The Dufferin Terrace in Quebec City has been home to the ice slide since 1884.Etienne Dionne/Supplied
For obvious reasons, Florida was off the table this year for our family getaway. The alternative to an all-inclusive beach resort with our two boys, I figured, was to head even deeper into the winter. And I knew just where to go: Quebec City, a place that embraces the season, and where a turreted castle on a hill awaited us.
Our timing was excellent. After a couple of days of above-zero temperatures, the mercury had dropped into the negative double digits. Our early-morning VIA Rail train out of Montreal was rimed with streaks of ice, and, as we plunged through a landscape of farmers’ fields and evergreens robed in a thick shroud of snow, horns blaring, it felt like we were on a Canadian version of the Snowpiercer.
This rustic lodge two hours from Montreal is the place for true Quebec winter fun
Quebec City’s Gare du Palais is the perfect gateway to a city that, as 19th-century journalist Léon Paul Blouet put it, looks like the French city of St. Malo strayed up north and got lost in the snow. Built in 1915, the train station is a confection of copper turrets, limestone and sandy-coloured brick, one that set the stage for an even more fantastic relic of the glory days of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s tourism empire. A short taxi ride through narrow streets brought us to our home for the weekend, the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac.
In our room, we only had a few minutes to enjoy the view of the traversiers (passenger ferries) elbowing their way through the ice because our sons Desmond, 14, and Victor, almost 10, were already pulling on their snow pants. In return for leaving their devices at home, my wife Erin and I promised them unlimited rides on Quebec City’s version of a roller coaster. And it was right beside our hotel.
The Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City.Citizen North/Fairmont Le Château Frontenac/Supplied
Since 1884, the Dufferin Terrace, a boardwalk which overlooks the 18th-century houses huddled in the Basse-Ville (Lower Town), has been home to the ice slide, which is perched 83 metres above the shores of the St. Lawrence River. As we trudged up the sloping staircase, with Desmond in the lead pulling an old-fashioned toboggan, I chatted with Marc Duchesne, the current owner of the concession, who explained that the entire wooden structure has to be raised anew every winter, using 8,000 metal screws.
He’s able to keep the ticket price low – $5 for a single ride, $18 for a family of four – because of the high volume: in December of last year alone, they sold 55,000 tickets, and about as many cups of hot chocolate. Duchesne reckons that, when conditions are good, a fully loaded toboggan can hit 70 kilometres an hour.
One by one, Victor, Desmond, Erin and I clambered on board and then we were racing down one of the slide’s three icy grooves, flashing beneath arcs of fairy lights, so fast that I thought I was going to lose my tuque. At the bottom, I asked Victor, who had been sitting in front, and screaming the loudest, for his reaction.
“Dad,” he said. “That ride shivered my timbers!”
The ice slide sits 83 metres above the shores of the St. Lawrence River.Etienne Dionne/Supplied
For dinner, we walked two short blocks to Restaurant Wong, whose neon sign has been glowing across the street from the spires of the Notre-Dame basilica since 1960. Chef Steven Wong has reinterpreted his father’s old-school menu, forging a fusion of Cantonese standards with contemporary Québécois terroir.
Desmond made short work of a sticky half-order of baby back ribs, marinated in a ginger and hoisin sauce, and my wife and I shared appetizers of burrata in a yuzu and Asian pear compote, along with dumplings filled with chanterelles and lobster. Even Victor, for whom anything spicy is radioactive, happily slurped up his bowl of wonton noodle soup.
The next morning, after the boys launched an assault on the hotel’s breakfast buffet – proving it is possible to have crêpes, chocolatines, waffles, muffins and bacon in one meal – we returned to the Dufferin Terrace. Descending the aptly named Escalier Casse-Cou (the Breakneck Staircase), we did some window-shopping on Rue du Petit Champlain, the Basse-Ville’s photogenic main tourist drag.
When Desmond started to complain of the cold, we ducked into a milk bar called Chocolato for hot chocolates. Getting back to the hotel from the Basse-Ville was easy: We boarded the Funiculaire du Vieux-Québec, an incline railway that has been whisking people up to the Terrace Dufferin since 1879.
Back at the hotel, where the boys took off down the halls in bathrobes and stocking feet to check out the pool and hot tub, I joined a tour led by Bruce Price, the original architect of Château Frontenac. Well, it was led by a simulacrum of Maryland-born Price played by top-hatted guide Israël Gamache, whose work with Cicerone Tours gives him privileged access to the hotel’s lesser-known ballrooms and hidden corridors.
Price – er, Gamache – led us to the book-lined rotunda where Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis once held court, and shared the story of how an employee prevented a world-altering leak by turning in a carelessly discarded copy of the plans for the D-Day invasion, which was plotted at the hotel by Roosevelt and Churchill.
Guests can dine at a table made of ice at the Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Glace.Supplied
Erin and I decided we could safely leave our boys – supplied with tickets for the ice slide – for a couple of hours while we boarded a shuttle from the Château Frontenac to Valcartier, a 45-minute drive north. We were looking forward to an experiment in Arctic gastronomy at the newly launched Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Glace – the Ice Hotel.
After a welcome drink, served in an icy rectangular goblet by a bartender wearing heated mittens, we were led to our tables and chairs, which were also sculpted out of blocks of transparent ice, though fortunately spread with butt-sparing furs.
The truffled consommé of duck breast at the Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Glace.Supplied
The menu, devised by the chefs at the Château Frontenac, began with a pair of foie gras cake-pops encased in dark chocolate. This was followed by a truffled consommé of duck breast, roofed with a lightly baked crust, and a très Québécois main course of rack of venison served in a Grand Veneur sauce, and dotted with lingonberries. Each course was rushed from the overheated kitchen trailer outside on a toboggan to the dining room, where the ambient temperature was eight below zero.
The room was cold enough that I needed ski gloves to pick up the ceramic soup bowl by its lion-headed handles. When dessert came, we relished the meagre warmth of the drizzle of hot chocolate sauce our waiter poured over the clover-flavoured marshmallow and molten chocolate cake.
As fun as it was to embrace the cold, we were more than happy to be ending the night with our kids, snug in the double beds of our cozy riverside castle.
Fairmont Le Château Frontenac/Supplied
If you go
Dinner at the Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Glace, including a welcome drink, a tour of the ice hotel and shuttle to and from the Château Frontenac, is $255 a person. It can be booked at valcartier.com
A main course at Restaurant Wong runs from $20 to $35, restaurantwong.com.
Main courses on the kid-friendly menu at Café Buade, Quebec City’s oldest restaurant, cost between $12 to $23, cafebuade.ca.
Rooms at Fairmont Le Château Frontenac start at $337.
The writer was a guest of Destination Québec cite. It did not review or approve the story before publication.
