Hot chicken sandwich, pulled pork poutine
Standing resolutely on a Plantagenet hilltop at the corner of Old Highway 17 and Du Comte (the fact that it is “old” #17 just seems to make things all the more resolute), Patati Patata et Bar Laitier will celebrate its 35th anniversary in spring 2026. The stand is closing soon, but you still have some perfect fall weather left to check it out in 2025, if you haven’t done so.
More than a third of a century is a very long time for a food operation, so kudos to owner Chantal Lapensee and family for weathering the vagaries of the economy, pandemics, winter closures, evolving customer tastes and the general see-saw that is running any sort of business.
Lapensee, a teacher and school principal by training, and her husband Alain Chartrand, a former Air Canada employee, bought the chip stand in 1991. For a variety of reasons, they sold the business a year later only to buy it back again after a period of time.
“It’s my baby!” Lapensee says, of the family business. “It’s me and my husband and two daughters, also teachers, who work nights and weekends during the summer along with ten other employees.”
The stand itself had been moved to a couple of different locations by a previous owner over the years, but the variety of goods on the menu – “this, that and the other” you might say to which the phrase “et patati et patata” alludes – has been a longstanding one too.
You file up the stairs – there are often cars lining the street and people queued to order at the window – pay for your food and take a small wireless pager that buzzes and lights up to inform you that your order is coming out the side door for you to pick up. I’ve been to several very busy casual upscale pubs where you are armed with a similar pager but not a chip stand. There’s some parking space and a few picnic tables with umbrellas on the property.
On the menu, you’ll find hamburgers (including one that mimicks The Big Mac), whistle dogs, chili dogs and pogos, in addition to a hot chicken sandwich.
This is not a Nashville-style breaded cayenne-spicy hot chicken sandwich made famous at joints like the OG venue Prince’s Hot Chicken (and one of the late Anthony Bourdain’s favourites) but rather something that seems like a U.S. lunch-counter deli throwback along with its hefty cousin the hot hamburg sandwich….
