#57 - Walking Quebec City
Field notes from a wonderfully healthy cafe scene
Bonjour!
This is a dispatch from the road. A shorter Field Notes type piece where it gets called as I see it - written as I’m doing it, low edit, shipped quickly. It’s the espresso simple1 version of the standard newsletter dispatch from People & Place.
That means no Macro, and no Tools. I have a sneaky suspicion these will do even better than my standard style - general rule of thumb of modernity seems to be the closer you are to the length of a tweet, the better it does. I don’t love that. I don’t even like that. But a central message of People & Place - and of economic development itself should be - interact with the world as it really is, not as you wish it was.
I write this particular brief in the Saint-Roch neighbourhood of Quebec City, with an espresso simple, and a Saint-Justin carbonated mineral water2, surrounded by young locals doing the things that locals do. That is exactly the opposite of Vieux Quebec, which is currently competing for the gold medal of old beautiful, historic town that is seemingly 100% boutique hotels and tourists.
You’ll know by now if you’ve been with People & Place for some time that I think tourism is overrated on many levels. I’m sorry for this, but it’s almost certainly true. There are, of course, levels of good and levels of bad. Selling out small boutique hotels, beautiful family owned diners, and local cafes? Perfect. Cruise ships that are floating hotels with all-you-can-eat buffets, whose temporary residents spend next to nothing in the town, other than on little trinkets? Overrated.
The freshly-minted-money of the matter is that no country ever got rich off of tourism, without an economic core of year-round population, steady birthrates, core industry, and dynamic entrepreneurship (big and small). If this isn’t the case, you are destined to be one of the many (often wonderful) countries near the equator that are treated like the rich world’s frat house.
And so I urge you to read this dispatch in your own version of Cafe Saint-Henri in the Saint-Roch neighbourhood. Around your community - with your people, in your place.
Near the young, fit, sweaty man wearing his bluetooth Bose, pit vipers, and lycra (are we sure we need lycra if we’re not racing The Tour?). Near the young lady presumably working on an e-commerce business that has something to do with apparel. Near the Lebanese family waiting for their Uber, and the French, who already have spring tans that would literally be impossible for my phenotype. Near the young Cub Scout who has posture that would make the CN Tower wonder what he had for breakfast. Near the baristas who always have your back - and I know for a fact you love it when I write about our beloved baristas.
Vasi! 🇫🇷
Quick note that this won’t be a place-by-place kind of post. The itinerary genre is not my style and has the ability to consume a place in the social media era - but it sells like hotcakes!
My posts are much more about the feeling of a place, and trying to describe it based on what I see and experience at ground-level. At this point Kathryn and I know exactly what we do and why we do it when we land in a place, even if we don’t know where that will end up taking us.
Everything is tourism - yet somehow wonderful
We left New Brunswick by road, in pursuit of the economic and geographic juggernaut that is Ontario, via a lovely long-weekend in Vieux Quebec. In geographic terms we’re going from absurdly huge to very huge, and in economic terms we’re going into a combined GDP of almost $1.5T - with a T.
Ontario is physically huge and is economically huger - almost $1T in GDP (as of 2024) and nearly double that of Canada’s silver medalist - Quebec - with $500B in GDP. What Quebec lacks in comparison economically it makes up for with nearly 1.5 million square kilometres of total land area. If you’re curious, New Brunswick, Quebec’s little sibling is - ahem - third to last in GDP3.
Driving to Quebec from New Brunswick is an excellent development experiment - as seeing a place by road and rail always is. You leave driving North when you ought to be driving West, quickly to discover you can’t drive West, unless you’d like to traverse the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument while you’re at it.
Much of the drive is beautiful, some isn’t, and the bit before the Saint Lawrence feels awfully long. Crossing the border in to Quebec is quite beautiful indeed, as you enter the mountains, and the rate of Catholic Churches named after every kind of Saint increases dramatically. This and ambitiously hyphenated male names with seemingly every kind of variation. It seems like there isn’t a man of consequence anywhere in Quebec’s history that didn’t have a hyphenated first name (or several).
I recommend taking the ferry into Old Quebec solely because it’s beautiful and it’s worth seeing from the water. Once there, find your favourite boutique hotel with your lover in tow, and park the car for the duration. Not needed, not wanted, as the streets are very Euro in their design, width, and people criss-crossing on foot. You’re already up on points because on foot is the best way to see a place, hands down.
If walking is my vehicle to know a place, cafes are my medium. I experience towns by their cafe and food scene first, and their outdoor scene second. Quebec City, for all of its hell-on-earth level touristed areas (and it’s only May!), seems to have a very healthy culture of both and that is for the good. Especially as it seems to orient itself to the outdoors - stone streets lined with patios that are bursting at the seams, even in the morning.
Much like France itself - when the first warm sun of spring appears, Parisians take to the streets to face the sun and enjoy the health and wellness that being outside, among your people, inevitably brings. I mean this literally - it can’t not bring it. We aren’t meant to be alone and something far from ideal seems to happen to us when we are. The French understand this, and as Chris Arnade reports, this is good.
Yet even in Tournon, on a boring Wednesday afternoon, there was an active social scene, a communal sense of needing to be, if not directly with other people, then at least near them.
…I was there for three hours, and while I was alone, I never felt lonely. I also didn’t order much, and I never felt rushed. The French understand the value of sitting for a long time, around others, while doing seemingly nothing.
In the birthrate and borders era it may even be upgraded to the essential category because it offers us the chance to root ourselves in place, and among people. We’re able to reflect on what being this is, and why it’s good to be this. To be proud of our history - we all have one even if our people did bad things - and the modern liberal project of breaking attachments to anything and anyone is destined to fail. As Oliver Burkeman calls it - the myth of the digital nomad.
When we find ourselves powered by our own steam - our own God given energy - we are experiencing the world and it is experiencing us. The streets give us something the screens never could - and never will - access to what Paul Kingsnorth calls the 4 P’s of people, place, prayer, and the past. We need all of these ingredients to feel truly rooted in our humanity, and I’m as certain about this now as I am about anything4.
First order of business is checking when the local cafe circuit opens. In big urban centres like Toronto (see you soon you speed freaks!) it’s 6:30am or earlier, and most of the first cups are to-go. They’re so to-go it’s like listening to a podcast version of a place on 1.5x5. Other places don’t crank out the awnings until closer to 7:30 - like the historic district of Mexico City - and start slower, which I find delightful and is the correct tempo for the morning. Quebec City is sandwiched in the middle, with Cafe La Maison Smith opening for business hours at 7:00am and some of the more niche cafes closer to 8:00am6.
Quebec City also has the interesting quirk this time of year of experiencing sunrise at the balmy hour of 5:10am. We left our window open to let the breeze in - Hotel Acadia on Rue Sainte-Ursule - and the birds started chirping for the emergence of pink skies at 4:45 in the morning. For someone like me this is wonderful, and perfect (we all have our own chronotypes!).
That means Morning PT is awfully early, facing East toward Levis across the river, near the railings at the foot of Chateau Frontenac, followed by a slow morning walk to the cafe7. For morning pages (reading and writing), it’s a new Arnade I’ve been meaning to read, followed by a few quick words on the keys before breakfast at the hotel.
Gratefully, others had the same idea as we did, and it’s in this way you get to experience a whole town waking up and going about their business. Like these two lads being lads, talking about the news over the day over simple, perfect cappuccino and a croissant. I get the feeling they do this most days - they didn’t give the impression of being one of the many just passing through.
Next, a long walk in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood - easily my favourite neighbourhood in the area if you’re looking for flavours of what daily life is actually like for locals and families. It’s more Thornecliffe Park, less Liberty Village, and there are classic local posters like Proteger nos Co-Op and signs protesting the recent “reno-victions” that these folks believe is the responsibility of Airbnb.
In mid-day, a walk to the Saint-Roch neighbourhood - which had the flavour of a trendy, young place that was gentrifying quickly, although I didn’t get as good a sense of it as Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Oddly (maybe?) it reminded me of the neighbourhoods that form the perimeter around Fenway Park in Southwest Boston - lovely, just in a state of change that hasn’t quite settled yet.
Saint-Henri was a wonderful, new-age cafe, which doesn’t always land for me, but that brought you the first half of this Field Note, my Saint-Justin mineral water, and one solitary sip of espresso simple. For someone who anchors their morning on espresso my tolerance is comically low. I’ve somehow maintained the discipline of having one espresso shot per day while in my local, and the equivalent of that, spread across two different espresso simple when on the road so I can get some variety. Voltaire would be absolutely ashamed by the numbers I’m putting up.
To get a better sense of the place outside of Old Town, we walked to DeTerroir Cafe - a trendy 8-seater (or so), again in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood. DeTerroir is one of those places that is so authentic it’s almost a caricature of itself. The quiet, reserved barista sat outside on an Adirondack in the sun (nice move) until eager beavers like us showed us, poured espresso from what looked like a spaceship (very good) into old-school pottery (also very good) before wordlessly resuming his solar gazing on the sidewalk. If you’re wondering the answer is yes, there was small-batch cheese and milk in the cooler for sale from a local farm, which is a truly excellent addition to any small cafe.
Although it takes far more than a long-weekend in May to get to know a place - what Quebec City very clearly has is a sense of itself and it’s place in a very distinct French culture, in an otherwise anglophone nation. As a Maritimer, we’ve grown up with this French influence, and I married into a family who can trace their francophone history back many generations, from Northwest France, to the eventual settlement of Cocagne.
I couldn’t help but envy this Quebecois distinction - as we practised our French every opportunity we could - the language version of the Humble Stumble. I say envy because it is clearly rooted in something that is people and place based. The French are different and they know they are different, and there is a fierce pride in it and around it8. The Old Country is still clearly culturally present, and it’s important that Vieux Quebec looks like it does on this front.
For many anglophone settler Canadians (like me) our place - the United Kingdom and Ireland - our cultural home often feels out of reach in some way. It’s there! It’s always there - in the coast, the moss, the cool breeze, the fishery, and elsewhere, but it doesn’t feel as rooted as it felt as a visitor in Quebec.
Again, I believe this is for the good because it is for the good to be rooted in place and to have a clear address in the Universe of meaning. The Quebecois do, and I admire it.
If you want to walk the routes we walked in Old Quebec, it might look something like this. I hope you do!
—
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you on the road.
If you’re an espresso guy or gal, a single espresso in French is espresso simple, not single. No, I did not know this.
What is easily in my top 3 bizarre, yet genuine philosophies is more of a hunch - that if you eat the food and drink the water of the place you're in, there is a legitimate sense of tuning yourself to that place. In fact, the more I learn about what health and energy actually are, the more I think this is likely on several levels. I will take this to the grave with me (tucked nicely into local dirt).
In reality we are second to last because, by definition, Prince Edward Island has to be last in total product. It’s just too small.
Which - as a life-long learned - is very little, so you can safely take this one to the bank and make a deposit.
You see these things when you have Observers Disease. You can’t not notice what is going on around you, you start to conceive of stories as you’re living them, and then eventually you write them down. I’ve made peace with who I am, as I recommend you do as well. All of the things you do naturally - because they are you - are great gifts. They are given to you by something that isn’t you, and if your average day - on vacation or otherwise - looks roughly the same than you are in the sweet spot. Keep going my friend.
Hilariously, where I now sit - in Unionville, Ontario - opening hours seem to be a mere suggestion. Especially that Italian place down the block. In a rather amusing twist, the ladies very clearly told me ‘…by 8:00am certainly!’ and I sat across the street in observation until they flipped the Closed sign to Open at - checks notes - 9:23am. God bless the Italians. Whatever Germanic sensibility they clearly lack, they made up for with great espresso and a sun facing bistro set. More on this delightful morning next week.
This practice is inspired by my friend, international photographer Mark Hemmings, who takes to the streets first thing in the morning, having captured 5 absurdly good street-scene photographs, an espresso, and a croissant aux amandes while on route.
There is one seemingly interesting distinction between our French brothers and sisters in Quebec vs. their cousins in New Brunswick. The former will reply to you in English if your French sucks, and the latter more and more insist that you speak French. I don’t know what to make of that but you can write to me in the comments or DMs if you have an interesting take on this.
I too love that place, and especially for almond croissants at the bakeries. Great photos Matt!