Chicago versions of Canada’s poutine

by Phil Vettel, Tribune critic

Canada has given us so many things — Smarties, Trivial Pursuit, Jack Bauer — but one of its best-known culinary innovations remains largely unknown in Chicago. That would be poutine, a debatable delicacy that first appeared in Quebec in the 1950s. The dish consists of french fries, topped with cheese curds (mild white-cheddar cheese nuggets so fresh they squeak when you bite) and lovingly smothered with a chicken-based gravy. It’s a rich-tasting, artery-clogging slopfest of a dish, popular with hockey fans and over-imbibers (two categories that, every so often, overlap).

Let us not snicker too much. Compared with the gloppy abominations known as cheese fries and stadium-style nachos, topped with that distinctive Day-Glo orange cheese (molecular gastronomy gone horribly wrong), poutine should be considered haute cuisine.

But the dish was relatively unknown in Chicago until a few years ago, when The Gage, a gastropub on Michigan Avenue, added it to the menu — presented, says executive chef Dirk Flanigan, as a taste of home to Catherine Gilmore-Lawless, the Canadian-born half of The Gage’s husband-wife ownership team. Flanigan, an accomplished chef, wasn’t content to put out straight poutine. Instead, he fashioned a version that included not mere gravy, but an elk ragout with nibbles of elk meat. Gourmet poutine, if you will.

Now there are at least a half-dozen poutine incarnations in the Chicago area, and though the essential components — fries, cheese, gravy — remain in place, Chicago’s poutines are tricked out with specialty meats, imported cheeses and/or fine herbs. Definitely a notch above bar food.

With a grateful bow to the soon-to-be-concluded Olympic Games in Vancouver, we look at poutine, Chicago-style…

The Bad Apple
(Tribune photo by Phil Vettel)
4300 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-360-8406

What distinguished the poutine at this 6-month-old North Center pub? “Just a lot of love,” jokes Craig Fass, one of three owners. “I traveled to Montreal, fell in love with the city and ate a lot of poutine. When we opened this restaurant, I really missed it, and thought, ‘Why not?’” And so the menu serves poutine ($7), with the requisite fries and squeaky-fresh Wisconsin curds, and a chicken-based gravy seasoned with sage, tarragon and Dijon mustard. This is arguably the best poutine in town.