Fairmont Magazine, Fall 2014

—
Vol. 9
N o. 2 —
Emerging Nanjing
The jet-setter’s gift guide
Fitness for the road
Fairmont
Magazine
—
turning
moments into
memories
nouveau
Monde
QUEBEC CITY, AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE
Beyond the 17th-century facades of Quebec
City, Canada, a modern metropolis is
emerging with all the architecture, culture,
nightlife and dining to match – and while
the tone is strikingly contemporary, it nods
proudly to the past.
By Valerie Howes — Photos by Lorne Bridgman
Styling by Cary Tauben
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PHOTO: PRODUCER: JULIEN BEAUPRÉ STE-MARIE; HAIR & MAKEUP: ANDREW LY; PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSISTANT: PIERRE-LUC BOUCHARD;
MODEL: SARAH CHINERMAN; RIGHT: MICHAEL KORS HOODED SWEATER, T-SHIRT, TROUSERS AND FOOTWEAR; BY MALENE BIRGER HANDBAG
MONDE
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T
I
settle into a bronze bar stool at the black marble bar in Bistro Le Sam,
under a light fixture of gold and copper strands, as delicate as fine-chain
necklaces. Their colors complement the plush blue velvet and pale gold
of the booth seating around me. My bartenders are Joannie, who does a
wee shoulder dance as she mixes drinks, and Daniel, who sports a Tintin
haircut and thin beard. They explain that the decor was inspired by the
vintage passenger cars run by Canadian Pacific Railway – the company that
built the Château and many of Canada’s historic hotels to accommodate
19th-century rail travelers. The name Le Sam pays homage to the city’s
founder, Samuel de Champlain, but in cheeky diminutive to point out its
smart-casual ranking among the hotel’s three new restaurants.
Built on Cape Diamond, a quartz-encrusted cliff overlooking the
MICHEL CÔTÉ
Director of the Museums
of Civilization
I’ve lived all over Europe directing many
museums, and can confirm that the Château is
an international icon – everyone knows about
it. When friends visit from here or abroad, I
always take them for a drink at the hotel bar
for the spectacular views of the St. Lawrence
River. It’s the highlight of their day.
LEFT: FILIPPA K TURTLENECK AND TROUSERS; BETTY RAY NECKLACE; GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI FOOTWEAR (AVAILABLE AT BROWNS)
­ e first time I stayed in Quebec City, at Fairmont Le
h
Château Frontenac, was 16 years ago, with my son –
then a toddler. We walked the cobbled streets of the
Old Town. I practiced my French at European-style
bistros by ordering lacey crepes. And we visited the
Plains of Abraham (once a battlefield, now a public
park), until he’d announce – like a petit prince in
snow pants – “I want to go back to my castle.”
The desire to inhabit a 121-year-old hotel
orbited by 17th-century fortifications is a regal dream even for those more
than three feet tall. Quebec City is one of Canada’s oldest settlements, and
the Château, with its copper roof and fairytale turrets, the jewel in the
city’s crown.
French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City, in 1608,
as a fur trading post and the first permanent colony of New France – a
territory stretching west from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, and
south from subarctic Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi.
The French and British clashed repeatedly for control of Quebec City;
the capital of New France was a key trading port on the St. Lawrence River
– the most important commercial waterway in Canada to this day. To
protect their strategic position, 18th-century French leaders built more
than three miles (five kilometers) of fortifications around the Old Town,
which today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet the British still laid
siege in 1759, claiming victory in a 15-minute battle on the Plains of
Abraham, which brought French rule across all North America abruptly
to an end.
Still, the language and culture prevailed. In the late 18th century, to
calm tensions between French Canadians and the influx of Loyalist subjects
fleeing the American Revolution, the British created Upper and Lower
Canada, with Quebec City as Lower Canada’s capital. This laid the foundations both for the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec
and, ultimately, for Canada as an independent country.
So while history may be palpable here in every cobbled step, locals
refuse to treat their hometown like a city frozen in time. On returning to
stay at the newly renovated Château this year, I discover a dynamic and
youthful Quebec City, crying out to be explored.
PREVIOUS PAGES, LEFT TO RIGHT: WATERSPOUT, AN ALUMINUM SCULPTURE BY JEAN-PIERRE MORIN GRACES THE ENTRANCE OF THE MUSÉE NATIONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DU QUÉBEC;
RELAXING IN THE HOTEL'S REFRESHED LOBBY; THIS PAGE: ENJOYING A BLOODY CAESAR AT BISTRO LE SAM'S BAR; RIGHT: THE CHÂTEAU'S WHITE COSMOPOLITAN COCKTAIL IS SERVED WITH
A SPHERICAL ICE "CUBE" CONTAINING A PINK ORCHID; THE MODERN FOYER OF THE MUSEUMS OF CIVILIZATION; MICHEL CÔTÉ SITS AT CHAMPLAIN RESTAURANT'S KING'S TABLE, A LONG TABLE
THAT CAN BE RESERVED FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS AND AT WHICH DINERS ARE TREATED TO A "CHEF'S CHOICE" TASTING MENU
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JACQUES PLANTE
city, where for 200 years the territorial governor's residence once stood,
the Château has been the backdrop to daily life since 1893 and has hosted
such dignitaries as Grace of Monaco, Winston Churchill and Charles
de Gaulle. It was even the silent star of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 thriller,
I Confess. All of these elements of the Château’s storied past inform its
latest incarnation.
I ask Joannie for a cocktail suggestion from the new menu and she
returns with a Martinez. Warm with cinnamon and allspice bitters, it’s
served in a slightly misshapen silver tankard. “This thing has been at the
Château for a very long time,” she says.
For my next drink, Daniel pumps bourbon-barrel smoke into his
cocktail, then covers it with a glass cloche. “This is our spin on the classic
Bijou, which uses gin to represent diamonds, sweet vermouth for rubies
and Chartreuse for emeralds,” he says. “But ours is called the Algonquin
because the smoke suggests the campfires of Quebec’s first inhabitants.”
When Daniel lifts the cloche, dramatic swirling ensues. Then each time
I raise my stemless glass from its base, it sends out a tiny smoke signal. A
couple approaches just to stare. Who doesn’t like barside theatrics?
Architect, author, teacher and designer of
Palais Montcalm concert hall
My grandmother was born in the lower town in 1902 – a girl "from down the hill" as
they used to be called. To her, the Château, in the upper town, had an aura of glamour
about it, reserved for the city’s elite. To have so much as a coffee at the Château was
to enter a world of wonder and prestige. She would dress in her Sunday best just to
go, and did so right up until the end of her life.
LEFT: ROKSANDA ILINCIC SKIRT AND TOP (AVAILABLE AT SSENSE.COM); MIMOSA FOOTWEAR (AVAILABLE AT BROWNS); SWAROVSKI RING
J
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Fairmont Magazine
THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: THE CHEESE ROOM AT
THE ENTRANCE TO 1608 WINE & CHEESE BAR; ARCHITECT JACQUES
PLANTE; THE CIRCULAR BAR AT 1608; RIGHT: LA MAISON DE LA
MUSIQUE'S CASAVANT PIPE ORGAN AT THE PALAIS MONTCALM
WAS DESIGNED TO MATCH JACQUES PLANTE'S CONCERT HALL;
MUSEUM DIRECTOR LINE OUELLET TAKES A BREAK ON THE VELVET
BANQUETTES OF BISTRO LE SAM
LINE OUELLET
Director of the Musée
National des Beaux-Arts
du Québec (MNBAQ)
The Château is part of the urban landscape
and the experience of visiting Old Quebec. I’ve
visited in every phase of my life. As a child, a
trip to the terrasse with my parents always
ended with us entering the majestic hall where I
felt as though I’d been transported to a château
in Loire, France (where the architect took his
inspiration). It was an experience I repeated
years later with my own children. What the
Château represented to our lives in the 20th
century, I hope the new pavilion of the MNBAQ
will come to symbolize in the 21st.
une marked the completion of Fairmont Le Château Frontenac’s
facelift, a renovation that touched on everything from the guest rooms
to the spa. In the lobby, the original oak paneling and gleaming brass
mailbox and elevator doors that I remember remain. But behind the reception desks I now find backlit blue-rippled Italian onyx and ultramarine
ceiling panels, recalling the St. Lawrence River – the city’s lifeblood.
This motif continues in the more formal Champlain Restaurant, where
a twisting swath of gauze streams across the ceiling. Breakfast is just
wrapping up as I sit down for coffee with the hotel’s executive chef Baptiste
Peupion and Champlain Restaurant chef Stéphane Modat.
“We hear a lot about Nordic countries right now. Why not Quebec?”
says Peupion, an Alain Ducasse protégé. He and his second-in-command
are in whites, sans toques, on a break before their lunchtime shift. One
picks up where the other leaves off, like an old married couple, as they
define their vision for a new Quebecois cuisine.
“We use what Quebec has now instead of looking backward to what
they had in a time before trading,” says Modat. “For example, coconut may
not be a terroir product, but everyone’s grandmother here used it in their
macaroons. It belongs to our culture.”
“And maple syrup is great, but there’s so much more,” adds Peupion.
“A local company, La Face Cachée de la Pomme, is making us ice cider from
the juice of apples frozen on the branch in winter,” continues Modat. “It’s
a great example of what people call a terroir product, but if you look back
30 years, it didn’t even exist.”
As well as working with traditional imports and customized artisanal
goods, the young chefs also favor regional delicacies – sweet little strawberries from across the bridge in Île d’Orléans… fresh lobster caught from the
Magdalen Islands… artisanal charcuterie from the farms of the Gaspé
Peninsula on Quebec’s eastern tip.
In the glassed-in cheese room of the hotel’s new 1608 Wine & Cheese
Bar, one of the signature products is cheese made from the milk of the
Canadienne. The stocky cow was the only dairy breed to have been developed in North America. It almost disappeared in the 20th century.
But its milk is luxuriously rich, and the animal thrives in Quebec’s frigid
winters, so a few farming families in the province have been working to
save the Canadienne and elevate its reputation to prized terroir breed.
“If we don’t lead the way by offering products like this,” says Peupion,
draining his coffee, “who will?”
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A
pproaching the 19th-century Saint-Esprit church in La CitéLimoilou – amid a modern throng of cafés, bikes and strollers – I
know I’m in the right place when I catch a girl singing loudly on the
front steps and practicing a Charlie-Chaplinesque choreography. She’s the
class clown (literally) of École de Cirque de Québec circus school. I push
open a heavy wrought copper door beneath an electric-lime big-top-like
canopy, step inside and take a pew.
Downstairs, beneath a sapphire vaulted ceiling, I find girls pedaling
unicycles where choirboys once clasped hymnbooks. “Mind if I watch?”
I ask. Pleased to have an audience, they take things up a notch, adding
backward moves and 360-degree turns.
From its founding, Quebec City was predominantly Catholic and
home to several religious orders. In the 1950s, religion and politics went
hand in hand, with priests not only preaching religion but also trying to
sway churchgoers in the vote. Prime Minister Duplessis’s era of religious
oppression and regressive politics came to be known as the Great Darkness.
By the 1960s, a new generation was rebelling against the old regime,
investing their energy in progressive social change and the arts. Church
attendance plummeted.
Today, Quebec City has 130 churches, 20 convent chapels, two cathedrals and two basilicas, all considered architectural and cultural
treasures. Faced with the demise of these assets, the Archdiocese has
been working with the Ministry of Culture and Communications to
preserve properties like Saint-Esprit, giving them new uses – but ones
that keep them at the heart of community life.
Upstairs, I watch a teenage boy in tights slither through a hanging
hoop, stained-glass windows in the background. His female mentor calls
out advice when the boy’s body gets stuck in a pretzel form. I ask another
girl why she comes here as she clambers onto a trapeze. She calls back,
kicking her legs to swing, “Cirque du Soleil!”
M
THE CHAMPLAIN RESTAURANT WITH ITS SIGNATURE HERRINGBONE FLOOR, WINE CELLARS (ACCESSIBLE BY LADDERS)
AND CEILING INSTALLATION REPRESENTING THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER; RIGHT: PAINTER PAUL BÉLIVEAU IN HIS
ST-ROCH STUDIO WITH HIS PIECE "WARHOL"; THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE OF THE SÉMINAIRE DE QUÉBEC, A FORMER
SEMINARY TURNED HOME TO THE ARCHITECTURE DEPARTMENT OF LAVAL UNIVERSITY
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Fairmont Magazine
y calves are getting a killer workout as I explore this city of
uphill climbs on a BMW Cruise Bike that I borrowed from the
Château. I pedal past the fortifications toward the Plains of
Abraham, heading over to the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec,
a onetime prison, now home to the province’s collection of fine art.
Builders are constructing a pavilion for large-scale exhibits in an architectural collaboration between Dutch luminary Rem Koolhaas’s firm and
Montreal’s leaders in sustainable design, Provencher Roy. Architectural
renderings reveal a glass pavilion that will be seamlessly integrated into
the park and bathed in natural light – the Quebec City equivalent of the
pyramid at the Louvre.
This synthesis of modern design with the strongholds of Quebec
City’s past has created some creative architectural workarounds, such
as Les Musées de la Civilisation’s stone-and-glass frame that climbs the
sloping bank of the St. Lawrence, and the Palais Montcalm, in which
an ultra-modern acoustic hall was fused to the building’s existing Art
Deco facade.
To see more, I take the cycle path past the Plains’ now-silent cannons
and pick up speed as I descend the winding streets down to the Old Port
to reach the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain – a 1.5-mile (2.5-kilometer)
public path that follows the St. Lawrence River. Inaugurated for the city’s
400th anniversary in 2008, the very visual riverside trail is punctuated
by modernist rest stations and large-scale public artworks. Its highlight
is a modern lookout tower, the kind of minimalist structure on which
beautiful people linger in the pages of Dwell (but here set in a locale
PAUL BÉLIVEAU
Painter
My family has a long history with the Château: My grandmother used to work
there as a chambermaid and, later, my brother as a cook. In the '70s, I got my
first job in the kitchen as a dishwasher before being promoted to prepping
salads and performing other non-essential culinary tasks. I remember a big
banquet in the ballroom during the holidays. All the servers conspired to pour
the ends of the Champagne bottles into a silver teapot, which they gave me
and I polished off in hiding. Let's just say I went home a little tipsy that night.
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Concierge
Quebec city,
Canada
Stay
FAIRMONT LE CHÂTEAU
FRONTENAC just underwent a $75-million
transformation that included a redesigned
grand lobby and guest rooms, expanded
Fairmont Gold floors, additional banquet
space and newly launched urban spa and
restaurant concepts. The revitalization
lends a contemporary hotel feel, while
honoring the 121-year-old landmark by
restoring historic details throughout.
fairmont.com/frontenac-quebec
RENÉE HUDON
Dine At BISTRO LE SAM, Fairmont Le
In the summer of 1952, Alfred Hitchcock came to Quebec City to film I Confess with Anne Baxter and Montgomery Clift,
whose most dramatic scene took place in the hotel ballroom. For authenticity, he left several roles open for Quebecers to
fill, requesting only that the candidates be bilingual and without previous dramatic training. I’ll never forget showing up
to the audition in one of the hotel suites at 10 years old, and shortly afterwards signing a contract with Warner Brothers to
appear in a film directed by the master of suspense (and as one of the two little girls who identify the murderer, no less). I
owe a lot to Hitchcock. It’s because of this experience that I started a career in radio and television. That’s where it all began.
TOP: HITCHCOCK GIVES DIRECTION TO RENÉE HUDON (LEFT, AT 10) AND CARMEN GINGRAS IN 1952 ON THE FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING THE MOVIE
I CONFESS (THE DIRECTOR INSISTED RENÉE WEAR GLASSES TO "EMPHASIZE HER EYES"); HUDON TODAY; BELOW: THE LOOKOUT TOWER ON THE
PROMENADE SAMUEL-DE CHAMPLAIN
38
where fur traders once launched their
canoes).
On my way back, I stop to photograph Canadian
Prairies sculptor Joe Fafard’s powder-coated,
cut-steel-plate abstract sculptures of horses.
The eight vividly colorful and heroic-sized galloping ponies were a gift from the City of
Calgary, Canada, whose farming and lumbering
industries were built on the labor of horses sent
west from Quebec – horses whose ancestors
crossed the ocean from the French stables of
King Louis XIV.
Their poses are said to represent past, present and future. The vitality of their arched
necks, flying manes and pounding hooves
certainly speaks to the new Quebec City I’ve
discovered on this trip. I sit down for a while
to take it all in.
My son, now getting ready for college, would
have loved the energy in this city. I send him a
snapshot of Fafard’s horses and a wish-youwere-here text. It’s getting late. I’ve been cycling
hard. I want to go back to my castle. ­­­­
­
Fairmont Magazine
Château Frontenac’s “evolving restaurant,”
guests can come for a light lunch, afternoon
tea, happy hour, live entertainment or classic
cocktails. In the hotel's 1608 WINE & CHEESE
BAR, which has the first dedicated cheese
room in the province, diners can also sample
from a rotation of more than 30 artisanal local
cheeses and an extensive wine list. And at
CHAMPLAIN RESTAURANT, the reinvented
Quebec cuisine is built around regional
ingredients and informed by heritage dishes.
cuisinechateau.com
On rue Saint-Jean, CHEZ BOULAY cooks
up seasonal daily menus based on the
Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen, followed by Scandinavian trailblazers Noma
and Fäviken. Unique foraged and hyperlocal ingredients make it into their dishes.
chezboulay.com
Do Fairmont President’s Club mem-
bers can borrow a BMW Cruise Bike at the
reception and cycle from the Château to
the PROMENADE SAMUEL-DE CHAMPLAIN
– a 1.5-mile (2.5-km) bicycle path along the
St. Lawrence River that integrates nature
and public art. quebecregion.com/en
PHOTO: MARC CRAMER/DAOUST LESTAGE INC. ARCHITECTURE DESIGN URBAIN (PROMENADE SAMUEL-DE CHAMPLAIN)
Media personality,
public speaking consultant
(and child star)