Bienvenue! Welcome! Seat yourself at any diner in Montreal, and chances are this is what the placemat in front of you will read—a cheery invitation to the world of poutine and steamés. This chorus of greeting is also emblematic of the dynamic that makes this city so interesting. Montreal’s historic “two solitudes” are just two parts of the city’s ever expanding spectrum of city-dwellers. Diners, known in Quebec as casse-croûtes, are a quintessentially North-American institution. However, their informality, low prices and long business hours invite hungry people from all walks of life, making them a site of cultural exchange. Bienvenue / Welcome wants to explore the individuals, objects and places that make up Montreal and invites all those who encounter it to explore it as well.
Issue 2 was launched at Nouveau Palais on April 5th to the beats of DJ Cadence Weapon and is now available at Patati Patata, The Main , Casse-Croute du Coin, Green Spot and Mademoiselle Jean Talon . Stop by these fine institutions for a good meal and brief exploration of how food defines culture in Quebec.MONTREAL, QC
Over easy: a soda jerk tosses ice cream into a malted milkshake. Corpus Christi, TX, 1939.
(Via the US Library of Congress.)
Knishes and sweet corn! Coney Island, NYC, 1966.
(Photo by James Jowers.)
Casse-croûte table.
(Photo by Montreal photographer Alexi Hobbs.)
Casse-croûte in central Quebec, near the St-Maurice River.
(Photo by Montreal photographer Alexi Hobbs.)
A drive-in restaurant in Brantford, Ontario, in 1959—complete with carhops! In fact, this photo looks like it might have been taken through a car window.
(Photo courtesy of the Archives of Ontario.)
A streetcar converted into a diner. Langford, BC, 1951.
(Photos courtesy of the British Columbia Archives.)
Via ofanotherfashion:
The lunch counter is a vexed symbol in U.S. cultural history. It is at once a key site of struggle against everyday and institutional racial segregation and a romanticized site of many hopes where young lovers share milkshakes and budding ingenues are “discovered” (e.g., the myth of Lana Turner).
Because there’s no identifying information that I could find for the photo above, it draws, in some way, on both histories for me. But for the flower in her hair, the woman in the foreground of the photo in the skirt suit might be a career woman having a quick read during her lunch break. The hair accessory, though, suggests something more glamorous. I’m going to guess that the photo was taken somewhere in the northern part of the country in an already integrated lunch counter since from their clothes, it doesn’t appear that this photo was taken in the post-Civil Rights era.
The exterior of Galardo’s Hamburgers, a diner in Montreal, circa 1954.
(Photo by Conrad Poirier. Courtesy of the Quebec National Archives.)
