Gatineau's "Naughty" Chef
Chef Romain Riva is in the kitchen of his restaurant holding up a blank piece of paper.
“This is the menu when I arrive in the morning,” he says, with a laugh. By the time service starts, he and his team will have figured out what they’re serving at Les Vilains Garçons restaurant on Promenade du Portage in the Hull sector of Gatineau. That same piece of paper will have a hand-written chart of 15 dishes, complete with garnishes. All kitchen staff contribute to the menu brainstorming that takes place daily, often driven by what suppliers drop off in the morning.
On this particular morning, one truck, which arrives at the same time as an edible Ottawa photographer and writer, has Lucky Lime oysters from Prince Edward Island, sea urchin from the St. Lawrence Seaway and caribou and Kusshi oysters from B.C.
Asked to produce a dish for edible that represents his culinary philosophy on a plate, he has a little fun, showing his irreverent approach to dining right off the bat. First, he pulls out a bison antler and offers to plate the dish on that. The alternative? A turntable.
“We have that because we don’t always have time to wash the dishes, so when it’s busy, everything becomes a plate,” he says, adding that he’s also known to serve dishes in a stainless-steel mixing bowl, to the chagrin of one Ottawa critic several years back.
The dish crunch is how the turntable tradition started, but the chef and co-owner of the restaurant has embraced the quirky idea and now, each evening, one person will be presented their meal on the turntable. The bison antler could also make an appearance.
On this day, both do, because chef Riva wants to feature two dishes. The first includes perfect rectangles of sliced yellowfin tuna on top of which he puts the roe of three full sea urchins. Besides that, there’s corn two ways — one is fried and the other is marinated in smoked paprika. Wakame, fried plantain, puréed cranberry and popcorn (corn yet another way) round out the rest of the garnishes.
“We always have popcorn somewhere on the menu,” says Riva, who owns the operation with two friends — Cyril Lauer, who, like Riva, is a native of France, and Bob Tyler St-Jean.
This plate represents Riva because it captures his mad scientist approach to dishes as well as the seasonality of the sea urchin. He’ll usually have a protein, some complementary flavours and lots of colour and crunch, especially in the garnishes. And it’s a small plate, a concept many restaurants claim to have, but in this nine-year-old establishment, it’s an accurate statement. Most of the menu — 12 dishes out of 15 — are small portions the lads call Pintxos. The word denotes a tapas-like snack, usually eaten in bars in Northern Spain’s Basque region and in the south of France. Riva grew up in Saint-Emilion, in the southwest part of France near Bordeaux, before emigrating to Canada.
The second dish, plated on the bison antler, features pork sausage charcuterie made with cashews, beets two ways — one pickled and one fried into a chip — a bit of cilantro and a purée made of mustard and sea buckthorn.
It represents Riva because he spends much of his time making charcuterie as part of Les Vilains Garçons’ side project La Boucherie des Vilains.
Not just a restaurant
Located on a residential street in Hull, La Boucherie des Vilains is where Riva and his team produce charcuterie for the restaurant and several other local restaurants. The store also carries the restaurant’s homemade pickles, antipasti, salts and espelette. There are products from “home” for Riva, meaning St. Emilion, France, and a variety of locally made treats in jars made across Quebec. The fridges contain take-home foods, and there’s Quebec beer and wines on the shelves and in the fridges.
In the walk-in fridges, all manner of meat ages while sausages hang from metal shelves. One staff member — Samuel Lavergne Fournier — makes most of the charcuterie at the shop, though Riva is often there to help.
On the day edible visits, the refrigerated cases in the front are lined with aged and non-aged meats and charcuterie. The freezers are stocked with delicacies such as bison demi-glace, sweetbreads and foie gras torchon.
After a tour through the walk-ins, Riva has two more things to show. First, the treasures in the basement: Down a narrow stairway, eight booze barrels serve as Riva’s playground. The first contains what will be house-made Worcestershire, while the others include stout vinegar, apple and maple vinegar, blueberry and hibiscus vinegar (similar but better than balsamic, Riva says) and two red wine vinegars. He also has a “funky beer” in a barrel.
“That’s the next project for us,” he says. “We try to do different things. We’ve run restaurants for so many years, we need other distractions, and it’s good because [we can do this] during the day.”
The last show-and-tell item is the Le Vilain Camion — a hybrid food truck the lads bought brand new just two months after the first COVID shutdown in 2020.
COVID woes
When the first lockdown hit, Riva and his team scrambled because their food didn’t travel well for takeout.“The first 10 days, we just shut down,” he says. “And we had three restaurants at the time.”
They adapted the Les Vilains menu to cater more to takeout and took orders for the first three-month shutdown. When the second came, the manager at Soif Bar à vin came up with the idea of collaborating to have five restaurants doing takeout together.
“We had Soif, Maison du Village in Wakefield, Les Fougères in Chelsea, Le Rustiek in Hull and Les Vilains Garçons,” Riva says. “It was brilliant. At one point, it went so well that we served — from this kitchen — 900 people. It was 600 dishes for the collaboration and 350 were from our menu. It was just filling boxes and boxes.”
The third shutdown was too much, he says. “That’s when we lost our [optimism] and I think it was the same for everyone,” he says. “We lost our staff because they were tired of having a job, then not having a job.”
Part of that loss of spirit no doubt came from having to close two of their three Gatineau places — Brasserie du Bas-Canada, a charcuterie place, and YZU, which was an oyster, cocktail and Asian tapas place.
The food truck they bought in May 2020 and started selling hot food from in August made up for some of the pain of those closures, and today, they operate it at special events and during the summer months.
Operations and inspirations
“Les Vilains Garçons” translates to “the naughty boys” and the trio claim to be guilty of “running a creative and funky bistro” that features “irreverent gastronomy.” There is no set menu, as evi- denced by Riva’s blank piece of paper and the food is “inspired by our desires of the moment, seasonal foods and our culinary audacity,” the website claims. “Never the same, unmistakably original.”
When they chose the name, they were younger lads who drank a lot, slept very little and worked all day. “If you read Kitchen Confidential, that was me,” Riva says.
But their lifestyle slowed down during the pandemic, partly because he and Lauer now have children. Lauer takes care of the accounting and administration, while Tyler St-Jean, a musician with Funk-A-Tron 5000, takes care of the front of house. All three do their share of social media for the restaurant and the butcher shop.
When designing the menu, Riva usually includes four meat dishes, along with four vegetable and four seafood dishes.
“Everybody gives their input on the menu,” he says. “And because our menu changes all the time, we don’t have waste. This small bucket is the amount of garbage we produce each day.
“Sometimes the inspirations are Asian-influenced because we’ve been shopping in Chinatown. Sometimes they're Middle Eastern.”
Besides the main plates and many small portions, there’s a five-course discovery menu for $65, with an option for paired wines for an extra $55. Riva is well aware his menu would cost considerably more across the river in Ottawa.
Influences
Riva grew up in St. Emilion until he was 16, when he came to Quebec to live with his father. He returns to France to see his mother, but he’s made Canada’s French province his home and still makes sure his restaurant’s food is as local as possible.
“If it can’t be local, it will be Quebec and if it can’t be Quebec, it will be Canada,” he says.
He started working soon after he emigrated, having studied culinary arts at a young age in France. He had to return to culinary school at Le Centre Relais de la Lièvre-Seigneurie in Buckingham, Que., because Canada wouldn’t recognize his French credentials. The 10-month program featured a lot of staging.
“I worked for Oncle Tom for four-and-a-half years,” he says. “And I was at Le Tartuffe for five years, where I learned French cuisine — classic all the way. Then I worked for Georges Laurier at the Wakefield Mill, and I was there for nine years with a lot of former staff from Henry Burger because they had just closed. I worked with English, Irish, German, Jamaican, Japanese and Ukrainian people. That’s a lot of influences.”
Riva says his kitchen is also influenced by its colleagues as the approach is collaborative.
“It’s not a cut and paste, but our place is a lot like [Montreal restaurant] Au Pied de Cochon,” he said. “One of my chefs worked there for many years, and another worked at [Montreal’s] Joe Beef, so these influences come through.”
Whatever the influences, the restaurant is distinctly Quebecois and indeed unmistakably original.
Les Vilains Garçons
131 Promenade du Portage, Gatineau, Que.
lesvilainsgarcons.ca | 819.205.5855 | @lesvilainsgarcons
