Home Sweet Home

By David Gibson

For almost a year now we have been traveling to Los Angeles to work with a great client there. Because we like to eat delicious food, we love to scour this huge city for good eats. Near our client’s office we had lunch poolside at The Roof on Wilshire. A friend took me to Chosun, which has fantastic Korean barbecue. There’s Mercado for great Mexican and Carmela’s next door for small batch ice cream. After work the rooftop bar at the Ace Hotel is a nice hangout, while Slurping Ramen hits the spot for a lighter dinner. I could go and on and on and on.

There's a nifty place on LaBrea where early on, I met my design friend Lorraine Wild for a great breakfast. I'm talking about Sycamore Kitchen, and I can't talk about it without mentioning the Buttercup, the lightest, sweetest, crunchiest pastry I know. It's actually a Breton pastry called a kouign amann — a small golden muffin-shaped bundle of joy with a fluffy white inside. Over the past year I've become obsessed with them — my monthly trips to LA inevitably involve a morning tryst with Buttercup.

Last fall I found myself hanging out with some favorite cousins in Montreal, the city where I was born and grew up decades ago. One morning, after yoghurt and a piece of toast with Libby and Jim, i.e. Elizabeth Taylor and her husband James Taylor (no not them, my cousins), I set off in the car to see if I could find Buttercup in one of the neighborhood bakeries of this food lovers paradise. I grew up around Westmount in the western English part of the city in the years of linguistic segregation and cultural separation. Saint Laurent, or the Main as it was known, was the dividing line between east and west on city streets. It was also a kind of cultural divide between the two separate populations of the city. We called it the East End when for many Montrealers it was actually the city center.

A quick scan of the net suggested Saint Laurent might be a good place to start my search for Buttercup. Like so much of this historic city, the fabric of the Main had not changed much since my childhood. Two, three, and four story nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings still line the street. Where once Jews and working people gathered, now millennials, tourists and other cool looking urban denizens thronged the street, popping in and out of clothing stores, cafes and restaurants. The street looked like the middle of a vibrant city as indeed it is. There was Boulangerie Guillaume, a sparkling modern palace of bread – with all the bread I could imagine, but no kouign amann. Several blocks up at Hof Kelsten the tone and the menu was more eclectic. Cool retro and vintage fixtures graced the interior where the menu included both pastry and bread but again no kouign amann. I headed north through the Plateau and Mile End neighborhoods, parts of Montreal I barely know, but now clearly magnets for urban creatives like me. There’s vibrant urban living alongside quiet streets with carefully restored historic houses – people walking everywhere.

My next stop was Outremont, home to the French upper crust, the flip side of English Westmount. It is filled with astonishing streets lined with substantial homes, much like the streets I traversed on my long walk to school as a kid, yet somehow different. Different tastes, different architects, different people built these mansions on the French side of the mountain. And there on Avenue Van Horne in the heart of Outremont sat Mamie Clafoutis, a perfect bourgeois French patisserie, its cases lined with glistening berry tartes, crisp millenilles, croissants, lemon curd. But not a kouign amann in sight. Damn.

I had one more chance, below the tracks, so to speak, to find Buttercup. I headed to Little Burgundy, a former working class neighborhood not too far from my old high school, that’s now a culinary hotspot and hipster hangout. There sitting in a gleaming case in the cool dark interior of Patisserie Patrice, an elegant pastry shop on a street that had never caught my eye growing up, was Buttercup’s Montreal cousin. The kouign amann was sublime. Bingo.

I love making the connection between my LA passions and my hometown. I’m an urban explorer who loves to uncover the delights of a new friend like Los Angeles and at the same time reacquaint with an old love like Montreal. Cities are layered with memories and tastes and sensations that draw me back again and again. Los Angeles can sometimes seem like a big sprawling place with no there. Long ago my film friend Ian Birnie taught me that in LA you have to look in the hidden corners, the out of the way places, up the hill, behind the gate, to find the real charm of LA. Turns out the same kind of urban sleuthing helped me rediscover what I love about home sweet home.