I said, ‘sure.”’
A chat with the server led to a conversation with the sous chef and, to Dammann’s surprise, the restaurant was hiring. After reviewing his credentials, the sous chef asked Dammann when he could do a kitchen trial. “As soon as I finish my lunch,” he replied.
Dammann was hired as chef de partie and, after just six months, he was named chef de cuisine, a position he held for three-and-a-half years. He returned to Canada when his visa expired — eventually winding up in Montreal — but remained good friends with Oliver. “He said, ‘If you ever want help, I know you’re capable of doing it, and I know cooks have no money. So if you want help, I’m willing to help you [open a restaurant],’” recalls Dammann. After four years helming the kitchen at Old Montreal’s DNA, Dammann took Oliver up on his offer and opened Maison Publique on the Plateau Mont-Royal in October 2012. Oliver is an investor in the pub — his first North American restaurant venture — but Dammann has full control over the operation and menu. The location, which sat empty for two years, is located in Dammann’s neighbourhood. “I’d walk by it a few times a week walking my dog,” he says. “I had the idea for the pub [early on] and after a year-and-a-half, took the plunge.”
French for “public house,” Maison Publique is modelled after British gastropubs: relaxed pub dining with quality food. “Ever since I lived in London, I thought a gastropub is the way to go,” says Dammann. “It’s casual, you can have fun and just do good, responsibly sourced food.… And there’s nothing like it in Montreal.”
Located in a residential area, just slightly off the beaten path, Maison Publique has the fixtures of an old English tavern. The pub features a vast wooden bar, an open kitchen, tin-tiled ceilings, textured wallpaper and worn wooden floors. “We built everything new out of wood and distressed it so it looks like it’s been here for a 100 years,” says Dammann.
The walls are adorned with random pieces such as a deer head, framed photographs and old books. “It was an organic process of cluttering,” says Dammann. “You can’t force it, it has to come naturally.”
Despite its British influence, you won’t find fish and chips or bangers and mash on the menu. Maison Publique serves up Dammann’s take on Canadian cuisine, including his signature dish: a single, giant Beach Angel oyster from Quadra Island, B.C. ($10), which EnRoute magazine describes as a “showstopper.” The oyster is steamed open, sliced into three or four pieces and baked with a sauce of chopped mushrooms, mayonnaise and marmite.
Other dishes include parfait de foie gras ($15), raw B.C. sockeye salmon with heirloom cherry tomatoes and basil ($26) as well as Welsh rarebit with P.E.I. cheddar ($9). “Canada is a melting pot of different cultures, so we’re not pigeon-holed into doing just one cuisine,” says Dammann. “We can draw from a lot of different cultures to make Canadian food.”
Maison Publique serves only Canadian wine and beer and about 95 per cent of the ingredients in the kitchen are Canadian (salt, olive oil and lemons are among the exceptions). During the high season, most of the food is sourced from Quebec. “We do our own butchery, we have farmers who grow vegetables just for us, and we have farmers raising pigs and lamb just for us,” says Dammann. “We don’t deal with any middlemen — we go right to the source.”
Dammann’s culinary philosophy stems from working with his mentor, Peter Zambri, at Zambri’s in Victoria, B.C., prior to moving to the U.K. “He taught me to let the ingredients speak for themselves and take 10 steps back before you [take one step] forward,” he recalls. “For example, understand that maybe you shouldn’t do too much to a really good Swiss chard.”
Maison Publique opens for dinner at 6 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday and serves brunch on Saturday and Sunday. No menus are handed out — the dishes are all listed on a chalkboard with two tasting menus ($55 and $70). And, if customers aren’t sharing their food, they’re not doing it right.
Dammann’s vision was to shorten customer wait times by serving dishes meant for sharing in the order they’re ready. “Just like in Chinatown, the food comes to the table when it’s ready,” adds Dammann. “At first it was a tough sell…. but now [that people are used to the service style], it’s amazing, because we sell mostly the sharing meals.” He adds: “When people share food, their body language changes. They open up, they start making eye contact, and the volume goes up a little more. It’s more fun.”
Like any restaurateur, Dammann’s biggest challenge is dealing with all the moving parts. “You have ovens, dishwashers, hot-water tanks, freezers and walk-in fridges, all of which are expensive, all of which break,” he says. “And when your compressor goes on your fridge, it never goes at 10:30 in the morning on a Wednesday… It’s tough. There’s a lot to do. And if you want to be consistent and offer the same thing to everybody, you have to be on top of everything.”
But that’s not going to stop Dammann from growing the operation. “I’d like to build a cookie cutter of this somewhere else,” he says. “Maybe do another one or two, maybe open a fish-and-chip shack. But I told myself I wasn’t going to think about it too much until I made it to the two-year point.” Dammann also has a cookbook coming out in the spring, which is about his way of looking at Canadian food. No further details could be revealed at press time.
There’s no question there’s a big audience for Dammann’s Canadian gastropub experience. EnRoute named Maison Publique one of Canada’s best new restaurants in 2013 and Canadian Living recently named Dammann one of “10 Canadian chefs you need to know about.” Dammann’s Twitter feed (@maisonpublique) is full of praise from customers, who gush, “I almost cried the first time I ate at [Maison Publique], the food was THAT tasty!” And “My recent trip to Montreal saw me check out @maisonpublique — easily one of the best meals of my life.”
Despite the praise, Dammann is hesitant to call his concept innovative. “I didn’t reinvent anything. I wanted to do good food out of a pub and build the kind of place I like to eat at,” he says. “But there’s a reason pubs have been around for hundreds of years, and there’s a reason they’re called a public house. They’re welcoming places.”
