I Tried to Eat Five Weird Poutines in a Single Day During Poutine Week

Poutine Week: A gift and a curse, if you do it like we did.

Seal sausage, lobster, butter chicken, and doughnuts aren’t the usual fare piled onto fries mingled with curd cheese. But then again, that’s likely why Poutine Week has become such a hit in Eastern Canada. For one week, restaurants have carte blanche to shove some of the craziest shit imaginable between a base of fries and a blanket of gravy. What started in Montreal two years ago as a one-week festival filled with fresh takes on the iconic Canadian dish, has since ballooned to four major cities with prospects to spread even further. For some reason, I thought it’d be a good idea to poutine-hop, going from one greasy spoon to another, to binge on five different dishes of poutine in a single day. Either my love for the dish defies all logic, or I want to test the efficacy of my organs under extreme durress. To kick off my day, I sat down with the founders of Poutine Week, Na’eem Adam and Thierry Rassam, over a Butter Chicken Poutine aptly served at Poutine Centrale. The two men are young, bright and obviously resourceful as they’ve managed to quadruple the number of cities hosting their festival (Quebec City, Ottawa and Toronto) in just two years. They also seem to have a sincere interest in helping out restaurants during one of the worst times for dining out. If their numbers are correct, Poutine Week brings in $3.7 million to restaurants in just one week of winter munchies. They’ve avoided corporate sponsorships so far and the founders seem much more intent on building a poutine-lovers community than raking in sponsorship-dollars. I wish them luck on that goal, but this story isn’t so much about Poutine Week, as it is about outlandish poutines. So, let's get to it!

Na'eem and Thierry, the architects of my gastric ruin.

When it comes to poutine, I tend to be a purist. But for the sake of Poutine Week, I set myself to trying the weirdest interpretations of the dish, and as far as they go—the butter chicken poutine is pretty fucking tasty. They ditched the gravy altogether and went with a butter chicken sauce. In case you’ve never had butter chicken before, it’s a creamy Indian dish full of curry and, well, butter. It tastes great. I love my curry and when you load it with butter and cream, it pushes a special button deep inside my brain that tells me to keep shoveling it down like the world is about to end. There’s a spicy warmth to this dish, which is especially satisfying when it's snowing like a motherfucker outside. With my first dish done, it’s time for me to move on to my next plate. I wish I could say I’m still optimistic about my plan, but halfway through this first one I start to realize how completely screwed I am. Poutine Week doesn’t mess around. These plates aren’t little taste-testers or fancy art gallery nibblin's. This shit is dense. It’s full on pub-fare size and fit for the hoards of maenadic club rats looking to line their stomachs with grease to fight off alcohol poisoning.

Butter chicken poutine from Poutine Centrale.

Because of the horrendous weather, it takes me just short of two hours to finally arrive at my next destination. Chez Boris is a warm little cafe that specializes in freshly baked doughnuts. They welcome me in with a big ass plate of Doughnut Poutine slathered in duck gravy. The ‘fries’ are made fresh on the spot—a flour dusted young man assiduously rolls and cuts the doughnut dough into fries by hand. Knowing I came from VICE, the chef loaded my plate with fist fulls of cheese curds and lathered the gravy on thick. I’m honoured… and a bit nauseous at the idea I’m going to thrust all this into me. Maybe he’s just trying to fuck with me. I don’t know. This plate of fried dough and fowl gravy tests my limits but it also demands me to keep going. Each thick doughnut fry I eat is like a small, curled finger inching me closer to my goal. The gravy is insanely rich, and honestly, it’s a little too much combined with the doughnut fries. It's like the two were fighting it out inside my mouth and the victor will have the honour of killing me with heart disease. I’m forcing my way through a dish I’d normally relish, and all the while the threat of painting the cafe in a vomitus reimagining of a Jackson Pollock painting looms over me.

Doughnut Poutine from Chez Boris.

On the way to the next spot, I begin to re-evaluate some of my life choices. How could something so delicious inflict such pain? How could I have thought this poutine-crawl to be remotely feasible, much less a good idea? I’m not usually down with over eating. I mean, who hasn’t had to loosen a button or two after Thanksgiving and whatever. But this? This is grotesque. Bite after bite, poutine after poutine, I’m cramming so much food down my throat that it’s becoming immoral. But, then again, to hell with excuses! I’ve only just begun, and there’s no amount of self inflicted guilt that can undo my decision to go balls deep into Poutine Week. It is time to man-up and head to Au Cinquième Péché.

Seal poutine Au Cinquième Péché.

I have arrived and it is time for some Poutine au Phoque. If I felt gluttonous before, I’ve reached a new level now. It’s much smaller than any of the other plates I dined on today, which, at this point, I welcome whole-heartedly. There’s gnocchi instead of fries. Thick lengths of seal merguez hide just below the surface. Brussel sprout leaves and other greens mingle with the cheese curds and a light dousing of Au Jus completes the fanciest of my poutines so far. It doesn’t feel like tapas but it certainly doesn’t strike me as poutine. I guess they’ve decided to meet halfway: some balance between gastronomic pretension and gutter-palate hedonism.

And yeah, I was about to eat seal. I wonder what it would take to successfully rebrand seals as the “pigs of the ocean”; delicious and plentiful and a crucial economic driver in Atlantic Canada. Maybe pictures of the seal hunt have forever taken that possibility off the table. For all the moral niggling my friends had raised about eating cute, big-eyed sea mammals, this sausage doesn’t really look like much. In fact, it tastes like regular sausage. It’s hard to reconcile seal meat when your first thought goes straight to images of adorable, small, furry animals having their skulls bashed in, and a growing puddle of red stains on the otherwise pristine snow. Yeah, maybe seal meat is just unmarketable, tastes ok though.

The Poutine au Phoque was the smallest and most manageable dish of the night, but I still had to take a break from cramming my face, and ended up in a two-hour food coma splayed across my couch. Coming out of my gravy nap I steeled myself for my journey to Frites Alors to sample their Lobster Mobster poutine.

Lobster poutine at Frites Alors.

Sitting here at the restaurant, I can’t even look at my food as I eat it. While I had nothing but good feelings toward all of my previous dishes, this is rough and I’m worried about spewing all over the boozed up college students and low rent decor. I feel a shudder roll down my back every time I stare at my fork and I have to go blurry eyed and act on muscle memory to guide it into my mouth. I force every bite down through sheer will power. Horrible choices. I’ve just made such horrible life choices. This poutine, on a normal day, wouldn’t be so painful. It’s standard; thin and crispy fast food fries with some sort of lobster cream sauce dolloped on top. It’s exactly what all these McGill students want, and I’ve gone for it many times before. When you’re drunk and broke, what’s better than fries, cheese and gravy? But I can’t. I just can’t. Fuck this whole thing in the gravy hole: I give up. I guess it’s Poutine Week for a reason.

Empty, like my soul right now.

Before all of you haters chime in, I’m well aware that I’m falling one plate short of my original goal of five poutines in day, but eating ‘only’ four poutines could potentially save me one very unwelcome trip to whatever room hospitals reserve for pumping stomachs—which I imagine has a very large sink or tub, and almost certainly a drain in the middle of the floor into which they use to hose the stray chunks.

Na’eem and Thierry, I salute you, but for now I’m going to slowly make my way home and try to never think of poutine again. My poor stomach has endured so much. I don’t know for sure if I’ll manage to keep it all down. I do know, however, that this food-baby I’m nursing is so big that I’m going to have stretch marks when I’ve finished birthing it.