5 EXPERIENCES THAT STAND OUT

MONTREAL— Montreal is a city with an embarrassment of riches in terms of attractions and activities. Here are the best ones right now:

Eat: Poutine has circled the globe as the only universally identifiable piece of Canadian cuisine. It’s picked up some stardust along the way. Poutine is the result of Quebecois taking the cheap, low-quality ingredients that were available and making something terrific out of them. So forget your Yukon potatoes, sea salt and Wagyu gravy. Go to Fameux Viande Fumée Et Charcuterie, at the corner of Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal E. (4500 Rue Saint-Denis). It’s open 24 hours and makes the stuff out of what it has always been made of. Crap. And it tastes magnificent.

Drink: Bishop & Bagg is the best of the three gin bars in the city, which has picked up on the international focus on this easily distilled, mostly inexpensive, endlessly variable drink in a way the rest of Canada has not. There are half a dozen New Quebec gins, the best of which are Cirka and St. Laurent. Named for a temperance bishop and philanthropist Stanley Clark Bagg, the gin pub is run by the same people behind the Burgundy Lion and is just a few doors up from Fairmount Bagel.

Drink some more: Montreal’s newest distiller, Cirka, offers mixology classes focused on its two current products, Terroir vodka and Sauvage gin. Held the third Thursday of every month for $75, the two-hour classes are a great excuse to drink at the Lachine Canal, the birthplace of Canadian distilling.

See: Cité Mémoire is a semi-permanent video installation in Old Montreal that lifts the city’s history out of the walls of the city itself. With the help of a simple but functional app, you can roam around the 19 snippets of Montreal history, from the burning of parliament to hockey great Maurice “Rocket” Richard and baseball player Jackie Robinson, to the Robin Hood tavern-keeper named Joe Beef. It runs from about dusk to midnight, and you’ll need earbuds and a smartphone.

Bike tour: The possibly ironically named Fitz & Follwell offers a bunch of tours around the city. Mine — one of the Hoods and Hidden Gems tours — took me through Jean Talon market, the alleyways of working-class Montreal and the spot where — so we were told — the band Arcade Fire thought up its name. The four-hour tour costs $100 ($80 for kids) and includes a bagel (ours was from St-Viateur Bagel), an espresso (at Café Saint Henri) and a picnic lunch (in a park of your guide’s choice; ours included a local beer we picked up at a convenience store). Bert Archer was a guest of Vélo Québec and Tourisme Montreal, neither of which reviewed or approved this story.