Toronto’s ‘Unicorn Poutine’ Gives Quebec a Great New Reason to Separate

The rest of Canada has taken another big ol’ dump on Quebec’s rich cultural heritage. This time, the culprit is a Toronto restaurant serving up “unicorn poutine”.

The restaurant, the Enchanted Poutinerie, is effectively serving a regular poutine, but has laid its hands on multi-coloured cheese curds to put on top of fries. (With the restaurant’s menu stating that the curds are from Quebec, it seems likely that those curds have been dyed at the restaurant itself, since no self-respecting Quebec fromagerie should offer such a product.)

But the circus doesn’t stop there: it also has created a multi-coloured gravy to pour on top of it. That’s almost a feat of food engineering: Gravy is typically a pretty brown substance, so to get it discoloured enough to allow food colouring to shine through in such a lurid way is, um, challenging. (Even white gravy, as might be found in parts of the U.S., probably doesn’t lend itself to this kind of dye-job.) Frankly, it looks like ‘90s Nickelodeon toy Gak, melted and poured on potatoes.

The existence of the Enchanted Poutinerie has mostly gone under the radar since it opened in 2018 — while the unicorn poutine is clearly an attempt to get viral attention (and perhaps this article has fallen into that trap), it had never really drawn any attention until this Sunday, when the official Canada Twitter account tweeted an image of the birthday cake diarrhea poutine.

As if to offer up a bonus screw-you to Quebec, the French equivalent of the Canada account also tweeted out a picture of the poutine.

After the Canada Twitter account single-handedly validated Quebec’s sovereigntist movement, people bit back with various versions of “no” and “ew”.

Oddly enough, the rest of the Enchanted Poutinerie’s menu is mostly fine — there’s a classic poutine, a breakfast one, and various other fusion options that might even pass muster in Quebec. Its owners state that they opened the restaurant because they loved “making crazy poutine concoctions” — and fine, jerk chicken poutine is an out-of-the-box dish that seems like it could have appeal. A box of fries covered in blue and purple meat-frosting? Not so much.

Remember how back in 2017, Quebecers were concerned that the rest of Canada was culturally appropriating poutine? Well, this travesty pretty much proves that point: not only is the rest of the country lifting poutine (and in some parts, serving it with grated cheese), but they’re also doing horrible things to it, like disguising it as a pile of multi-coloured vomit. (Fine, regular poutine already does look a little pukey, but at least it’s appetizing.) Please, just leave it to us.

• Canada calls unicorn poutine ‘magical’; Quebecers have other words for it [CTV]