'Poutine' is not otherwise a word in French, aside from referring to the Quebecois fat-saturated food. People 'embraced phony phonetics, unanimously choosing to mispronounce the name of the president of Russia,' as the New York Times' language columnist wrote in 2005. So French-speakers, at some point around Putin's rise to power in 1999, instead decided to be diplomatic. If written as 'Putin' in French, Putin's name is spoken in a way that sounds very close to 'putain,' which is one of the most common French curse words. The word's strange double meaning goes a long way back, and it has its roots in avoiding an even more awkward choice of word. The restaurant's owner couldn't be reached for comment about how long they plan to avoid saying the name of their signature dish or what kind of threats they've gotten in response. 'If we could make someone smile there, that's already a win! We are with you from the bottom of our hearts.' 'Very touching to learn that our tiny message of support has been sent from Drummondville all the way to Ukraine!' the restaurant wrote. On Saturday, the restaurant's staff wrote an update, saying they'd learned of a message of thanks given by a Ukrainian, speaking on Radio-Canada television, who had learned of the gesture. It later took down the post, telling media it had received hateful phone calls and was nervous, but its Facebook page still describes it as the 'inventor of the fries-cheese-gravy.' 'Tonight the Jucep team decided to temporarily retire the word P***tine from its trademark in order to express, in its own way, its profound dismay over the situation in Ukraine.' 'Dear clients,' the restaurant wrote in an online post on Friday. Invariably, in France, Quebec and other French-speaking places, the Russian president is written as 'Vladimir Poutine.'

The spot is famous enough that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even stopped there once on Quebec's national holiday and filmed a video paying homage to poutine.īut that word also happens to be the French translation for Putin's name. The dish is, of course, poutine, Quebec's most famous comfort food, and Le Roy Jucep claims to have invented it in the 1950s. The diner Le Roy Jucep, in the small city of Drummondville, announced on Facebook on Friday that it was calling itself 'the inventor of the fries-cheese-gravy.' In 2022, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, at least one Quebec restaurant has come up with its own way of denouncing Vladimir Putin - though cutting his name out of the local lexicon is much harder than it seems.

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