You might be familiar with the television show Chef in Your Ear on the Food Network - the reality competition series in which chefs vie to see which of them is able to coach a completely clueless cook through preparing a restaurant-quality dish without setting foot in the kitchen with the newbie. The chefs watch the rookie on a monitor from a remote booth and communicate instructions only via an earpiece.
A similar concept was adapted for a French-speaking audience in Québec. The show is called Un chef à l'oreille and airs on Friday evenings on Radio-Canada.
The format is essentially the same featuring Ricardo Larivée as the host and guests chefs including Martin Juneau.
The show's premise is that "delicious fun happens when two extremes come together: talented chefs and kitchen rookies". Clueless cooks keep viewers watching as much as, if not more than, learning serious cooking skills from top chefs.
It might do just fine in Québec but the show's producers might face a different challenge in Québec.
Quebeckers are likely not as clueless in the kitchen.
According to findings from our What Québec Wants study in 2014, French-speaking Quebeckers are more likely to agree with the following statements than English-speaking Canadians in the ROC, and also, in most cases, than English-speaking Quebeckers.
French-speaking Quebeckers might find that having a chef whisper in their ears is just a nuisance.
Quebeckers now have a local French-language adaptation of the legendary, long-running American live comedy and music show. Montréal producer Fair-Play, which is producing the show in tandem with Zone 3, bought the format two years ago. The first show hosted by Louis-José Houde aired last Saturday on provincial public broadcaster Télé-Québec.
It’s too early to say if the made-in-Québec version will catch on.
It’s also difficult to say how strong the SNL brand really is in Québec. Here’s how the Montreal Gazette’s Brendan Kelly put it last week:
The funny thing is that it’s unclear just how well-known the Saturday Night Live brand is in franco Québec. The folks at Télé-Québec figure many probably know the name but probably aren’t that familiar with the show. That’s why the broadcaster and the producer are really positioning this as a new Québécois sketch-comedy show, something we haven’t seen in years and years.
Good idea. But the show’s format, the set design with the Métro (subway) and the Farine Five Roses signs, the SNL signature music, are all adapted from the SNL brand.
Quebeckers are staunch protectors of their culture. Québec has no shortage of comedic talent. Montreal’s Just for Laughs is the largest international comedy festival. Cultural brands like Cirque du Soleil became global brands.
One could argue that Québec has all the ingredients needed to create from scratch without adapting.
Perhaps, this is simply one more example of how Québec borrows from proven TV brands and adapts them to local tastes:
Le banquier on TVA is modeled after Deal or No Deal
Star Académie is based on the Spanish format "Operación Triunfo".
She’s everywhere - including a show on the Food Network and a book titled “SKINNY CHICKS EAT REAL FOOD”.
She’s quintessential Hollywood.
Her profile states that she is a classically trained French chef, Certified Nutritionist, Media Spokesperson, TV Persona and Co-Host on Food Network’s show Fat Chef. She has been Hollywood’s go-to nutrition/culinary expert for celebrities such as Jeremy Piven, Audrina Patridge, Giuliana Rancic, Johnny Galecki, Paula Abdul, Rich Sommer, Jason Statham, Samantha Harris, Chelsea Handler, Henry Winkler, Kym Johnson, Steven Segal and Marcus Allen. Christine has counseled more than a thousand clients one-on-one in her private nutrition and fitness coaching practice located in New York City and Los Angeles, who have collectively lost more than 10,000 pounds.
Christine has shared her nutrition and culinary advice on the Today Show, Dancing with the Stars, Rachael Ray, The Doctors, Good Morning America, Oprah’s All Stars and dozens of others. Her insights can be found in magazines such as Vogue, W, New Beauty, Women’s Health, US Weekly, Health, Fitness, InStyle and many others.
She also recently endorsed The Skinny Vine launched in the US in January by Treasury Wine Estates, the Australian company behind Penfolds, Lindeman’s and Rosemount Estate. Yes. It’s wine for the calorie conscious.
According to an article by Peppi Crosariol in the Globe and Mail:
The Skinny Vine has shipments already exceeding 100,000 cases, the three wines – Slim Chardonnay, Thin Zin and Mini Moscato – weigh in at just 7.3– to 8.5-per-cent alcohol and 86 to 95 calories per five-ounce glass. That compares with an average of between 120 and 141 calories for comparable varietals made in California.
As expected, Christine’s visibility is enhanced by her extensive use of social networks. The day Peppi wrote about her endorsement of The Skinny Vine in the Globe, Christine tweeted “Got a great #shoutout today in The Globe! Many Thx @Beppi_Crosariol.
And on it goes...
Meet Dr. Isabelle Huot - Québec's version of Christine Avanti.
They share looks, a knack for getting exposure and a very smart business sense.
Isabelle Huot holds a PhD in Nutrition. One would think she also holds one in marketing with a specialty in personal branding.
I met her several years ago when she was a nutrition advisor for one of our clients and later became a spokesperson. Back then, she already had a binder full of press clippings to impress me during contract negotiations. There’s clearly no need for that binder anymore.
She is a successful entrepreneur who knows the importance of carefully cultivating her brand and generating visibility. The woman is everywhere in Québec.
She's on television. She is a regular contributor to TVA’s Salut Bonjour morning show. Québec’s version of The Today Show.
Salut Bonjour - TVA's morning show
She's in book stores. She has published six books with Les Éditions de l’homme (a division of Québecor Média)
One of six books published by Dr. Isabelle Huot
She's in advertising. She is the spokesperson for Québec commercial bakery St-Méthode. She appears in television advertising and her conseilsnutrition.tv advice is available via the bakery’s website.
She's on the web - in every way. Her ConseilsNutrition.tv website is classic content integration connecting the dots between the books, recipes, and online videos. It links to her website which goes a step further with a link to Kilo Solution, her nutrition and weight loss clinics.
Nutritional advice via web videos and other content
She's on cruise ships. Meet the doctor aboard a Royal Caribberan cruise ship. She’ll deliver conference themed “Nutrition at the heart of health”.
An invitation to hear her talk about nutrition while cruising the Caribbean
She’s on TVA’s Shopping Channel. Where she sells her line of food as part of her weight loss program.
She's on the radio. She has a regular segment on Rythme 105.7 FM in Montreal.
A radio commentator
She's in newspapers. She has a weekly column in Le Journal de Montréal (another Québecor Media property) where she delivers advice and she pitches her line of food. Why not treat promotion as news, if you can?
A weekly column
"News' reports
Or she reviews and recommends food products. Why not use that influence, if you can?
Reviewing and recommending products
She's in magazines. She is regularly featured on magazine covers.
Celebrity treatment on magazine covers
She’s on Twitter and Facebook. And she’s active.
Twitter & Facebook to engage and extend her reach
What’s missing?
Wine. I bet it won’t take long for the über nutritionist to start pitching it.
Agreement with the statement "I am confused about how to eat a healthy diet": 35% of French Quebeckers compared to 25% of Canadians in the rest of the country.
Four of the top five most trusted professions in the eyes of Canadians reside within the health care sector, while firefighters top the list of forty-one professions to come out as Canada’s most trust profession studied, according to a new Ipsos Reid poll conducted on behalf of Postmedia News and Global Television.
Nearly nine in ten (88%) Canadians say they trust firefighters, scoring them a 5, 6, or 7 on a trust scale of 1 to 7. Following closely are emergency medical technicians (86%), nurses (85%), and pharmacists (78%). Rounding out the top-five spots are doctors, who are trusted by 75% of the population.
There are no significant regional differences except for one profession - which, along with actors, taxi drivers, travel agents, airport security guards, nurses - was added to the list for this annual survey.
Quebeckers are more likely to say they trust 'chefs' than Canadians in the RoC.
35% rated chefs' trustworthiness a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is the most trustworthy and 1 is the least trustworthy compared to 27% nationally and less than 25% in B.C., Alberta,the Prairies and Ontario.
From celebrity chefs to simply celebrated chefs, they've become big business in Québec.
Chef Louis-François Marcotte
The site Recettes de chef offers a glimpse at the many chefs and their recipes.
Cuisine du Québec lets you discover 900 chefs across 17 regions of Québec.
Broadcasters can't get enough chefs on TV. TVA has recently been heavily promoting Louis-Françcois Marcotte's TV show and magazine.
Culinary magic in Québec
It is said that making mayonnaise requires culinary magic to perfectly blend an egg yolk, oil and lemon juice. The fascination with chefs in Québec is likely the result of the perfect blend of celebrity, love of food and local food sourcing and recipes.
For more on this, read this previous blog post on WQW by Marie-Claude Ducas.
According to this 2009 article published in Inc. magazine, “Even a casual mention of a product, exposed to her (Oprah’s) 44 million weekly viewers, is a boon for the company that makes or sells that product. Several companies from the 2009 Inc. 500|5000 have been so lucky as to score a spot on The Oprah Winfrey Show over the past three years, perhaps accounting for a great deal of their growth during that period.”
When Oprah endorses products and people, including a Presidential candidate, they’re adopted or elected. Read this Time article Under the Influence of Oprah for more.
Québec also has a talk show host, actor, comedian, producer who has Oprah-like influence.
Guy A. Lepage is the host of the immensely popular weekly talk show Tout le monde en parle on Radio Canada. The show typically draws over a million viewers each week. Although its audience has dropped under the million mark earlier this year.
Jack Layton was a guest on Tout le monde en parle during the last federal election. Guy A. Lepage called him a ‘bon Jack’ - a Québécois expression for a ‘good guy’. Quebeckers went on to vote for an orange wave of MPs. Many of them had not even bothered campaigning. The NDP’s success in the province can’t be attributed solely to Guy A. Lepage’s ‘bon Jack’ endorsement but I’d argue it was the tipping point. For more on this, read this previous blog post.
The high priest of Sunday night television also makes his views known outside his Tout le monde en parle soap box. He tweets regularly to his 115,000 followers.
He recently tweeted his outrage at juice maker Lassonde for its aggressive legal stance on a trademark issue. Over the course of a weekend, the issue went from a newspaper article in La Presse to an online explosion fueled in a large part by Guy A. Lepage’s announcement that he’d boycott Lassonde, a Québec Inc. success story. For more on this, read this previous blog post.
Last year, Guy A. Lepage was musing about boycotting Banque Nationale because its VP of IT was a unilingual anglophone. The headline in Le Devoir read: “Guy A. Lepage considers boycotting Banque National. ‘I can’t believe that we cannot find bilingual bankers!’
It would be an understatement to say that things are rather ‘tensed’ in Québec these days. And they may well get ‘tenser’ as the Charest government takes more drastic steps to end the student protests.
Québec’s Oprah is of course adding his voice to the debate.
In an article in yesterday’s Le Journal de Montréal about the preparations for the Fête nationale on June 24th, Guy A. Lepage says ‘there is collective indignation’ right now in Québec. The article claims that in the midst of a social crisis, the Fête nationale celebrations at the Maisonneuve park will be more political than ever and that artists aren’t afraid of words.
These are strong words from a powerful media personality.
Not long ago, the expression “Québec gastronomy” would easily have been dismissed as an oxymoron. No more. Today, the usual foreign media coverage about “la joie de vivre” in cities such as Montréal, Québec City, and in the province of Québec in general includes abundant references to high-quality restaurants of all ranges and prices, and of the innovative young chefs that lead them. This article published in August 2010 in the magazine Travel & Leisure is just one of many examples. More recently, New York’s celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was in Montréal shooting an episode of his TV show The Layover. He later sang the praises of the "uniquely crazy, uniquely individualistic and rugged and excessive and wonderful” cuisine there.
These are some of the leading figures that have been attracting attention for a while: Normand Laprise, who created Toqué! in 1993 in Montréal; Martin Picard, chef and founder of Montréal’s Au Pied de Cochon, who first reached celebrity thanks to his infamous “Poutine au foie gras” (more on that later); and Daniel Vézina of Québec City’s Laurie Raphaël, who branched out in Montréal five years ago.
Normand Laprise of Toqué!: one of the trailblazers of Québec's "chef set".
All three were part, this spring, of a panel titled Y a-t-il une gastronomie québécoise (Is there a Québec gastronomy?), organized by Montréal’s daily La Presse. According to this article by columnist Marie-Claude Lortie who has covered extensively food and gastronomy in Montréal, you could sum up the answer with: “yes, but…”. Yes, there is a Québec gastronomy, but it is still being built, according to Normand Laprise. It does not have millennial roots like Chinese gastronomy, no elaborate code like French cuisine, has not been exported everywhere like Italian dishes have been, and does not have the revolutionary exuberance of the new Spanish cuisine.
Still, a consensus has emerged remarkably quickly over what characterizes the new “Québécois cuisine”. It involves, among other things, rehabilitating and upgrading some traditional and often low-brow dishes such as the “pâté chinois” (Québec’s version of the shepherd’s pie), the tourtière (traditional Québécois meat pie), and using some local products that people have long tended to disregard such as corn, potatoes, maple syrup and other ingredients that are found on traditional sugar shack menus. Talking about maple syrup, there’s a movement pushing for the recognition of the regional differences in the same logic of the “appellations contrôlées” for the different wine regions of France.
The impact of some of those innovative chefs has been magnified by their presence in the media, and of course by the books they publish. Picard has taken part in the series Martin sur la route, broadcast on Radio-Canada, and which he referred to as “his road movie”. An English version was broadcast on Canada’s The Food Network, under the title “The Wild Chef”. Daniel Vézina has a show on the specialized network Zeste, Québec’s answer to The Food Channel. And he will be host, for the third time this summer, of “Les chefs”, a reality-TV-style program featuring aspiring chefs (Normand Laprise is one of the judges).
What is becoming known as Québec’s gastronomy also involves some daring mashups between some aspects of traditional French gastronomy and the Québécois heritage that’s strongly permeated by the North American way of life. In that regard, it is Québec’s manifestation of a trend that is emerging everywhere in Canada: the wave of “blended cuisine”, which followed the diversification of the population, the proliferation of ethnic food restaurant, the availability of imported and exotic foods in grocery and specialty stores, a growing awareness of the health benefits of following certain diets associated with some ethnic cultures (“Mediterranean”, of course, comes to mind.). It is one aspect that is constantly praised about Québec’s leading restaurants: they’ve been able to marry the sophistication of imported European gastronomy with a relaxed atmosphere more in touch with the American mentality.
Martin Picard's "Poutine au fois gras": don't ask about the cholesterol level. (Source for the picture)
Some of Québec’s trailblazers in the “chef set” have French roots, such as Jérôme Ferrer, founder and owner of Europea, Andiamo and Beaver Hall Bistro. Most of the others have done at least part of their training in France. Picard has had the idea of upgrading the “poutine”, consisting originally of French fries with gravy and cheese curds. He composed his own recipe, involving prime quality ingredients, and adding homegrown Québec foie gras. No one wants to know about the cholesterol levels... But it made Picard an international star.
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Marie-Claude Ducas is a journalist and blogger specializing in communications, marketing and media, and the past editor-in-chief of Infopresse, Québec's leading publication in the field of communications and marketing. You can also read her posts in French at marieclaudeducas.com.
In case you've missed it - here's a great article by Kate Taylor in the Toronto Star.
An excerpt:
In marked contrast to English Canada, Quebec is a textbook case of national identity and popular culture mutually reinforcing each other.
“They have created their own TV universe,” notes Arnie Gelbart, president of the bilingual Montreal film and TV production company Galafilm. “Both the commercial (TV) audience and the CBC audience prefer local content and local actors. It is self-reinforcing . . . It’s a cocoon, and it’s 180 degrees different from English Canada.”
In English Canada, American hits aired by commercial broadcasters, such as Survivor, Grey’s Anatomy and Criminal Minds, rule the ratings.
In francophone Canada, that list is dominated by Quebec game shows, talk shows, reality contests, soap operas and dramas, some of them created by Radio-Canada but the bulk of them produced by the commercial broadcaster TVA.
A hit such as Le Banquier, TVA’s adaptation of Deal or No Deal, can draw audiences as big as 1.5 million in a market of seven million francophone Canadians, six million of whom live in Quebec. That would be like drawing five million viewers in English Canada, a feat that no game show, Canadian or American, would ever achieve.
Of course, Quebec is protected from Hollywood’s influence by the language barrier, but many European TV schedules, which have increasingly featured dubbed American content in prime time since the introduction of new commercial channels in the 1990s, are put to shame by Quebec’s originality. There is something more at play here than language.
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