Mireille Silcoff plays host to guests of different professional backgrounds and ages at her Hot Chain salon events, held at the Museum of Jewish Montreal.Ezra Soiferman/Supplied
It was probably around the time someone mentioned Voltaire and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that I started to feel I was really at a salon.
The word “salon” has always conjured 18th-century France and the philosophes who gathered in the living rooms of aristocratic women to toss around the ideas that would become the French Revolution.
We were almost there. Yes, this was Montreal instead of Paris, and, sure, in place of quail-egg canapés (or whatever) there were bowls of jelly beans.
But we also had wine and semi-circular seating and an assortment of interesting people – including an AI entrepreneur, a prominent cantor from a local synagogue and a thirtysomething woman who helps billionaires give away their money – throwing out witty comments and sparking off each other.
Maybe more importantly, we had our hostess, a crucial element of any salon: a woman – and it is just about always a woman – whose personality and intellect act as a conductor of conversational electricity.
On this night writer Mireille Silcoff was doing her best impression of Julie de Lespinasse, “the soul and the charm” of a celebrated 1760s salon where authors of the great Encyclopédie gathered to exchange their latest brainwaves.
Guests are sent advance reading to give them a common starting point for discussion.Ezra Soiferman/Supplied
I’m not sure there were any Diderots or d’Alemberts among us guests, but Silcoff had her part down cold. She was dressed in a burnt-sienna gown and toeless velvet pumps, fresh off a New York Times cover story about the surprisingly thrilling sex lives of Gen Xers, hers included. The chosen theme of the evening was “escape,” and soon we were riffing on the “internal migrations” of Eastern European intellectuals under communism; the relationship between social media and political action; the joys of MDMA and hot yoga; the need for “third spaces” of non-professional, non-domestic sociability; and the power and perils of boredom. The conversation flitted around the subject like moths around a bonfire. The bonfire was Silcoff.
Hot Chain, the cryptic title of these events, is her baby. It has become a buzzy success in Montreal and now she’s looking to export the model to Toronto, New York and other cities. The 18th-century salons led indirectly to the storming of the Bastille, and Silcoff wants to create her own kind of revolution: nothing less ambitious than teaching our atomized, screen-addled, pandemic-scarred age how to have a conversation again.
Most evenings of most people’s lives in the already dismal year of 2025 resemble the opposite of Hot Chain. We don’t go out. We don’t dress up. We don’t converse. An iPhone is often our only companion. We scroll. We binge.
It’s a bleak portrait of modern life, and maybe a bit exaggerated, but Silcoff sees it with the shocked clarity of a Rip Van Winkle. Her life can be broken into three sections: the hyper-social youth of a club kid and literary scenester, a long descent into chronic illness and isolation, and a sudden, clear-eyed re-emergence into the land of the living. She thinks it makes her the right sort of apostle for the lost art of talking to each other.
The ground rules for Hot Chain are elaborate, designed to keep fresh blood and fresh thinking flowing into the gathering.Lisa Milosavljevic/Supplied
Silcoff was born in Montreal and came of age in the city’s vibrant rave scene of the 1980s and 90s. Ecstasy and electronic music brought people together in ample loft spaces and forged a community on the dance floor. Silcoff was soon integral to the scene, becoming the first nightclub columnist for the alt-weekly Montreal Mirror, which in turn launched her career as a journalist.
Montreal was weird and cheap in those days, and unexpected social groupings came together in the chaotic ferment of anglophone exodus and economic depression. One of them was the Nicholson salon, a Wednesday night gathering presided over by David, an “eccentric gentleman” in a red blazer and patterned socks, and his wife, Diana, in their Westmount mansion. The Nicholsons hosted the high and the low of Montreal society, provided they were interesting. There was always a lot of wine.
Silcoff was an occasional guest, trading quips with business titans and politicians while continuing to slum it in the gritty world of late-nineties Montreal nightlife and indie journalism. Inspired by the surprising exchanges you could have there, she started her own salon when she moved to Toronto for a job at the fledgling National Post.
The Silcoff salon soon outgrew her midtown apartment, moving to the basement of the newly renovated and suddenly trendy Drake Hotel. The gathering ran for two years and spawned offshoots in New York, L.A. and San Francisco, along with a quarterly literary magazine called Guilt and Pleasure that amassed 20,000 subscribers.
Meanwhile, Silcoff could hardly get out of bed. She had been stricken with what was later diagnosed as spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leaks, a rare condition in which the liquid cushioning around the brain drains away, causing excruciating headaches and concussion-like symptoms. The thrill of her fizzy professional success was smothered by debilitating pain.
“This thing was blowing up and I was increasingly incapable of being upright,” Silcoff said.
The next 15 years were a fog of neurological illness, a time of pulling back and hunkering down. Silcoff was already married and gave birth to two daughters during this period, but her social life shrank almost to nothing.
No couples are allowed, to avoid clustering. The dress code: ‘Make an effort.’Ezra Soiferman/Supplied
Only after a doctor at Duke University in North Carolina figured out a treatment for her in 2019 did she begin to venture back out into the world. Having awoken in a society utterly changed by the advent of smartphones and social media, Silcoff found herself appalled by some of what she observed.
“As soon as I got my wits about me, I looked around at the world and how atomized it had become – how people couldn’t look each other in the eye, how lonely everyone was, and how the art of interacting was just fraying,” she said. It was time to revive the salon. Hot Chain – originally planned as a kind of online chain letter, hence the name – was on its way to being born.
The ground rules are elaborate, designed to keep fresh blood and fresh thinking flowing into the gathering. Silcoff drew up an initial guest list, but subsequent salons have been organized on the basis of nominations from past attendees. No couples are allowed, to avoid clustering. Advance reading is sent in handsomely packaged hard copy to give guests a common starting point for discussion. Dress code: “Make an effort.” Event manager Anya Kowalchuk keeps the wheels turning smoothly.
The Museum of Jewish Montreal – former home of the restaurant, bar and icon of Montreal’s golden age of nightlife, Le Lux – was a natural home. Silcoff, who is Jewish, feels that her version of the salon is inscribed in a distinctly Jewish lineage: the ancient lineage of rich and disputatious schmoozing.
“There is a long tradition of Jewish salonnières,” she said. “This kind of almost Talmudic discussion – discussion for discussion’s sake – feels like quite a Jewish endeavour.”
At the same time, diversity is in the marrow of Hot Chain – religious and to a lesser extent ethnic, but also of professional backgrounds and points of view. The salon has played host to local pop-music royalty, porn producers and video-game developers (all signature Montreal industries) along with the more predictable corps of professors and writers. Guests runs the gamut from Gen Z to boomer – a key quality for a thinker as fascinated by generational schisms as Silcoff is.
The atmosphere on a recent blizzardy night was like what you would find at the best university seminar you’ve ever attended, where all the students are trying to impress their cool prof. Silcoff was the pivot point, always, bestowing permission to speak on pupils with hands eagerly raised. A quiet sense of one-upmanship raised everyone’s game: the jokes got a little funnier, the riffs a little more fluid, the thoughts a little more profound as the night went on and the wine got refilled and the bar of wit and wisdom got raised.
It wasn’t quite a conversation – there were more than 50 participants, and the existence of a moderator ensured that everyone got a word in while interrupting some promising trains of thought.
The “escape” theme got a real workout all the same. The name Donald Trump wasn’t uttered once, but he was the backdrop to everything: the existential threat that so many people in 2025 feel the need to escape from – into phones, or meditation, or drugs or some inner world of apolitical contemplation.
With snowdrifts piling up outside, along with a host of contemporary neuroses and disappointments, there were far worse escapes than Silcoff’s salon. The 18th century should have been so lucky.
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