Goodwill & butterflies
Every winter, the Montreal Botanical Garden turns one of its greenhouses into a butterfly jungle. Kind locals were the highlight of one family’s visit to this beautiful, historical city
To loosely paraphrase Tennessee Williams’ Blanche Dubois: When you travel with a family, that’s when you “really” depend on the kindness of strangers.
The thought occurred to meduring a three-day weekend late in April that I spent in Montreal with my husband, Howie; our son and daughter-in-law; and three young grandchildren.
I was struck not only by how much planning and work it requires just to get from place to place and deal with jackets, the stroller, seating arrangements, food preferences, the occasional meltdown — but also how your whole day (indeed your whole trip) can be made or ruined by the way others react: the eye roll of impatience versus the thoughtfulness that signifies a genuine desire to help.
The good news is that in Montreal we experienced nothing but kindness. Everyone we met — at our hotel, in restaurants, in museums and on the street — seemed so eager to make our lives easier that at moments I was shocked. Why were these people so nice? The kids picked up on the considerate responses and (as kids do) responded accordingly — they were on their best behaviour. Meanwhile, the older ones were thrilled to discover that we could drive four hours from our home in the Hudson Valley and wind up in another country — a country where people spoke French!
Montreal feels almost like a European city — sophisticated, cosmopolitan, multilingual — influenced by its French and English heritage, and by the generations of immigrants who have come to live there.
Not only because French is so widely spoken — though everyone we met spoke English — but because of how the city looks, Montreal feels more old world thanToronto and Vancouver. Walking around this supremely walkable city (which is, however, large enough to require a car or public transportation — there is a good metro system — as you get farther from the centre) you feel as if you are moving through centuries of history. Near the Port of Montreal, Old Montreal — with its cobblestone streets, old stone buildings, majestic basilica and small, leafy squares and parks — you almost feel as if you could be in France. (In fact, films have been shot here, using the neighbourhood as a standin for French cities.) The downtown is more modern, bustling and vibrant, offering excellent museums, great shopping and sleek, modern architecture. Each of the many disparate neighbourhoods has its own particular character, at least partly reflecting the immigrant populations who first settled there. You can find cafes serving espresso and cannoli in Little Italy, and Portuguese restaurants and bakeries in the city’s Little Portugal.
St. Lawrence Boulevard, once the centre of Montreal’s large Jewish community, is still the place to try the city’s famous “smoked meats” — known elsewhere as pastrami and corned beef. Among this area’s most famous residents were Leonard Cohen and writers Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler.
And while it’s true that the weather can be daunting in the winter — the city gets a lot of snow, and the stones in the old city seem to exhale cold and damp — the spring is lovely, and the summer, according to everyone I spoke to, is glorious.
Here’s an example of what I mean about the goodwill that went beyond anything I had expected — or experienced. Let me be honest: I had kind of forgotten to tell the restaurant Le Club Chasse et Peche, in Old Montreal, about my 18-month-old grandson, Pablo.
I’m not proud of it, but I had committed my little lie of omission because I had wanted, for so long, to try the wellknown and justly celebrated chef Claude Pelletier’s elegant and original take on what one might find at a Québécois hunting and fishing lodge; because there were seven of us and the website said the restaurant could accommodate only six at a table; and because I thought we’d deal with the baby one way or another, rotating laps, if need be. I was prepared to be gracious when the restaurant refused to seat us — it wouldn’t be their fault. I braced myself for the punitive reproof masquerading as an apology that usually begins, “We’re sorry, but ...”
That was not what happened.
MONTREAL from T1
The receptionist hid his consternation beautifully, conferred with a few co-workers, then returned, smiling, to say: “My colleague is smarter than I am, and has figured out how we can make this work.” They showed us to a table against a long banquette at which we could sit Pablo between his sisters, Emilia, 11, and Malena, 7, comfortably and with enough room so that he wouldn’t feel hemmed in. Before we had even ordered, they offered to bring out plates of pasta with butter and cheese for the kids.
Later, when the younger kids did get restless, a host brought over a toy animal she had improvised, using a few wine corks and some sticks, a creature with which Pablo and Malena played happily while their parents and grandparents dined on exquisite braised piglet risotto with foie gras shavings, perfect seared scallops with fennel puree and lemon confit, halibut with chorizo and almonds and, for dessert, maple syrup parfait with red berry sauce.
The staff was similarly resourceful and accommodating at the legendary restaurant Joe Beef in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood, widely known for its dedication to excellent, lavish portions and gourmet excess; and at Le Pied de Cochon, one of my Montreal favourites and a 10-minute drive from the old port, where I insisted that at least one of us try one of the restaurant’s specialties: duck in a can. It’s an ultra-rich dish that — as a waiter with a can opener releases it from the can — arrives with an especially dramatic presentation, as the food and delicious aroma spill out.
All three of these restaurants are admittedly high-end, but we were treated just as nicely in simpler establishments — for example, the popular breakfast spot, Olive et Gourmando, a few blocks from our hotel in Old Montreal, where the tempting pastries vie with menu items made with fresh fruit and eggs.
In Montreal’s small but engag- ing Chinatown, a short walk from the Old Harbour, at the noodle shop Nouilles de Lan Zhou, we waited to be seated, as the kids watched, with enraptured fascination, the man twirling, stretching, spinning and cutting hand-pulled noodles in the restaurant window.
They also enjoyed eating on the fly as we walked through the huge Marché Jean-Talon, a covered market in what is officially the Little Italy neighbourhood, but whose main streets are now lined with Vietnamese restaurants, and where one gets a powerful sense of the city’s ethnic diversity. One can lunch on tacos, samosas, enchiladas and baklava, oysters and poutine (Montreal’s signature dish of french fries, gravy and cheese curd). And the displays of artisanal cheeses and freshly caught fish are so enticing that the market is the sort of place that makes the visitor think: Really, I could live here.
Eating not only well but wonderfully is one good reason to go to Montreal, but it was only one of the reasons — and not even the principal one — that we went. The trip was, at least in the planning stages, all about the butterflies.
Several years ago, in Montreal for a few days, in the dead of winter, I asked a woman working in the gift shop at Montreal’s excellent Museum of Fine Arts: What would she do if she had extra time to kill in Montreal in the winter? She replied without hesitation: I’d go see the butterflies. And she couldn’t have been more right.
Every winter, from late February through April, which can still be fairly cold, though it was temperate and pleasant when we were there, Montreal’s Botanical Garden turns one of its greenhouses into a butterfly jungle. The result, entitled Butterflies Go Free, is awe-inspiring. At any one time, 2,000 butterflies — iridescent, brilliantly coloured, elaborately patterned, are flying through the air, alighting on the lush vegetation and occasionally on a visitor.
It feels a bit like walking into a scene from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude, where one of the characters, Mauricio Babilonia, is followed constantly by swarms of yellow butterflies.
A winding path leads visitors past thickly planted borders and through open areas where knowledgeable docents stand ready to talk about butterflies and their habits. Ever since that first time I had gone, I had been planning to go back again with the kids.
The children (and their parents and grandparents) were appropriately mind-blown as we called each other over to see some particularly outrageous specimens. A bright blue butterfly landed on baby Pablo, who made his noise of wild enthusiasm, somewhere between a bird’s caw and an adolescent wow. His sisters borrowed our phones to photograph the insects that seem to pose obligingly on banana leaves, fluttering their wings only slightly.
There was a lot that the kids enjoyed: walking through the Old City of Montre- al, especially in the early mornings and on a Friday evening, when the streets were less crowded than they were on weekend afternoons, and when you could imagine you were in a different country in an earlier era; strolling through two of the most interesting neighbourhoods, Westmount and the Plateau; stopping in clothing, toy and gift shops that seemed so much more various, quirky and individual — less corporate — than stores in American cities.
But for my grandchildren, the standout of the weekend, by far — even more impressive than the butterflies — was the Montreal Science Centre, also in the Old Harbour neighbourhood. As a parent and grandparent, I’ve had plenty of experience with interactive museums designed mostly for kids, but Montreal’s version is far and away the best I’ve ever seen.
We had planned on spending an hour or so there, but we wound up passing a good part of the day, as Emilia and Malena ran from exhibit to exhibit, calling each other over to see the latest wonder they had discovered, and Pablo ran behind, eager to see what had gotten his sisters so enthusiastic.
Partly because we had spent so much time in the science museum, there was a lot we didn’t have time to do in one weekend. The kids wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, formally known as the Montreal Observation Wheel, in the Old Port of Montreal, from which you can, apparently, see the entire city; they wanted to ride the boats that tour the Old Port harbour on the St. Lawrence River; they wanted to climb the trails in Mount Royal Park in central Montreal.
Meanwhile, the grown-ups were thinking, with regret, of all the excellent restaurants we hadn’t had time to try. And when the desk clerk at our wonderfully comfortable hotel, Le Saint Sulpice, who had proved marvellously accommodating and thoughtful during our stay, suggested we return at the height of summer, when the streets are full of performers and music, when — he said — the city becomes a perpetual open-air (and free!) party. All of us, children and adults, agreed: We’d be back.