My wife and I had our plan all set. A mid-winter escape—not to southern, beachy latitudes but, rather, a zig when everybody else seemed to be zagging: To the north, Canada, Quebec. And no, not to Montreal, but to a remote-ish inn tucked into the snowy woods next to a frozen lake. Shockingly, our kids were on board with all of this—there was, after all, a ski mountain nearby—until we told them we would be driving.
If you’ve ever spent eight hours in a car with two young children, you’re likely questioning my sanity at this moment. My children certainly were.
What they didn’t know: Mercedes had loaned me their Maybach SUV—the Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 4MATIC SUV, to be precise. Suffice to say: Problem solved. Once my kids saw the backseat expanse which would be their paradise for the trip, I could have told them the drive was 36 hours and they would probably have thanked me.
The central conceit of these wondrous vehicles: While they’re exquisite to drive, with all the power and precision you could ask for, they’re deceptively elegant, in almost a minimal way, from the outside. Step into one, though, and prepare to have your mind blown: Lush leather seats, of course, which can be both heated or cooled, and which remember the exact position you’d adjusted it to last time you sat in them, with the back seats reclining almost entirely—adjust your footrests and you essentially have a plush bed to nap or sleep in. The roof is almost entirely retractable, leaving a glass ceiling through which to stargaze while reclining in said plush bed. Oh, and there’s a champagne fridge tucked between the rear seats, replete with flutes (unfortunately, my children were too young to take advantage of this feature).
So, yeah: The drive up was a breeze, with an overnight in a small New Hampshire town (sorry, small town, for our family crashing your bowling alley’s league night) and a meandering finish as we crossed the border and arrived at Manoir Hovey with just enough time to settle in and relax for a bit before dinner.
The 39-room Manoir Hovey and its attendant 35 acres—part of the Relais & Chateaux association—overlook Quebec’s Lake Massawippi just outside the quaint town of North Hatley, about 90 minutes east of Montreal. Initially built in 1900 as a Mount Vernon-inspired summer home for Henry Atkinson, the founder of Georgia Power, who trained up from Atlanta, the property was converted into a hotel in the 1950s and named after a local settler. President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton have stayed there twice, as have former French President Jacques Chirac and his wife, as well as a host of prominent actors, musicians, and the like—though if you’re going there to see celebrities, you’ve probably got the wrong idea. Manoir Hovey may be routinely on lists of Canada’s—and, indeed, the world’s—great hotels, but it’s an extremely low-key kind of chic. Think quiet luxury, and then think quieter.
But about that dinner. Let’s just say that while some come to Manoir Hovey to get away from it all—to skate on the winter ice, row on the summer lake, and otherwise simply unwind in various ways—many, if not most of their clientele aren’t trying to escape anything. They’ve made a beeline here to experience some of the best food (and wine, and cheeses, and desserts) one can find in the country.
As I quickly learned—dinner after masterful dinner at Le Hatley, Manoir Hovey’s justly famous restaurant—Chef Alexandre Vachon, whose own roots are French-Canadian, is an artist of the highest order, one who has made a name for himself by incorporating his creations to somehow align with the abundant nature that we were surrounded by. By using local producers, of course, making things like honey harvesting plenty more ingredients on-site when possible, as well as playing with the tropes of local cuisines. (It’s not only flower petals but small branches and local sponges that make appearances on tables and dishes.)
Night after night we feasted on agnolotti with squash, hazelnut, and Hillhurst cheese; chitarra with squid ink; one of the best quail (with risotto and truffle) I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot; duck foie gras; and mind-blowing desserts from the simple to the exquisite—the highlight being a citrus tart with lime and fir shortbread, grapefruit mousse, and limoncello ice cream. Requiring somewhat less culinary mastery? Our ridiculously picky children were served their same preferred off-menu plain pasta with butter—with absolutely no garnish, please—whenever required to keep the peace, with a simple bowl of ice cream for dessert. And, yeah, we’re working on it.
The next morning after breakfast—eggs and pancakes and berries and butter and fresh croissants and cheeses and yogurts and smoothies and juices and coffees, all arrayed next to a roaring fireplace—I looked out the window of our suite at all of that empty ice covering Lake Massawippi and decided to lace my skates up and do something about it. Manoir Hovey maintains a small dedicated cove of the ice nearest to the property for those who like, or need, a modest enclosure to circle, but I quickly moved past that and onto the vast lake itself. (Full disclosure: In winter months, I revel in skating pretty much any ice, all the ice, anywhere, as often as I can.)
Imagine your local ice rink—or, if you’re not lucky enough to have one, imagine a hockey rink. Now imagine thousands of them put together—but ringed by trees, with the only sound that of the blades on my skates carving lines onto the top of the ice. If the Maybach was one kind of luxury and Manoir Hovey another, this was a third venture into the same territory. (Although the usual rules of lake skating apply here: Check with a local who knows ice conditions before venturing out onto any frozen lake.)
Just when it seemed like I might just keep skating forever, I was—almost shockingly—hungry again, and so I met up with the family at Le Tap Room (also on-property), a kind of casual lunchtime hang—albeit one with a stellar wine list, killer beef bourguignon and Abenaki poutine, and a vast array of beers and desserts. It inaugurated a kind of half-indulgent, half-adventurous routine we settled into for a few days: Eat, tromp or trek or skate or ski, eat, sleep, repeat.
My son and I borrowed snowshoes from the Manoir and set out on some nearby trails, over the river and through the woods; when another morning showed new stacks of fresh powder on the lake, we hopped back in the Maybach and drove 20 or so minutes to Mont Orford to ski for the day. Driving back to the Manoir in absolute darkness, I remembered that we were near the first international dark-sky reserve in the world (meaning: only minimal artificial lighting, which also means a canopy of stars overhead like you’ve never seen before). We enjoyed yet another sumptuous meal and fell asleep in our suite to crackling fires.
On our final day, we met up with Florent Hébert, the Manoir’s designated local fishing guide, out on the frozen Massawippi for some ice fishing. (For the uninitiated: Ice fishing generally means that you walk out on a lake, drill a hole in the ice, put your baited hook through the hole down into the water, and wait and wait and wait for a fish to bite.) This being the Manoir Hovey, though, and Florent being Florent, this was hardly the you-against-the-elements spartan struggle that it can sometimes be.
When we first meet Florent, he’s stoking a warming fire and lighting a wood-fired pizza oven. We spend the next couple of hours with him hearing wild stories about the area’s history and inhabitants and, yes, attempting to learn the secrets of ice fishing. For reasons I’m still trying to sort out, my young son pulled pike and walleye and lake trout hand over fist from beneath the frozen ice, while my wife, daughter, and I caught exactly nothing. But never mind: The pizza was fantastic, the stories even more so, there was hot chocolate for all, and the experience is something that our family still talks about.
On our final night, Chef Vachon—already a hero—joined the ranks of legend, sending out individual oysters in individual lidden vitrines, each of them more like an organic Joseph Cornell box than a mere appetizer, followed by an endless array of tiny, thoughtful courses of pasta and meats and fishes and spices and finishing with a work of modern sculpture disguised as a cream-based dessert.
The only thing we didn’t experience was the Manoir’s spa, then just being finished, in and around a new building just between the main lodgings and the lake. So to all of the above, one can now add an infinity pool, hot tubs, a steam room, a dry sauna, and treatment rooms of all kinds. So, yes, there will be a return trip involving a Himalayan salt scrub.
Sad as it was to leave the Manoir Hovey, piling back into the Maybach for a (thankfully) long drive home took a bit of the sting away. How much did we love that car? When we got home, we left the kids with the sitter, picked up a couple of friends, and went joy-riding around Manhattan—after all, someone had to road-test that champagne fridge between the back seats.
