Maxime Lizotte’s Cooking

My current cooking style depends a bit on the context. So here, at Chez Maqahamok, we have a restaurant that wants to appeal to as many people as possible. Maqahamok means gathering, so of course we want to bring people together around the table. My cuisine has always been a people’s cuisine, a cuisine that aims to bring people together and to work with the land around me, which is also super important. I did this when I was in Quebec City, I did it when I was in other regions, and I want to do it here as well. And it has added value for me in a certain cultural sense, because this is our ancestral territory, where we are today: Wahsipekuk, Wolastokuk.

So yes, that’s right, my cuisine is seasonal, people-oriented, local, and product-based. The idea is really to use what grows here in Quebec, and even more so in eastern Quebec, especially since that’s where we are. So creativity is simply enhanced, I would say, by this kind of blind spot, by using only a few ingredients, compared to the whole range of ingredients we could use if we didn’t set any limits. It pushes creativity, that’s what I really like about it.

Of course, traditional ingredients, ancestral ingredients from the culture, let’s say, Indigenous to northeastern America, are often found in my dishes. For example, I think of the pizza we make here in a wood-fired oven, where I incorporate corn flour into the dough. I use corn a lot in my cooking. It’s in the salsa I put on lobster tacos, in tortillas that are 25 percent corn. It’s also in the waffles we serve for brunch and on fried chicken coated in cornbread crumbs.

After that, my goodness, anything with dried fruit. Right now, I have a duck dish with mushrooms and a sauce made with sour cherries. Even though the cherries we use aren’t necessarily heirloom cherries, the fact remains that cherries are native to Quebec, at least certain varieties. After that, there are so many examples, there are so many dishes in restaurants, I’d say. I think, that I can name an ingredient from Indigenous culture in each of my dishes. Traditional ingredients are everywhere in my cooking, in a contemporary approach, in a modern approach.

For me, it was a bit of a revelation for my cooking and also for my roots to say to myself, why don’t we consume more of what grows naturally rather than what humans grow, be they men or women. So, when it comes to wild fruits, northern nuts, and herbs, why don’t we use fir instead of rosemary, mugwort instead of oregano, and tansy instead of sage, because sage isn’t native to Quebec, even though many people associate sage with Indigenous culture. So wild plants have a very important role to play in my cooking. I have a wall full of containers of all kinds of plants that flavour my dishes. I also make essences. Right here, I have one made from sweet gale, which we serve in Old Fashioneds instead of using bitters and Angostura. It’s a lovely little product that we like to make, not just for cooking, but for mixology as well.

There are two that I use quite often in my cooking. One is sweet clover blossom, which I would say has a subtle vanilla and tonka bean flavor, a molecule that is also found in vanilla and sweet clover. And sweetgum is another one I really like, with a slightly clove-like, spicy cinnamon flavor, as well as a woody taste that lends itself equally well to baking, cooking, game, and charcuterie. I would say those are pretty much my two favorites.