As a city, Montreal is no more representative of Québec the province than Québec is of Canada. Similarly, Boulevard St-Laurent—Montreal's central north-south spine—both typifies the city's ethnocultural diversity and simplifies the complex patchwork of neighborhoods, communities, and regions of the city.

Yet St-Laurent, Montreal, and Québec all share a perpetual state of evolution—and an assembled nature that means that these places' foodways are emergent, rather than causal. Certainly this emergence plays itself out at varying speeds, and while at times and in places 'traditions' may appear to be static, stability has been neither a feature of the larger nation nor its more granular components.

What, then, would be the meal of these places? What would be the gastronomic manifestation that the street or the city or the province would eat, to both express its culture and reinforce its sense of individual identity?