Le Pied de Cochon, Gatineau’s 48-year-old bastion of French bistro fare, is to close June 29

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Guy Mervellet reckons he hasn’t taken a vacation in six or seven years. He works six days a week at his restaurant, doing the kind of kitchen work that can be gruelling for chefs half his age. He’s 79 and ready for a well-earned rest.

Mervellet’s last day in the kitchen is finally coming. The French-born chef will retire after Le Pied de Cochon, his venerable bistro in Gatineau’s Hull sector, serves its last dinner on June 29.

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“I love working, what I do, but it has become too difficult,” Mervellet says.

In 1976, he opened Le Pied de Cochon, which translates to “the pig’s foot” in English. Over its 48 years, it has attracted several generations of customers from prime ministers and Supreme Court of Canada judges to innumerable regulars, especially from Ottawa’s political scene.

In his time, Mervellet has cooked countless orders of beef tartare, veal sweetbreads, rabbit terrine, Provençale rack of lamb and rognons de veau. The chef says that Jean Chrétien loved the latter dish of veal kidneys and that the former prime minister steadfastly ordered it until he stopped coming to the restaurant after his wife, Aline, died in 2020.

While Le Pied de Cochon still has many loyal customers, a good many of them are as old as Mervellet. Meanwhile, people’s tastes have changed over the years, and COVID-19 was an ordeal for Le Pied de Cochon, which required Mervellet and his daughter to expend $300,000 to pay taxes, insurance and other costs even as restaurant revenues withered.

“We’re closing, it doesn’t work. It’s too hard,” says Cendrine Mervellet, Guy’s 51-year-old daughter, who has served customers at the restaurant for the past six years.

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“Everybody focuses on takeout, fast food,” Cendrine says. “The younger generation, they prefer to spend $20 at McDonald’s. The quality of our food is top-notch, but people don’t come.”

The tally of French restaurants in the National Capital Region has decreased somewhat in the past 25 years. According to this newspaper’s 2001 dining guide, there were then 15 French and Belgian restaurants. From that list, only three — Le Pied de Cochon, L’Orée du Bois and Signatures — remain open.

More recently, a few French restaurants have opened in Ottawa, such as Gitanes, Cocotte Bistro and Vain in Versailles, although they are generally more modern and French-inspired than traditionally French.

In addition to the Mervellets, Le Pied de Cochon now employs one other cook and one other server. Guy Mervellet owns the building his restaurant occupies. The ambience in two dining areas that seat about 80 is true to Le Pied de Cochon’s earliest days, with plates bearing the restaurant’s name and custom-made Tiffany lamps with pigs on them both dating back to the late 1970s.

In 1966, Guy Mervellet came to Canada from Toulouse in southern France. He was 21 and wanted to see North America, he says. He decided to stay in the Ottawa area after making friends and relationships here, he says.

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“Et voilà.”

Before he opened Le Pied de Cochon, Mervellet cooked at storied kitchens on both sides of the Ottawa River, including La Ferme Columbia and the Royal Ottawa Golf Club on the Quebec side, as well as the National Arts Centre’s first fine-dining restaurant, L’Opéra.

“It was a fiasco. They tried to do the grand cuisine,” Mervellet recalls, complete with classic gueridon service in which waiters working with a special serving cart finish dishes tableside, flambéing dishes, tossing salads or preparing pan sauces or boning fish. The NAC had to cut its L’Opéra’s staff in half when it didn’t work out, Mervellet says.

But after Mervellet, who calls Aylmer home, opened Le Pied de Cochon in 1976, it was “packed, packed, packed,” he says, with customers who appreciated his “bistro deluxe” cuisine.

Mervellet says he also opened L’Orée du Bois, the esteemed French restaurant in Chelsea, with its first chef-owner, Guy Blain, in 1978. “At the beginning, I worked at both, but it was too much,” Mervellet says. Within a year, he stopped working at L’Orée du Bois to focus on Le Pied de Cochon.

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Anne DesBrisay, this newspaper’s former restaurant critic, reviewed Le Pied de Cochon four times between 1995 and 2010. She twice spoke highly of the restaurant’s steak tartare, writing in 2003: “There are few restaurants in this region that do a decent one, and this is one of them. It is a plate of hand-minced raw beef, the red meat, enriched with capers, onion, pickles, a touch of cayenne, the flavours well-balanced and the whole effect very pleasing.”

Le Pied de Cochon was also in the news in 2003 when a story in this newspaper revealed that an executive assistant to then-heritage minister Sheila Copps dined there 65 times over two years, spending $7,521 of taxpayers’ money in the process.

“Le Pied de Cochon’s clientele is made up largely of regulars, many of them lawyers, judges, developers and political staff from the dozens of federal offices just a five-minute drive away in Place du Portage,” that story said.

“Most of the customers seemed to know one another, moving from table to table to shake hands and share jokes as they prepared to return to their offices. Each time a phone rang during lunch, a dozen men patted their breast pockets looking for a cellphone,” the story said.

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Restaurant staff then told this newspaper that many high-profile figures, including Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and federal court judge Gilles Letourneau, were regular customers.

At lunch on a Friday in June were several male customers in their 70s and early 80s who said they’d been eating at Le Pied de Cochon since its early days.

“I like the food,” said Gilles Lauzon, 78. “I spent 10 years in Europe and I got used to a certain type of food and a certain level of service. It’s a very authentically French restaurant.”

“It’s very sad,” said Simon Noel, 76, who was seated at another table with fellow retired lawyer Robert Décary, 80. “It used to be the place to be, the gathering place.”

Said Cendrine Mervellet: “All the customers are crying. They’re saying there’s so much stories here. It’s not only a restaurant, it’s an institution.”

She expects the restaurant to be heavily booked during its final week. Already Le Pied de Cochon’s last night is close to full, and one couple booked a table for two for each night before the closure, she says.

Cendrine says she and her father did try to hire a chef to replace him, but no one could duplicate how he cooks, which is what customers want. “They don’t want to cook like that … they’re more fusion,” she says.

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Both she and her father say they’re happy to be closing Le Pied de Cochon.

“He should be retired already,” says Cendrine, who adds she will find work elsewhere.

Asked what he will do in July and August, with his life’s work at last behind him, Guy Mervellet answers with a single word: “Relax.”

***

In 1988, in response to a reader’s request, Mervellet shared this recipe with this newspaper.

Rabbit with White Wine Sauce
Makes: 3 to 4 servings

1 3-pound rabbit, cut into 6 pieces (2 thighs, 2 legs, saddle and breast)

1 tablespoon oil

1 tablespoon butter

1 or 2 cooking onions, finely chopped

4 or 5 whole shallots, peeled

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup dry white wine

Chicken stock

Salt and pepper to taste

Bouquet garni (sprigs savory, thyme and bay leaf)

2 tablespoons heavy cream (optional)

In a sauté pan or Dutch oven, sauté the rabbit in the oil and butter until the pieces are browned. Pour off the fat.

Add the thinly chopped onions, the whole shallots and saute for about 2 minutes, or until the vegetables are translucent. Sprinkle with the flour and simmer another 2 minutes.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine, stirring, and add enough chicken stock to just cover the rabbit. Season with salt and pepper and add the bouquet garni. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer — or cook in a 350 F oven — for about 45 minutes, or until rabbit is tender.

When done, remove rabbit and drain.

Over medium heat, reduce sauce until thickened. Add the cream, stirring, and simmer briefly. Pour over rabbit and serve with noodles, carrots and green vegetables.

phum@postmedia.com

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