Poutine becoming a Canadian symbol was decades in the making

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Justin Giovannetti Lamothe is the author of Poutine: A Deep-Fried Road Trip of Discovery.

Something unexpected happened to poutine during the 2010 Winter Olympics. The dish with the funny-sounding name appeared on television screens around the world, showcased by American breakfast programs that gave the strange culinary concoction a moment in the spotlight. Poutine, once obscure trivia known mostly as a pre-emptive hangover cure for drunk college kids, became a globally recognized symbol of Canada over a few short weeks.

A similar transformation happened closer to home. Sales skyrocketed and the country’s poutine vendors were caught flat-footed by a sudden and insatiable appetite for the messy mix. A national poutine boom started in 2010 that would stretch over the next decade.

Like nearly every overnight success, poutine’s story was years in the making. The dish emerged in central Quebec in the early 1960s, in a largely agricultural and hardscrabble region south of the St. Lawrence River. The area had two things in abundance: cheese curds and motorists plying the highways between Quebec City and Montreal. It didn’t take long for a trucker to combine inexpensive fries and gravy, with ubiquitous local curds, into an easy-to-carry meal to get back on the road.

Poutine likely would have stayed a quirky favourite at local casse-croûtes in central Quebec if it wasn’t for a stubborn chef in his early 20s named Ashton Leblond. In 1969, Mr. Leblond took poutine out of its rural cradle and set up a restaurant called Chez Ashton in Quebec City. He was sure that he had found a winner. Instead, poutine’s introduction was a complete flop. He ended up handing out free samples for years to win over diners suspicious of squeaky cheese in their food.

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Poutine’s arrival in Montreal a decade later was somehow even more inauspicious. Shunned by the city’s English-speaking tastemakers, the dish found an audience with taxi drivers and the 3 a.m. crowd. Poutine became a punchline for French-Canadian backwardness in editorial cartoons in the city’s English newspaper. An air of parochialism would remain attached to poutine in some quarters of the province for decades to come.

Despite roaring headwinds, poutine slowly pushed on. Every decade or so, someone would pop up to take the dish in a new direction, either geographic or culinary. Some of those pioneers were entrepreneurs, while others were young chefs or culinary mavericks. All of them shared a common love of poutine as food; none had dreams of creating a new Canadian symbol.

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Poutine’s road to the Olympics made a significant advance in 1990. Having largely conquered Quebec, poutine’s first major foray outside of la belle province was in about as unlikely a place as can be imagined: Newmarket, Ont.

New York Fries, a staple of many mall food courts, began experimenting with poutine in the Ottawa Valley. One of the chain’s franchisees from Newmarket tried poutine, loved it, and petitioned to bring it to the Toronto suburb. As Craig Burt, the chief operating officer of New York Fries, told me, Newmarket ended up being English Canada’s test bed for poutine. The introduction was a success. “It started to just take on a life of its own, consumers really thought it was cool,” he said.

From the moment poutine started getting dished out at an unremarkable mall in Newmarket, it stopped being a uniquely Québécois thing. An English-Canadian chain with a minimal presence in Quebec had taken on poutine and, in the decades since, has made it the central item on its menu.

Ontarians did make a few changes to poutine that have stuck with the dish ever since – the main one being to the cheese curds. As Mr. Burt, one of Canada’s biggest poutine sellers, explained, English Canadians wanted their curds to melt. That required some big changes to a traditional poutine.

Quebec poutines are topped by large, moist, squeaky cheese curds freshly made that day; a limp curd is usually grounds for a refund. However, in English Canada, it’s the goal. To serve local tastes, curds in Ontario are often frozen to remove any moisture and then cut into small pieces so that hot gravy makes them droopy and stringy. The rest of Canada also wants crispy fries and beefy gravy – both of which are unusual in Quebec, where poutine usually comes with fat, brown fries and a chicken-based gravy. The decision to go with a squeakless curd is a choice that frankly bewilders many Quebeckers and poutine purists to this day. It’s the two solitudes of poutine.

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Just over a year before the Vancouver Winter Olympics opening ceremony at BC Place, the first Smoke’s Poutinerie opened in downtown Toronto. The chain is visually loud, somewhat brash and has no roots in Quebec at all. With red flannel everywhere, the whole thing is deeply Canadian with no courtesy fleur-de-lis in evidence.

Before his death in 2023, the chain’s founder, Ryan Smolkin, told me that while he loved Quebec’s traditional poutines, his goal was to take the province’s idea and go somewhere new with it. First, the menu revolved around piling as many different ingredients as possible on top of a poutine. Butter chicken, cheesesteak, bacon? You got it.

His second goal was even more far-reaching. “Let’s change the perception of Canada itself. It’s gotta be bigger, much bigger. We’ve got to be disruptors,” he said. “Then the vision is global domination by providing the world with a unique Canadian food experience.”

The pieces were in place for the 2010 poutine boom. New chains like Smoke’s were ready to spread across Canada and the fast-food giants jumped on the craze, while New York Fries capitalized on two decades of poutine prep. The year before the Olympics, Mr. Burt told me, 30 per cent of that company’s sales were poutine, but by the end of 2010 that number was up to 70 per cent. Demand never quite let up. “2010 was the shift in the poutine business,” he said.

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In the years that followed, poutine store openings became a near-weekly occurrence across much of Canada. Smoke’s, for instance, now boasts about 50 locations. A National Poutine Day was created, the word poutine was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and poutine festivals were organized across the country. By the mid-2010s, Canada may have hit peak poutine. A survey found poutine elbowing aside maple syrup as the country’s most iconic dish.

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But one part of Canada remained unaffected by poutine’s decade of explosive growth: Quebec. The new national chains tried to open locations in the province and largely failed. Quebeckers stuck by their own local casse-croûtes and fast-food chains. The poutine boom outside the province failed to register for several years, until a university master’s student studying in the United States wrote an article for an obscure academic journal.

Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet’s warning about the growing Canadianization of poutine hit the province’s media like a thunderclap. Quebeckers, regardless of linguistic heritage, became defensive of their dish. If it came to symbolize Quebec on a plate, poutine would stand for hearty fare, local ingredients and rich heritage. But now, looking across Canada, Quebeckers saw hundreds of restaurants proclaiming poutine as Canada’s national food. The appearance of little maple leafs across Canada, and on menus around the world, led to complaints of cultural appropriation. While the furor has died down, the underlying grievance hasn’t.

The great Canadian poutine boom ended, like so many other things, with COVID-19. National chains that had been working for years on grand plans to expand poutine into the U.S. and Asia pulled back as the global economy seized up. Restaurants remained closed for months or years and many franchisees folded. With the pandemic giving way to inflation worries and high food prices, the poutine scene hasn’t returned to its pre-2020 vigour across much of Canada. There is one exception, and once again, that’s Quebec.

Ashton Leblond told me that he’d received significant offers in the 2010s for his Chez Ashton chain, but he’d turned down a series of large corporations based in Toronto. He said he wanted to find someone more like himself when he started out. He found them in 2022, when he sold his little empire to two young restaurant owners who had started a snack bar in a village outside Quebec City. Émily Adam and Jean-Christophe Lirette rebranded the chain to Ashton, shook up the decor and started expanding. A year later, the two struck again when they purchased La Banquise, the best-known poutine restaurant in Montreal.

In the poutine world, these were blockbuster acquisitions. To pull together the necessary capital, they tapped Desjardins and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ. Quebec had belatedly entered the era of big poutine. After six decades of largely leaving the Quebec poutine market to the casse-croûte down the street, big finance is getting involved in what is an increasingly profitable business. Local chains such as Fromagerie Victoria are now expanding fast and have floated plans to expand to Europe. There’s a growing sense that this national dish needs to be shared with the world. It’s all starting to feel very familiar.

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