Montréal style (meat pie, a British-inspired dish) or Lac-St-Jean style (a French - Renaissance-eral - inspired dish)?

Ah.. it may well have been a kind of family dish derived from that, but I think he says it was a Wallon classic (the French and Italians have a similar habit of upgrading family dishes to classic status! The next village usually never heard of it!). I recall he was pretty adamant that it required fresh spinach and a specific type of potato (a kind also used a lot in Alsace), which at the time (20 years ago) was easier said than done in the middle of february. He's from the Bruxelles area, and wallon. I also remember Jean-Luc telling me the Belgian dishes I knew to cook were all of Flemish origin, and that he rarely ate those at home as a kid and never cooked them.

I think it was gaufres de Liège as I'm pretty sure Julien's family and his wife's are from that area. It was heavier than what gets sold frozen as "gaufres de Bruxelles" here. and it got a special kind of sugar in it - that gets sort of crunchy under the tooth rather than powered sugar being dusted over it as it's done in Belgian restaurants around here.

We told him we often pour maple syrup over waffles here, but he wanted nothing to do with that (but a local chef, French-born, toured Belgium on a TV show last year and he was teaching Belgian cooks how to use maple syrup in innovative ways in cooking and baking. One of the Belgian chefs did try to incorporate it in a classic Bruxelles gaufre mix and he loved the result. He was saying it would be too expensive in Belgium, though.

We do have a street food car (those are new-ish, at the time you came here there were none as street food was forbidden) operated by a Belgian selling gaufres in winter, but I've never got the chance to catch it. We have less Belgian immigrants than French ones (the French are really everywhere - you rarely go long in Montréal without overhearing one of the French accents these days), but there's still quite a few.