A flair for food
The best spots to eat in Montreal, a city that takes its food seriously
MONTREAL— In Montreal, you’re always being asked to make a choice. Now that matters of national sovereignty have migrated to Spain, the big question in Montreal is an old one, but even more important: Which bagel is better — St-Viateur or Fairmount?
When a Montrealer asks you this question, they make it sound like your friendship is at stake. If you pass that test, an even more loaded choice remains, between the city’s two venerable farmers markets — Atwater, with its lovely art deco building in the west end next to the Lachine Canal, or boisterous, sprawling Jean-Talon by Little Italy in the east end.
Consider your answer carefully. In Montreal, they take their food seriously.
The best place to start a Montreal culinary journey is Chez Tousignant, just near the Jean-Talon Market, a “reinvented casse-croûte,” or snack bar, that opened two years ago. Yes, there’s poutine, but the jewel in the crown of their menu is a hotdog, custom made with an all-beef chuck wiener and their own bun. It’s humble and it’s perfect and you can enjoy it with their house soda.
Montreal’s food-truck revolution is a bit further along than Toronto’s thanks to Gaëlle Cerf and the Association des restaurateurs de rue du Québec (ARRQ), which started six years ago to advocate for the street-food vendors in the province. Cerf left her job managing Martin Picard’s hit restaurant Au Pied de Cochon to start Grumman ’78, a taco truck named after the year and make of the vehicle, and it can usually be found at First Fridays, the massive food-truck festival held the first Friday of every month from May to October at Olympic Stadium.
“Unfortunately, people still want to eat poutine, all the time,” Cerf tells me, but she says that, thanks to the jury of chefs, journalists and owners that pick and oversee new members of the ARRQ, innovation and local and homemade products are a priority, which has seen the growth of vegetarian and even vegan items on truck menus.
Tacos are hot all over, and one of the best taquerias in Montreal is in La Capital Tacos, in Chinatown, just by the big red gate at Blvd. RenéLévesque and St-Laurent.
There are standard menu items such as guac and tacos carnitas and al pastor, but fillings also include rib eye and garlic mushrooms, as well as daily specials such as the tacos el grito, featuring tasty pork garnished with crispy hibiscus flowers.
Just around the corner you’ll find a tiny stall selling dragon’s beard candy — Bonbons a la Barbe de Dragon. A cocoon of spun sugar contains a filling of peanuts, chocolate, sesame seeds and more sugar, made by hand in a big window looking out onto Rue de la Gauchetiere Ouest.
It’s less than a dollar a piece, so I suggest you buy a half-dozen and share them over tea.
You can find bigger treats at the new location of Bar Le Lab on SteCatherine Est in the Quartier des Spectacles, the latest specialty cocktail bar owned by mixology evangelist Fabien Maillard.
With a staff of slick bartenders who spin, toss and juggle bottles while they work, Le Lab offers a seasonal menu of drinks featuring absinthe and their house syrups and vermouths, served in everything from tiki mugs to takeout containers, garnished with beef jerky and created with fire.
Theatrical and a bit decadent, Le Lab is a great example of Montreal at its show-off best, still the wide open Catholic town, unabashed about its pursuit of brash, even naughty fun, in contrast to uptight, all-business Toronto, still trapped in the tethers of its Methodist Presbyterian rectitude.
That sense of fun can be found everywhere from Êtres Avec Toi (E.A.T.), the restaurant in the W Hotel by Square Victoria with its graffiti art interior and award-winning four chocolate dessert, to Junior, a homey but hip Filipino place in Griffintown by the Lachine Canal that features lumpia rolls and an offal sisig that’s startlingly tasty.
Montreal is an old town full of youthful energy, embodied in young chefs such as Stephanie Audet. Talking over dinner in the airy, gardenlike space of LOV, her new restaurant on Rue de la Montagne, Audet is full of enthusiasm for the influences that have inspired her “botanical cuisine.” (Her first location, on McGill in the Old City, opened just last December, and she coyly muses about Toronto expansion.)
A world traveller at 32, she wanted to incorporate everything she’d learned in her vegetarian cuisine, and when challenged to put poutine on the menu, she vowed to make “the best poutine in the world.” She’s done it with miso gravy and vegan curds, and it holds its own on a menu that features ceviche made with coconut meat, and buckwheat sweet potato gnocchi with hemp-basil pesto.
Montreal’s flair for the unexpected can be found at Le Virunga on the Plateau, where chef Maria-José de Frias takes the story of her own family in central Africa and points elsewhere to create dishes full of unusual ingredients and comforting flavours, finished with a haute cuisine refinement.
There’s a poutine, of course — made with smoked cheese and plantains — and mains such as the Macreuse de Boeuf Tanganyika, rich with spices and served with cassava, the chef’s starch of choice.
As the chef’s daughter and maître d’ Zoya de Frias Lakhany explains, “It’s a mix, a marriage of influences that represents us.” In a phrase, she might have summed up just what makes Montreal so much more than a sum of its many, sometimes bewildering, parts. Rick McGinnis was hosted by Tourisme Montreal, which didn’t approve or review this story.