Where to eat CANADA 🇨🇦 Lausanne: Les Gosses du Québec

Les Gosses du Québec

Avenue de la Gare 22, Lausanne

What we ordered: For two persons, one poutine and to drink, three bottles of Molson and a sparkling water.

Cost: 49 CHF / €50 / $54

Les Gosses du Québec (“the kids of Québec,” or as a friend wrote after we published, "in French slang, 'gosses' means kids, however in French Canadian, it means 'tits'") is a sports bar for hockey enthusiasts and fans of all those commonwealth sports that never quite made it big in America nor became grist for global popularity on quite the scale of the NBA, for example. Hockey though is a major sport in Switzerland and thank god for it, because it means Les Gosses du Québec is a dream for more than just the lost Canucks in Lausanne looking for a place to park it, have an ice cold Molson and watch a game.

Speaking of those ice cold Molsons, we paid a cool 9.50 francs for each one, bottled, which is its own bragging rights. It would have been nicer though if the Molson had been on tap, but like with many things involving global dining efforts in Switzerland, be grateful for what you can get.

We ordered the one classic thing we came to Les Gosses du Québec for, namely poutine, Canada’s national dish. It is one of those dishes that is so heavy and oozing with every classical North American flavor one could want in a bar snack that it transports you in your mind immediately to a very cozy spot in a very cold place where such foods are not only wanted but necessary for the warmth they provide.

Unfortunately, Les Gosses du Québec offers a solidly middle of the road poutine. It is perfunctory at best and while all the right ingredients were there, something about it, it simply did not pop. The cheese curds were also crumblier than would be expected in North America.

As far as atmosphere goes, though, everything was totally authentic and fun, replete with beer funnels at the table with tall jugs to tap and several pool tables. All that was missing was some snow girls in bikinis and winter boots.

The panoramic effect of televisions turned to sports on all walls, the mixture of cricket and ice hockey and off-hours sports like billiards and ski racing, takes you for the time you are at in Les Gosses du Québec, successfully to the great north of maple leaf country.

How to get to Canada from Switzerland:

Swiss Air offers code share flights with Air Canada that are nonstop from Zürich to Toronto and Montréal, with the journey to Toronto taking about nine hours and fifteen minutes and Montréal a little under eight and a half hours.

From Geneva, Air Canada has codeshare flights with Swiss Air offering routes to Toronto via Montréal. Other carriers offering routes to Toronto include United via Washington Dulles and Newark, New Jersey airports and Lot Polish through Warsaw.

Many European and North American carriers including Air Canada, Air France, British Airways, KLM, Lufthansa and United offer routes with a stopover if transiting between Zürich or Geneva and Vancouver. For Ottawa travelers, the options narrow a bit to Air Canada, Swiss Air and United.

How many people from Canada are in Switzerland: 20,000, including many dual nationals

Distance between Bern and Ottawa: 6,080 kilometers

Distance from Les Gosses du Québec and Ottawa: 6,052 kilometers

Learn how to make Canada's national dish, poutine, and about its origins.

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