Montreal: Le Menu

Crepe Nutella served on a beautiful woman.

Montreal is a delicious city. The streets are paved with maple syrup and smoked meat sandwiches and all of the restaurants play Arcade Fire. Here are more highlights of my epicurean eating experiences, for to describe each individual meal would be rather self-indulgent.

Dave heard that bagels from Montreal were even better than NYC bagels, so we went to two different bagel shops to seek the truth. The first shop, Fairmount Bagel, had a impressive variety of bagel choices, such as caraway seed and chocolate chip, although the chocolate chip bagel bin had nothing to offer us but crumbs. St. Viateur Bagels didn’t have as much variety, but one could sit down in the cafe with a hot buttered bagel and a side of cantaloupe and watch Looney Tunes. That’s what I did.

The biggest difference between the Montreal bagel and the New York bagel seems to be the thickness of the “O.”

New York Bagel: o

Montreal Bagel: O

Make of it what you will. A good bagel is tasty wherever it may be baked.

At Canadian Maple Delights, a tasty tourist trap in Old Montreal, I savored a scoop of maple gelato. This combined two of my favorite foods: maple syrup and gelato. It put a smile on my face for several hours that nothing could squelch.

On an ill-fated search for a chocolate shop on Rue Duluth, we stumbled upon a café called Soupesoup. It was as though someone suction cupped wires to my head while I slept, tapped into my imagination for recipes, and served them to me upon a bed of mixed greens. The menu was mainly things I would cook myself, like beet and quinoa salads, squash soups, and fancy grilled cheeses.

Dave was on a mission to find poutine, a Quebecois specialty that consists of a pile of fries and cheese curds sopped in gravy. To my delight, we found Patati Patata, a restaurant that serves poutine as well as food that is not slathered in meat and gravy. I had a spicy bowl of borscht on my last night in Montreal and have craved beets ever since.

I ate a lot of crepes this past week. My favorite was the maple syrup crepe. I realized the obvious: a maple crepe tastes exactly like a pancake with maple syrup – and it essentially is a pancake with maple syrup. But that doesn’t make me want one any less.

If your wondering why I did not discuss chocolate, it's because I have a whole post dedicated to chocolate hedonism.