The Barbecue Chicken Dinner? Let's Say “Rotisserie”

I grew up in Montreal in an age where restaurants, including barbecued chicken joints, were prolific – a state which existed in Montreal since, clearly, long before I was born. Small Mom + Pop restaurants were real businesses which fed families ... a husband and wife cooking out of their tiny storefront kitchen, serving breakfast 'til dinner - profiting, mostly, from lunch diners coming in from 11:30 'til 1:00. They would spend much of the day running coffees and sandwiches and such over to local businesses. I won't say they got rich but they fed their families. They worked hard and profited by these small restaurants. One neighbourhood enjoyed a beanery – a black and white tiled restaurant where you could walk in and get a plate of beans and a roll or slice of bread or something for almost no money. It filled a need and, through this, they fed their own families and many of these restauranteurs fed other families as well.

The post-war years saw a lot of Italian restaurants opening up. The Italian people came to Canada and they worked hard! In Montreal they cleared snow in winter, and mowed lawns and trimmed hedges in summer. They opened businesses. They introduced us to their wonderful foods! They also opened pizzerias – in abundance! (But that's a passion for another day!) Through their energies, they fed their own families.

Many Jews settled in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg and other population centres. They brought us Romanian delicacies we now refer to as “Montreal bagels” and “Montreal smoked meat” and “Montreal steak spice”. They brought us German style pastries which, by the way, you can still get fresh in coffee shops and bakeries in Germany! (And this, too, is a passion for another day.)

Lunch counters opened in industrial buildings across the city. They opened early enough for people to grab a coffee and some toast or a quick breakfast on their way in to work. They would be closed by the time offices and factories started closing. Their clients were going home - not hanging out in an industrial building diner or lunch counter. These restaurants would even close for two weeks during the construction holiday.

The real point of this piece, however, is the barbecued chicken restaurant.

A meal at one of these joints would typically be ordered as a quarter breast or quarter leg. Of course you could order a half or whole chicken. Aaand there was the half-special ... the back half. Chicken sandwiches were also on the menu. (Makes sense, right?) What ever you ordered, it always came with a serving of dipping sauce and some form of roll or bun (well, sandwich excepted – it was doused in sauce). It might have been anything from a hamburger bun to a french roll ... but some form of bun always came with the chicken. And then, some of those which used hamburger buns (which did become more popular) eventually cut back to half a bun. They soon started charging for that extra half bun if you wanted it. They were clearly having survival problems – something I didn't, then, understand. Fries (which I always ordered) were piled, generously, on the plate with the chicken. They were not, usually, thick-cut. Rather, they would be shoestring (or something between shoestring and batonnet cut).

It was a great date-night meal if your date was fun and unassuming and really hungry. It was a great place to go, with or without friends, for a satisfying meal. It was also a perfect family environment. In my favourite restaurant hung a sign I remember to this day, “When chicken such as this is served a person never lingers. He sets aside his knife and fork and eats it with is fingers.”

These were family restaurants. They were often loud. Service was brisk. Waitresses of the day (and they were always waitresses, not waiters and they were waitresses, not servers) were polite and efficient.

By the time of Laurier Barbecue's rebirth, I was already living away from Montreal so I never got to try Ramsay's vision. I saw the promo photo from the Montreal Gazette – someone sent me a hard copy. Given the opportunity I would justly tell him, “I told you so.” There is a certain look to a plate of this style of chicken dinner. This looks a little too neat...too proper. This is not a Montreal style rotisserie chicken dinner. It may be a very nice chicken dinner plate ... but it's not a Montreal style rotisserie chicken dinner ;-)

I left Montreal during the earlier stages of change to Montreal's burgeoning restaurant scene - just prior to what I see as the final decline of these fast-to-the-table chicken houses including the, by then, long defunct “Chick N Coop”. Of course, the gastronomic Montreal of my (relative) youth - largely affordable and fun, though not exclusively so - is almost all gone by now with chicken rotisseries being among the victims. (Then again, no genre of restaurant was truly safe.) Their end was, in part, signaled by the breakup of one of Montreal's most significant (small) chicken chains. They had opened to serve their Montreal crowd in Florida. Expanding to Ontario, however, involved a split in the company where the newly born (with a slightly different name) chain opened in Ontario. The real fight came, I would guess, when the Ontario chain opened a restaurant with the new brand on the island of Montreal.

Interestingly, it wasn't very good in Montreal. In Toronto the food was so well prepared – true to the original flavour from Montreal. Eventually, only one of the original restaurants were left open - as it is today. The last time I visited that establishment, well, it was terrible. Of course, this new Ontario chain is now owned by a major player in the retail and commercial food service industry. Since leaving Montreal, the last vestiges of this great barbecue chicken dinner seemed to have all but disappeared for me. The last surviving chain, iconoclastically Quebecois but owned by that same major food player, is simply not my taste.

While I find this all so academically fascinating, this barbecued chicken is, actually, “rotisserie” chicken. Oh... one could argue that it is technically a barbecue style of cooking but, well, it is a combination of that radiant heat (BBQ) and the rotisserie. Without the rotisserie ... if you used a barbecue and dropped your chicken on the grill you would not end up with the same finished product. It is truly, in my view, the exposure to heat given by the rotation of the rotisserie skewers, the meat basting in its own juices, and the fact that the skin doesn't actually come into direct contact with any searing hot surfaces. I think it's all this which gives it its unique texture.

Now, just for the record, I think chicken done on a barbecue can be just wonderful. I would never turn down a good piece of barbecued chicken, but a good piece of rotisserie chicken is flippin' awesome!

With all this said, and the fact that we don't live in Montreal and rarely visit, we still get to enjoy this dinner when we want it. Now we prepare the meal at home. Grocery stores, over the past several years (probably a gradual growth since the past 15 or 20 or so years) have begun carrying a lot more prepared foods. You can now get a finished, hot pizza at a grocery store. You can buy a tray of sushi or you can pick up a whole barbecue chicken, and fries and slaw – all at your grocer. You don't have to cook. You can buy a finished garden salad and a single serving of salad dressing at a salad bar in some grocery stores. The grocer is now more than a mere grocer. It now provides a value added service. You can either buy the ingredients separately or you can buy them fully assembled and hot.

We still choose to prepare as much as we are able at home. We get a rotisserie chicken from a grocery store and a packet of dry dipping sauce mix – add water, heat it up and you have sauce. What we do with everything is up to us. We make a coleslaw – usually a pomegranate slaw these days. We usually make some pita – almost always 30 % whole wheat. It's relatively quick and easy (about two hours including rising time – now that I'm practiced at it). While the dough rises (one hour), fries are cut (this time, a “plank” cut) – usually from russets. The sauce is mixed and the slaw is made. The chicken portions go into the oven to heat. All the prep is done during that rising time. If I'm doing well, all that's left is the second fry on the potatoes, cooking the pita, and plating. The six pita take about 20 minutes to cook. All-in-all, it takes about two hours to prepare this entire meal.

Recipes for our homemade elements are at www.foodcult.com/recipes.php

In the end, what we get is a really satisfying meal! ...And this is how a traditional, rotisserie chicken meal should look!

(Okay – they use white plates and rolls rather than pita ... but you get the idea!)