We came with our mothers. The restaurant was called Le François Premier, but we called it the Ninth or, if we were French, Le Neuvième. It was downtown, on the ninth floor of the Eaton department store on Rue Sainte-Catherine. We wore corduroy slacks and turtleneck sweaters, but our mothers dressed up. In high heels and fur coats, they looked like dancing bears at a circus. They spritzed themselves with Chanel No. 5. 

We first browsed the store’s lower levels before stepping into the elevators and being whisked to the Ninth. When the doors slid open, we found ourselves in a world of luxury and modernity. The dining hall was a rounded nave done in light grey and beige, its ceiling thirty feet high. Alabaster lamps in the shape of urns sat on bases of polished marble. The floor was linoleum, the pattern a cubist motif. 

We were the ...