Beef Stock

David McMillan never leaves you wondering. The co-chef and co-owner of Montréal restaurant Joe Beef, in Australia for the first time for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, is a man of strong and blunt opinions that he’s not shy about sharing.

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There is, for instance, his take on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. “It’s something I have a problem with,” he says. “It’s highly élitist restaurants for the richest, most well-travelled, most sophisticated one per cent of the world. That’s not my goal; I don’t want that to be my life. I want to enjoy cooking – I don’t want a chef in a white vest screaming at me or working for me. I don’t want to work in even a top 1,000 restaurant. I don’t abide by that system.”

“I want to work in a very good restaurant that has very close ties with the winemakers and the cheese-makers it has on its lists. I want to speak to my oyster guy while he’s on his boat. I can’t be a farmer – I’m not, I’m a cook. But I’ll practise agriculture in downtown Montréal in a 10-square-metre kitchen vicariously, through the farmers who surround us.”

It is this tension – loving the acts of cooking and running a restaurant but hating the dining scene – that has earned McMillan and his long-time co-chef and business partner, Frédéric Morin, an international following, and something of a cult status among fellow chefs.

The late Anthony Bourdain hung out with them on an episode of Parts Unknown, and David Chang has called Joe Beef his favourite restaurant. Their first cookbook, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef, has clocked close to 100,000 copies sold. Their recently released second book, a hefty volume called Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse and coming in at more than 300 pages, includes recipes for crisp frogs legs, pickled deer necks, soap and cough drops, plus a lift-out dedicated to correctly stocking a bunker.