No one will confuse Daniel St-Pierre with one of the trendy chefs who garnish the pages of food mags these days. I’m talking about slick, Nehru-jacket-clad pretty boys accompanied by an army of tall blonde "personal assistants."

St-Pierre, the executive chef at Hotel la Sapiniere in beautiful Val-David, Quebec (about one hour north of Montreal via autoroute 15N), is a straight shooter, a chef who, if faced with picking a Hollywood icon as his role model, would be a John Wayne with a French-Canadian accent.

In planning his menus, St-Pierre is determined to please his guests — no fanfare, no pretense, no fripperies to add any superfluous touches to classic French-Canadian cooking.

"My job is to feed people, not to feed my ego," says St-Pierre, who previously worked at L’eau a la Bouche  (Relais & Chateau) in nearby St. Adele. "I want to have fun when I’m cooking — I want to be creative and imaginative in the way I prepare my dishes, but I’m not going to indulge in an ego trip to please myself. If you can find pleasure in what you do for a living . . . that’s fine, but you still have to go with the flow of what the customer is looking for."

Hotel La Sapiniere table setting

To wit: St-Pierre is acutely aware that many guests stay at Hotel la Sapiniere for one-two weeks in the high season, and they have dinner in the formal dining room every evening. "And so I decided to change the menu every day or two in the summer to make sure that our customers never get bored with the menu," he says. 

Old School Cooking Secrets

When I asked Daniel how he prepared the venison in blueberry sauce I’d enjoyed earlier in the evening, he quickly reminded me of a basic principle of cooking meat: pan sear to seal in the flavors and natural juices; reduce veal stock with a blueberry demi and cook the meat rare (or at least on the rare side), as the loin is tender and soft — the more you cook it, the tougher it will get.

"I will always cook the venison rare or medium rare (what is known as "rare plus" at Morton’s steakhouse) unless the waiter tells me otherwise on the order," says St-Pierre. "You are going to ruin this beautiful piece of meat by overcooking it, but some people prefer the meat cooked through and who am I to judge what they like or dislike?"

St-Pierre also cooked a beautiful boar chop the night I was in Val-David — the chop was served with onions simmered in dark beer (a Laurentian beer, naturally) that reduced down to the consistency of sauerkraut — "that’s why I call them sauerkraut onions."

Dinner at Hotel La Sapiniere

Other French-Canadian specialties in St-Pierre’s repertoire include a Supreme of Goose with Calvados and green apple; Noisettes of monkfish with spice crust, sweet pepper and chervil coulis; Rack of Quebec pork with rosemary and red wine; West Canadian bison sirloin with two mustard sauces; and the aforementioned Medallions of Boileau venison with Porto and blueberries.

Worth noting is that pastry chef Marie-Josee Lacombe turns out exquisite desserts, including homemade maple fudge, créme brulee with pistachios, pecan pie with fresh fruit and a trio of maple, blueberry and chocolate mousse with praline and crystallized sugar.

Hotel la Sapiniere is one of those classic destinations that never change their style and class, except for the requisite modernizations and few added features. A brand-new cigar lounge offers Cuban-cigar-starved travelers the chance to smoke a real-live Cohiba in a comfortable setting while drinking vintage port or Cognac.

In business since 1936, and juxtaposed against the hippy, laidback town of Val-David, Hotel la Sapiniere is one of the few resort restaurants that sticks by its old school ties to promote quality, grace and French-Canadian culinary tradition.

Suffice it to say, it is the last one of its kind in an ever-expanding Laurentian landscape of high-end hotels and plush ski resorts.