of course! hope the rest of your weekend was great.
A short and photoless recap of a really damn good eating trip. Many thanks to @caleb , @robert, @dvlpmnt , and @boourns . This was a bachelor party for my pal who has cooked professionally, including at Blue Hill in NYC. He has such faith in this damn website of ours that he basically told me to plan out everything.
A few quick notes before I get to talking about individual restaurants. The hospitality and level of service in Montreal is pretty extraordinary. Even at a divey burger spot, they were giving us clean plates and fresh cutlery with each dish. Also, the wine scene seems to exist in a tangential and better universe than ours. Bottles and regions are slightly different than what we’re drinking in LA, and they’re cheaper, and they’re a tad more interesting. Or maybe y’all just recommended extraordinary places. Who could know?
Anyway, let’s get to the eating. I am all for institutions, but I thought that St. Viateur and Schwartz’s were both skippable. Many thanks to SV for being part of the whole OG Montreal bagel scene, but I prefer Saint-Raf!
Okay, on to the good stuff. First meal of the trip was Restaurant Dobe & Andy. Went there straight from the airport after an 830 am flight and a Starbucks breakfast sando. This was a godsend. We did char-siu and roast duck over rice and char-siu and duck over crispy noodles. Really tasty ginger-scallion sauce. The meat over the crispy noodles might be the perfect drunk food. All in, probably preferred the char-siu to the duck. Dobe + Andy is more or less a can’t miss if you’re in the general vicinity of Vieux-Montreal.
That same night, we did Vin Mon Lapin. Woah boy, first off. Such a beautiful and fun space. Also, how novel to have an electric spot where you can actually hear yourself talk. Take note, LA. So as mentioned in here, somebody named this the top restaurant in Canada, and so my expectations were in that weird spot of basically assuming it couldn’t be that good. Nah, it was that good. I’d eat here every week for the rest of my life. We skipped the mains entirely. Here’s more or less what we did:
-
scallop sando, which was silly decadent and reminded us a bit of Lyonnaise quenelle. So good.
-
radish and fried pig ears with a sea urchin dip. Wonderful, salty and briny with the pig ears, spicy and briny with the radish
-
snow crab in a buckwheat saboyon. heavy on the crab, another delight.
-
cannelloni with nettles, a ton of morels, in a Alfred le fermier sauce.
-
beef tartare. insane, maybe best of my life, can’t tell you what was in it.
-
salad with anchovies
-
buckwheat and honey cake. tasty, a lot of cake to share with two.
More to come.
7 Likes
2 for 2! always glad to help. Agreed on that Lapin tartare, I think about it often.
1 Like
First lunch of the trip was at Mano Cornuto, which was actually a pretty hero recommendation by hotel staff. Note, still just two of us at this point. Anyway, how to describe this place? Think like a hip Italian pasta bar and sandwich spot. Closest in vibes in LA is maybe Barra Santos? If this were in LA I’d go once a week. Had a delicious albeit simple pesto spaghetti and a bolognese that wouldn’t be out of place at Donna’s. The food wasn’t transcendent, but the energy was perfect. Highly recommend if you’re in the Vieux-Montreal/ Griffintown and don’t wanna eat at Dobe & Andy because you ate there 12 hours ago haha.
Then we had at our first of many meals at L’Express. So for some context, our AirBnB was a three-minute walk from there, which is really dangerous if it isn’t your intention to eat your weight in beef tartare. For this first meal, there were four of us, and we ate like gluttons. Beef tartate, steak frites, beet salad, leek quiche, confit duck leg, and the croque-monsieur, along with profiteroles, and creme brulee, and the lemon tart.
I don’t think I can say anything new about L’Express, but I will say that it’s a proper institution that seems hellbent on continuing to make good food. The place was packed with locals, young and old alike. It’s also open to 2 am, which is why we went back that night with one more of us, sat at the exact same table and proceeded to order more croque monsieurs and frites and desserts. Sadly, around 12:30 am, they were out of the tartare and the steak frites.
Thoughts on Foxy and a few others to come!
4 Likes
Thank you for reporting back, you’re getting me hyped for my stopover there next month!
1 Like