Montréal’s refined menus cover the globe
the slopes on flying saucers and sleds.
My favorite place to stay in winter is the Hotel Bonaventure, now a Hilton, with its spectacular rooftop gardens draped in white, and the resident ducks paddling through the snowscape on their heated pond. For human guests, a heated outdoor pool sends up great clouds of steam, with the city’s skyscrapers as a backdrop.
The Bonaventure was built during the boom surrounding Montréal’s 1967 world’s fair, and its unapologetic Brutalist style — all wavy textured concrete and rigorous lines — is a large part of its attraction. There may be hotels more chic, more atmospheric, more historic, but when it’s cold outside, the Bonaventure can’t be beat.
A bonus: The hotel feeds into the extensive warren of underground retail passageways that runs through downtown, as well as into the city’s excellent subway system, the Metro. You can venture far afield, people-watching and taking advantage of the city’s legendary winter “soldes,” or sales, without ever going outdoors.
Before checking in to your hotel, schedule a stop at the covered Atwater Market in the old Little Burgundy quarter, very near downtown. Beneath the soaring tower of this 1933 Art Deco food hall, you can pick up fresh flowers for your room along with a sampling of serious Quebeçoise cheeses, patés and baked goods that are testament to Montréal’s status as a great North American food capital.
Cheese hounds should note that young raw-milk cheeses are legal in Quebec, but eat these prizes while you’re in the city because you can’t bring them back to the States. Québécoise cooking
It’s fun to hit Atwater Market in mid- to late morning, grabbing a literal bowl of café au lait and some respectable Viennoiserie at the Premier Moisson bakery/cafe. Thus fortified, stroll the long aisles of vendors. One deals solely in patés and terrines; another offers sauerkraut in three styles (made with beer, white wine or “nature,” which signifies natural or plain) to go with the dozens of sausages on offer.
Atwater’s many artisanal butchers and charcutiers hint at the robust Québécoise cooking that has reanimated the city’s culinary scene over the past decade, bringing a rootsier cast to the more classical French repertoire that has long been a mainstay. Martin Picard, the wild man behind the foie gras poutine at Au Pied du Cochon, and Joe Beef’s chefs David McMillan and Frédéric Morin are among the famous practitioners of the new Québécoise style.
As befits a city with a partly English heritage (English speakers make up roughly 14 percent of the city’s population, and many Montréalers are bilingual), some upstart chefs have combined archival English culinary ideas with Québécoise ingredients for another spin on the new style.
I’m partial to the takeno-prisoners brunch at Maison Publique, chef Derrick Dammann’s neighborhood pub that is co-owned by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, but which shows a Montréal sensibility all its own. Plush boudin noir hiding under frizzled fried eggs is unforgettable stuff, and Texans will be amused at the fat toast slices propped alongside. They’re Texas Toast in another context, served with house-made preserves made with the summer’s plums.
Quite possibly the finest fried potatoes I’ve ever tasted came off the embossed leather specials board at Maison Publique, a short sweet list that changes daily. And surprise: they went perfectly with a Canadian sparking Riesling, the 2012 Tawse Estate from the Niagara region of Ontario, every bit as festive as champagne in its delicate glass coupe.
With its vintage wallpaper, rakish taxidermy and magisterial old bar, Maison Publique is also a textbook example of the snug, cozy quality captured by many Montréal restaurants in the cold season. The heavy drapery installed by the door to keep out chill air leaks; the perpetually groaning coat hooks and racks; the jaunty snow shovels stationed in the entryway: all these typical design elements conspire to keep guests feeling warm and protected within four walls.
Another great spot in the Anglo-Québécoise mode is Lawrence in the hipster-friendly Mile End neighborhood. There, those killer country fries might come with meticulously roasted Quebec heritage pork and tarragon-laced swizzles of Béarnaise sauce; or with dense, deep-rose ox heart to be lavished with still more Béarnaise.
I’ve been dazzled there by chef Marc Cohen’s special that resembled a lush, gelatinous terrine of pig’s foot married to a deeply caramelized apple tarte Tatin: savory and sweet, the best of both worlds. Any Houstonian who cherished the now-closed restaurant Feast will find a spiritual home at Lawrence, with its smartly edited wine list and allbut-forgotten desserts like Sussex Pond Pudding, a sweet suet pastry steamed with a whole lemon inside. Astonishing.
And there are oysters here, too: firm and briny beauties from the Upper St. Lawrence, even unto Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, some of the finest oystering grounds in the world. Indeed, the chance to eat many dozens of these pristine cold-water oysters is a chief lure of Montréal in winter. They appear on many menus, and a prime place to slurp them is Leméac, a familyowned French bistro on Outremont’s tony Laurier shopping strip.
Leméac also happens to boast one of my favorite counters in the world, a gleaming, mirror-backed sweep of high chairs in chestnut-brown leather and chrome, all designed by the late, great Montréal architect Luc Laporte. (He also designed the much- loved L’Express, another fine haunt for old-school French cooking.)
Perch here to sip the salty liquor from an iceddown platter of Leméac’s exclusively sourced Shan Daph oysters, carefully opened. Then stick around for suave house-made foie gras torchon; or dark-asnight blood pudding that manages to be light and fluffy, with a counterpoint of sweet pureed parsnip; or a rollicking bowl of mussels and hand-cut frites. Yes, there’s cilantro spiking that herbed wine broth: for a Texan, a surprise small touch of home.
It’s all set to a background buzz of rapid-fire conversations in both French and English. And the excellent French wine list is yet another reminder of why I love dining out in Montréal. Chablis Premier Cru with my halfshells? Crozes-Hermitage with that blood pudding? Yes, please. City of immigrants
Frenchness aside, Montréal is a port city of immigrants, not unlike Houston. There’s an oldfashioned central city Chinatown with blocked-off pedestrian streets, great for shopping and baked buns and soup dumplings. And there’s a rich mix of ethnic restaurants dotted through the urban fabric, including stellar representations of types of cuisine it’s hard to come by here at home.
More than a decade ago, I sampled my first modern Greek cooking at a spot on St. Denis, now gone but indelibly printed on my brain. That’s how I feel about the upscale Syrian restaurant Damas, where a roasted loup de mer stuffed with a complex mesh of nuts, tomato, lemon and roasted garlic chips somehow emerged with its essential character intact, the fish pearly and its skin crisp.
A bottle of fine Assyrtiko and some stirring stuffed grape leaves later, I was putting Damas atop my extremely short list of ambitious regional Middle Eastern restaurants. Everything clicked, from the voluptuous beef kibbe smoothed with olive oil and warmed with Aleppo pepper, to the final fragrant sip of cardamom tea.
A few meals later, the lovely blue-and-white Barbounya just a few blocks away, on the eastern end of the Laurier shopping strip, landed near the top of that very same shortlist. The modern Turkish cuisine of chef Fisun Ercan is served in a convivial communal counter setting, and while the format at night runs to small meze plates, the weekend brunches call forth a lively Turkish breakfast spread served on a wooden board.
Rustic herbed Turkish ricotta-style cheese sits on a fresh, clean salad of tomato and cucumber, to be consumed with thick-cut country bread and kaymak, the Turkish clotted cream, that has been swirled with honey. House-made preserves of quince and bitter orange are at hand, along with small dishes of mixed olives, dried fruits and nuts. It’s so satisfying to alternate the sweet tastes with the salty, the soft textures with the chewy and the crisp, that the hot entree selections that follow may seem like also-rans. Very, very nice also-rans.
Outside Barbounya, a two-block stretch of Laurier Ouest takes you past a sophisticated kitchenwares shop, Les Touilleurs (it means “those who stir”); or, kittycorner from the restaurant and through doors with rolling-pin handles, into the old-school French patisserie Gascogne. Pick up an abricotine, a Viennoiserie centered on plumped dried apricots and an ethereal pastry cream; and goggle at the array of seasonal marzipan fantasies, including “bonhommes de neige.” (Charmingly enough, that’s snowmen in French.)
Should you feel a bit homesick, brave the snow piles and ice of a Plateau backstreet to squeeze into Icehouse, Texas-born chef Nick Hodge’s ode to the grub he grew up with. (He runs a fancier, well-regarded Montréal restaurant called Kitchenette, where he works in a Texas/Southern mode.) It’s entertaining to witness Tex-Mex and fried popcorn shrimp treated as exotic ethnic fare, to be gobbled by beer-swilling, French speaking dudebros who order off a blackboard menu written, even more entertainingly, in French.
“Taco crostillant au boeuf” happens to translate as one of the best hard-shell groundbeef tacos I have tasted in decades, the two crescents per order held upright on their tray by wooden clothespins. Consume these tacos with one of the brave new Canadian microbrews (ask the friendly bartender for a crash course) and you’ll feel curiously at home, despite the spirited French conversations roiling around you. Botanic Gardens
Finally, when snowbanks and bitter temperatures begin to pale, head to the tall glass conservatories of Montréal’s Botanic Gardens, in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium and its sci-fi leaning tower, which must be seen to be believed. The climates of the glassedin plant environments range from the humid, junglelike bromeliad house to the dry warmth of the cactus house, with the cool damps of the fern house and the temperate air of the orchid house in between.
Each successive glass house is a handsome riot of pattern and form and surprise. I could spend all day wandering from one to another, and I have. (Food writer’s must-see: the house devoted to all manner of commercial plants, from bananas to rarefied spices, including a vanilla orchid, a gingerlike cardamom plant and a Tellicherry pepper shrub in situ.)
Like Montréal’s subterranean commercial passageways, creative bundling and warmthgiving restaurants, these glass conservatories are another ingenious way of getting through the long French-Canadian winter: welcoming for a visitor, vital for the natives. alison.cook@chron.com twitter.com/alisoncook