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They have a word for me in French: “frileux.”
It means that I’m someone who is particularly sensitive to cold. There are worse things to be called, I guess.
But being a frileux does mean that visiting North America’s only restaurant made solely of snow and ice was not very high on my to-do list. Still, that’s just what I did in late January.
I bundled up, a lot, and dined at the new restaurant of the famed Hôtel de Glace in Quebec, also known as the ice hotel for you anglophones, in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier, which is about a 40-minute shuttle ride north of Quebec City.
On that Saturday night, my phone’s weather app said it was -16 C, and that it felt like -23 C with the wind chill. However, inside the restaurant, the latest attraction of the ice hotel as it marks its 25th anniversary, it was more like a relatively balmy -5 C, even if we were sitting on fur-covered ice benches.
Thanks to the engaging surroundings, fine food, brisk service and a few pro tips to be divulged below, we had a memorable and tasty time, without even a hint of frostbite, much less hypothermia.
Inside Hôtel de Glace
Before our three-course dinner began, we worked up an appetite with a tour of the ice hotel proper. It consists of more than 50 rooms and suites where the double beds are massive ice blocks topped with mattresses. There, truly hardcore lovers of winter and below-freezing hardiness can spend the night, snug in their sleeping bags. (If the challenge of the great outdoors becomes too much, those guests can seek warmth and refuge in a room at the neighbouring Hôtel Valcartier.)
I settled for the tour rather than the full overnight stay, thank you very much. That said, the tour was pretty fantastic, thanks to a panoply of exquisite, clear-as-crystal ice carvings and snow sculptures that decorated the hotel’s softly lit rooms, corridors and common areas, including the restaurant. The tour was sufficiently mind-boggling that I momentarily forgot I was feeling cold.
Artistry aside, Hôtel de Glace also impressed me simply as a feat of construction. It is an unlikely creation that took more than 50 workers more than a month to build, as they manipulated 30,000 tons of extra-dense snow and 500 tons of ice. And yet, the hotel is also even more temporary than I had realized, as it will only be open until mid-March, I was told.
A memorable dining experience
Dinner beckoned. It began with a welcome cocktail of vodka, limoncello and sparkling wine in a tall, imposing glass made of ice.
A soup appetizer was, in a word, perfect, because it was both piping hot and warming. Underneath the pastry-crusted tureen was wild boar bacon consommé, loaded with bits of vegetable, porcini mushrooms and foie gras, that really did the trick. Served with the soup was a warm bun with whipped butter, which tasted best of all when dunked into the soup.
Our main course was classic cold-weather fare — a chunk of braised-till-tender beef short rib, served with celeriac purée and root vegetables. It, too, helped to banish any chilliness, and was better than some beef short ribs I’ve had recently in restaurants that could boast that they were well-heated.
Finally, the dessert that ended our 60-minute dinner was a coconut and passion fruit snowball. It was undeniably cute and photogenic, but maybe a little too on-the-nose in -5 C surroundings. A warmer dessert would have been lovely and would have prolonged that comfortable, defiant feeling.
I wondered if the extra effort to produce a hot dessert would have taxed the restaurant’s kitchen, such as it was, beyond its limits. After all, the cooking brigade consisted of two cooks in the cramped quarters of a steamy trailer just outside the restaurant. There, they reheated and assembled the soup and short rib courses that had been cooked by the ice hotel’s partner for its restaurant venture, the Fairmont Château Frontenac, in its kitchens in the heart of Quebec City.
Top tips to stay warm
I mentioned above some pro tips for visiting the ice restaurant. Here they are. Two extra layers over one’s feet and under one’s pants are not too many. My dining companion said it helped her if she kept her boots off the snow every now and then. Finally, there’s no shame in making use of hand and body warmers, such as the Hot Pocs provided to me at the Fairmont Château Frontenac, where I was fortunate enough to stay.
Now, let’s just say that, while visiting Quebec City in the next few weeks, you wanted to dine somewhere blissfully warm, rather than eat al fresco in the dead of a Canadian winter.
Then, one option would be the Château Frontenac’s luxurious gastronomic restaurant, Champlain, where you could even enjoy your tasting-menu delicacies and fine wine beside a roaring fireplace. Or, you could eat at the landmark hotel’s more casual Bistro Le Sam, which affords spectacular views of the ice-covered St. Lawrence River and hardy tourists braving the cold on the Dufferin Terrace.
You could leave your thermal underwear and Hot Pocs in your room.
But wouldn’t you rather brag that you ate at the ice restaurant?
If you go
A three-course dinner at the ice restaurant is $225, plus taxes and service per person, available on Fridays and Saturdays until March 15. There are two one-hour services each night, and each seats 52 guests. The fees include return shuttle service from the Fairmont Château Frontenac in Quebec City to the ice hotel about 45 minutes away. Vegetarian options are available.
Peter Hum visited Quebec City as a guest of the Fairmont Château Frontenac and Destination Québec cité.No one from either company read or approved this article before publication.