After Vermont I continued three hours north to meet my sister Cynthia in Montreal, for our first ever trip together, now that our kids who are home for the summer are all in their teens or older. Old enough to leave home, in other words. She flew there to meet me so that we could celebrate her birthday.
I arrived late on Wednesday evening. Our hotel was in the old city and we went out to a restaurant a few blocks away called Restaurant Bocata. We had seen it published as a Tapas place, which seemed to fit the bill for a late night meal, but really it was a regular French restaurant with a few small plates. Everything we had was delicious and the atmosphere and decor were really fun, though speaking over the noise was a challenge. Everyone was speaking French, in a nice clear dialect that we could easily follow, and as Cynthia said, it is like France without the attitude and jet lag.
It was too dark to take any pictures of the food, but it felt very European and festive.
Cynth enjoying the ambiance.
It was basically a one-day stay for me, so the next day we stayed local. Working out of our tour books, we went to breakfast at the much touted Olive et Gourmando. Great atmosphere, packed with people and food, and colorful blackboards everywhere announcing various dishes and events.
We ordered different pastries to try.
I ordered our waiter's recommendation, Housemade ricotta with honey, orange zest, and Maldon salt. Served with toast. Out of this world.
We did some walking and shopping: bought post-cards for our daughters at camp, Cynthia bought a dress in a great dress boutique right off the lobby of the Nelligan Hotel. The boutique was swarming with people and dresses were flying off the racks.
Then we made our way to Chinatown for some reputedly fabulous dumplings at Quinghua.
They were good but I won't be hopping on a plane for more.
One of the sources of good travel recommendations I have grown to trust, believe it or not, is the United Hemispheres Magazine series "Three Perfect Days: ...", in this case Montreal. In that article I had read about DHC/ART Foundation of Contemporary Art which hosts sprawling exhibitions across two buildings on four floors each. We saw an exhibit of the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman (two brothers) which had been organized with the Serpentine Galleries in London, a space I enjoyed greatly last spring. It was bizarre, disturbing, pronographic and very political and we hated it as much as we were supposed to, and escaped when we could take no more. Technically it was a tour de force—oil paintings, cast bronze sculpture, dioramas, staged scenarios of multi media. One major theme was McDonalds and its world domination. Here is a Ronald McDonald head on an african style woman's torso, cast bronze.
Now for something entirely different - The birthday dinner at night was at one of Montreal's top restaurants, Toqué! We opted for the tasting menu which was varied and imaginative and quite elaborate.
It began with an asparagus "foam".
I personally am over the tasting menu concept. They are always too long and drawn out. In the end the food becomes a chore. Three and a half hours is too long to sit. By the end of the fifth course I am ready to quit, and there are two more courses to endure as well as the always seemingly endless wait for the always enormous bill. For that price you could have box seats at the opera where you at least get intermissions to walk around. So I am "outing" myself as a food philistine. However it was Cynthia's first tasting menu and it was entirely worth it to watch her delight. She is a serious foodie.
I left early the next morning because I had 600 miles to drive, solo, bringing my road trip total to 1360 miles of solo driving. But Cynthia stayed on and did a fabulous foodie morning. I think she should be a food writer and I am including below (with her permission) her email to me describing how she ate her way out of Montreal:
CYNTHIA'S REPORT:
After you left, I got on the métro and rode 9 stops to the Marché
Jean-Talon. It was BEAUTIFUL! A huge market full of butchers, fish
mongers, cheese purveyors, fruit and vegetable stands. There were also a
lot of permanent stores around the perimeter, including a chocolatier
where I bought a 70% cacao dark chocolate bar for Noah. That was the
only thing I bought. The true stand-outs there were THE FRUIT VENDORS.
There were dozens of them, and they all put out huge plates of samples
of EVERYTHING. I ate so much fruit just from the samples! White
peaches, yellow peaches, yellow nectarines, white nectarines, plums of
all colors, grapes of all colors, oranges, and MANGOES -- lots of
different varieties of mangoes. Everything seemed to be in full season,
perfectly ripe and sweet. I think I had one of the best pieces of fruit
of my lifetime there -- a Haitian mango sample. It was so delicious!
I spent about 30 minutes at the market and then I
returned to the métro and took it back 4 stops toward the direction of
the hotel to the Mont-Royal stop. All of my other foodie destinations
were clustered closely around that stop.
First stop: La Banquise for poutine. They have
about 70 varieties of poutine there. I opted for "La Classique" but for
the record, they did offer several poutines with vegan sauce. The
poutine was tasty. The fries were tender and perfectly cooked and the
cheese curds on top offered a gooey, salty balance against the greasy
gravy. It tasted good, however it was a very HOT day (must have been
around 80 degrees) and such a heavy dish did not go down all that well
in the heat.
After that, I walked a few blocks up the street to
Montréal's most famous bagel shop: St. Viateur café and bagels. I
bought a dozen bagels to take home. I checked them in my suitcase and
had absolutely no problem bringing them through the U.S.'s half-assed
customs check which takes place inside the Montréal airport (they
actuallly say "Welcome to the U.S." as you approach the customs line, so
I guess that particular plot of land is technically U.S. territory).
The verdict on the Montréal bagel is not a good one here on Buckthorne
Ct. We like New York-style better.
My final stop was on the same grand avenue as the
bagel café, just one block on the other side of the Mont-Royal métro
station. There I found my destination: a tiny, hole-in-the-wall
unassuming little café called "Kouign Amman" which is purported to have
Montréal's best croissants. I ordered three pastries: an almond
croissant, a pain au chocolate (called a "chocolatine" there) and a
kouign amman. I ordered a cappuccino and sat down to eat the kouign
amman at one of the two little tables in the front of the bakery. The
pasty was delicious -- full of flaky layers, like a croissant, but with a
sugar-syrup in between each layer and a hard, crunchy layer of
carmelized sugar syrup on top. The cappuccino was good, too, but the
experience was not. This TINY bakery did not have air conditioning, and
with the ovens on the premises just steps away from the two eat-in
tables, temperatures must have swelled to over 100 degrees in the shop.
As I sat there eating, sweat broke out and began to drip down under my shirt. Very unpleasant!
I saved the other two pastries for later. I ate one on the plane yesterday and one at home today with my morning coffee.
After
the heat of the little café, I hopped back on the métro for the 5 stops
back to the hotel and was so glad to have just enough time to strip off
my sweaty clothes, take a shower in the beautiful, cool marble bathroom
and put on fresh (though not exactly clean) clothes for the trip to the
airport and home.
Traffic was horrendous on the way to the airport (it
took almost an hour). Luckily I had left ridiculously early and got
there in plenty of time. I still had about an hour to wait at the gate.
I spent my last Canadian $5 bill (thanks, Beck!) on a Ritter Sport
marzipan dark chocolate bar in the airport and boarded my plane to the U.S.
The only thing missing from my very pleasant last-few hours in Montréal was you! Thanks for a great trip!!
Cynth
Happy Birthday, Cynthia!
