Author Archives: Todd Mundt

The Holiday in Montreal… version 9.0

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IMG_0659Over time, I blog less about my personal trips to Montréal, largely because they’re only of real interest to me. But sometimes, my enthusiasm overwhelms my better judgment.

That’s fine: I’m excited to be returning to Montréal for yet another holiday – the ninth installment of a vacation which remains one of the great highlights of the year.

Last year, I spent nine days in Montréal, followed by five days in San Francisco. This year, I’m flipping it around: five days in Montréal and then to San Francisco for a week, ending on New Year’s Day.

I’ve written before about some of the reasons I love the city, so I won’t go into greater detail. I’ll just say that I’m excited to be going back; I’m excited about seeing familiar sites and new ones; and I’m excited that we will likely have snow this year. It’s been awhile.

Where are we going to eat? Thought you’d never ask. The list is a collection of old favorites and new places, but each one has a familiar connection:

  • Les 400 Coups: We’ve eaten at restaurants run by Marc-André Jetté, Patrice Demers and Marie-Joseé Beaudoin since 2008 (Laloux, Newtown were the others). Their food gets consistently better with each year and 400 has quickly gained a reputation as one of the best restaurants in the city.
  • Liverpool House: This is my preferred star in the Joe Beef constellation. As I’ve written before, Joe Beef seems to attract a larger tourist crowd, while Liverpool House gives off more of a local vibe. I think that distinction blurs as the Joe Beef empire continues to grow, but Liverpool House feels more like the neighborhood (speaking of which, Little Burgundy is changing rapidly).
  • Le Chien Fumant: This little 20 seat bar in the Plateau is gaining more attention by the year. A friend in the city tipped us off to it in 2010, and we’ve been going back every trip, for house-made charcuterie and the delicious, meat heavy dishes that define Montréal dining in the cold winter months. It’s a favorite.
  • Nora Gray: That same food-savvy friend gave this place a rave review last year when it was still new and was getting decidedly mixed reviews from the Yelp and Chowhound crowd. We gave his recommendation a higher priority, and we were rewarded with a wonderful Italian meal. We’re going back. Nora Gray also made this year’s Best New Restaurants list in enRoute.
  • Maison Publique: Speaking of restaurants that have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of crankiness from Yelpers and Chowhounders… there’s the brand new Maison Publique in the Plateau. Derek Dammann was at the helm of DNA, which was one of the true gems of Old Montréal until it closed this summer. He’s partnered with Jamie Oliver in the new place, but I want to be careful to note that this is Dammann’s restaurant; Oliver is an investor. What are people upset about? Do you actually care? You shouldn’t, and neither do we. Dammann is smart and innovative; he has a command of offal and a long commitment to Canadian wines (here’s the December 2011 wine pairing gallery from DNA); his food is delicious. (Want to read Marie-Claude Lortie’s review from La Presse? Here ya go.)

There’s a lot more to Montréal: there’s incredibly good coffee. My favorite is Café Myriade, where the city’s Third Wave (arguably) began. It’s on Mackay and has just opened a second location at 251 St-Viateur Ouest. There’s Olive et Gourmando, which continues to delight and, possibly, exasperate in the Old City. There are great museums; this year’s choices, based on current exhibitions, are likely to be the McCord Museum and the Fine Arts Museum. There’s the daily workout at Nautilus Plus on Ste-André and Ste-Catherine. There’s the Underground City, which is a lifesaver when your adventures outdoors turn especially frigid. And there are the crowds of shoppers. What was once Boxing Day has morphed in Boxing Week, much to the relief of nervous retailers. And there’s the rustic beauty of Quebecois French, which remains one of the most beautiful sounds in the world to me.

Can you tell my holiday is approaching? Four days and counting!

Montreal and the Beauty of French Wine

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A particularly good Gevrey-Chambertin we enjoyed at Liverpool House in December 2010.

I remember my first excursion to buy some wine at the SAQ in Montréal in 2004. Naturally, I gravitated to the California wines (those were the labels I knew at the time) and I found 1) a tiny selection, and 2) some pretty mediocre wine.

It tainted my view of SAQ for a long time after.

Of course, as my knowledge of wine grew, I discovered that I was complaining about a poor selection of California wine in stores featuring rack after rack of really wonderful French wine. And that was when I understood that good wine in Montréal means French wine. I learned not to fight it; in fact I love it and now I wander through wine stores in Boston (where I live) and wish for a better selection of French wine.

I’ve had several occasions to think about this in the past year: there were the trips to Montréal in December and June; and in January, I read The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts by David McMillan and Frédéric Morin.

Let me get this recommendation out of the way now: read the book. It’s great. Yes, there are recipes in the book, which you might re-create at home, or which you might read about and then order the next time you’re at Joe Beef or Liverpool House.

But this is a cookbook that you read, and I love the chapters on Montréal’s culinary history, the romanticism of train travel, the square meals at the casse-croûtes (snack bars) of Quebec, as well as the story of how Joe Beef and Liverpool House came to be in Montréal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood. It’s absorbing reading, but my favorite part of the book is David McMillan’s chapter on French wine, in which he writes, just to start things off right:

“I love red burgundy wine so much I want to pour it into my eyes.”

McMillan writes that he’s opinionated about wine and his restaurants reflect his worldview: mostly wines from Burgundy, Beaujolais, Loire and Alsace. There are a few bottles of American wine and Canadian wine on the list.

McMillan writes: “The air in Quebec is sweet and old, and we’ve been drinking French wine with French food here for more than three hundred years.” Montrealers dine out often and despite the proliferation of cuisines representing the more recent waves of immigration to Canada, and despite the various fine dining trends that have swept North America, Montréal remains a city where the best wine selection on the menu is invariably French.

Here’s what McMillan told Eater National in an interview earlier this year:

There’s been a serious French wine program at our local SAQ wine stores for 100 years, you know. If you give an older French-Canadian person Australian Chardonnay, they’re like, “Get this the fuck away from me—what is this?” And if you say, “Here’s CA chardonnay,” they’re like, “Why?” So we’ve had to keep the path to French wine and old world-flavored wines. Even when we wanted to play ball [with bigger, more modern wines] like the rest of the world, it never worked, so we just gave up.

It’s hard to complain about that, since French (and other Old World) wines pair so wonderfully with food most of the time, but what I take away from the chapter (and, indeed, the whole book) is a deeper understanding of the history and culture of Montréal, and how it expresses itself on the plate.

And there’s the recipe for the famous Joe Beef Hot Oysters on the Radio – that’s just icing on the cake, so to speak.

Props for Foodlab in the New York Times

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The New York Times says Foodlab doesn’t engage in molecular theatrics, “just an openness to experimentation.” It’s a nice shout-out for a venture which is not even a year old yet.

I blogged about the departure of Michelle Marek and Seth Gabrielse from Laloux last fall. The laboratory for food was a concept that SAT (Society for Arts and Technology/la Société des arts technologiques) embraced to serve as a kind of intersection of food and performance.

The Times:

A recent visit took place during a Middle Eastern phase and included a mezze platter of thick, creamy labneh, baba ghanouj with tart pomegranate seeds, and a sweet red pepper muhammara dip, all served with fresh grilled flatbread. A simple salad of grilled calamari flavored with tangy chermoula on top of slightly charred cherry tomatoes and zucchini paired perfectly with the tart fruit and acid of a Guy Breton Beaujolais. Dessert was a delicate rhubarb compote sandwiched between two pieces of crispy phyllo, topped with cardamom-spiced cream and drizzled with honey.

The food sounds delicious, and the Foodlab twitter feed has a pile of photographic evidence to back that up.

A New Home for Derek Dammann and it’s Not DNA

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Lesley Chesterman has the story in Wednesday’s Gazette: Derek Dammann, one of Montreal’s best chefs and formerly the chef of DNA, will open his new restaurant on the Plateau in mid-September.

Maison Publique will be located in the old Yoyo space at 4720 Rue Marquette. The other interesting detail is that Jamie Oliver will be the investor behind the new venture. But, Chesterman notes, this isn’t the typical Chef No Show establishment: Dammann is in charge, will write the menus and will be on the premises.

This also isn’t DNA: “We’re doing an old-school, British-style tavern,” says Dammann, and Chesterman adds the new restaurant will have a bar, open kitchen, and next year, an outdoor terrasse.

I’m excited about this, and it’s yet another win for the Plateau Mont-Royal, where there are already so many great restaurants.

A Trip to Montreal in the Summer

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I’ve made annual trips to Montreal since 2004, in some years more than one trip. But I traveled to the city only once in summer: 2005. And my view of the city has been shaped almost entirely by cold weather, brisk wind, and snow.

So, three weeks ago, in mid-June, when I landed in Montreal without my coat and gloves and scarf and sweaters… and looked around me and saw green grass and trees in full bloom, well, it was a different city.

Montreal is a different city in summer. The city gets a lot of winter tourism, but it’s swarming with visitors in the summer months. The sun rises early, sets late, people eat outdoors. I won’t go much further with this because that description applies to summer everywhere. But seeing it in summer again after so long gave me a chance to enjoy Montreal in new ways.

How so? Like taking a long walk outdoors in the evening. Two of the nights we were there, we ate at restaurants in the Plateau and then walked back to the hotel. Another example: aimless sightseeing. In winter, the weather conditions force one to be economical about time spent outdoors, so while I walk a lot, in winter my trips are less whimsical. I loved wandering down streets, or deciding at the last minute that I was near a favorite cafe, making a detour for an iced coffee.

Now I really am going to stop talking about this, but I’ll close by saying that I’m so biased about the superiority of Montreal in winter; however, I’m planning more warm weather trips there, too.

Happy Canada Day… and Stand By for the 2012-06 Report

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flags of Quebec and Canada

A quick note to say Happy Canada Day and to put you on alert that I do have some words and pics coming out this week about the Montreal trip in mid-June.

I returned to Boston on June 18th and right back into the whirlwind of work. The holiday-shortened week will give me an opportunity to get back up to date on posts. What I’ll say right now is that it was wonderful fun, even though it was much abbreviated compared to the holiday visit. But really nice to be outdoors in Montreal without a coat, and gloves, and hat, and scarf. And so nice to see the city when it’s green. This despite the love of fall and winter that seems to be a part of my DNA.

Well, there’s more to come!

A Goodbye to Restaurant DNA

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Update July 19: Derek Dammann is opening a new restaurant.

A flurry of work-related activity kept me away from the Chowhound boards and blogs for the past couple weeks, and so I missed the news that Restaurant DNA closed a couple weeks ago. The last dinner was June 2.

There are few things to note at the passing of DNA: the food was inventive, and when it opened it was close to the cutting edge of nose-to-tail eating. That you were going to have offal in your tasting menu was never a question; the question was the form it would take and how delicious it would be.

The wine list was so devoted to Canadian wines, and I have to say, over a number of meals there, I discovered a lot of good Canadian wine, and some great Canadian wine. That was a wonderful education that I’ll miss.

Here’s the gallery from my last meal there in December 2011.

The atmosphere, which I once described as the inside of a Borg ship, was dark, high-tech and antiseptic, and somehow that was right for the rich, delicious food and wine.

I had many great meals at DNA. I’ll miss it.

Eating Montreal: The June Edition

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We’ll be in Montréal next weekend for a few days of relaxation, the obligatory workouts at the gym, and some really great food.

As with every trip to Montréal, and this is my tenth, I’m pretty low key about planning activities. The general framework for a day is breakfast, some kind of tourist kind of activity, an invigorating workout, coffee at a café, cocktails, and then dinner. Next day, repeat.

The gym is Nautilus Plus in the Village, the coffee is at Café Myriade, cocktails are traditionally at the W Hotel, and dinners…

Friday 6/15 Les 400 Coups
Saturday 6/16 Le Filet
Sunday 6/17 Le Comptoir

This is a change from the original plan. I’ve wanted to drop in on Le Filet. Lesley Chesterman gave it a mixed review in the Gazette in 2011, but it had only been open for a couple months and it has some great names behind it (Claude Pelletier and Hubert Marsolais). And it popped up on some 2011 year-ender lists, including Marie-Claude Lortie’s in La Presse.

Tourist type activities? I want to go to the McCord Museum, which I’ve not been to. It’s a great city museum and there’s a good permanent exhibition on the history of Montréal that I’d like to see. What else? Nothing planned, but I can imagine I’ll spend a lot of time outdoors, since this is the first time in seven years that I’ve been to Montréal when the temperature was warmer than 40 degrees!

photo credit: Flickr/NedraI cc

What Makes Joe Beef and Montreal So Cool?

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Why is Montreal so cool? It’s because the city is “the R&D of multiculturalism and hybridity,” according to Yann Geoffroy, a writer and a musician… and a server at the legendary Joe Beef in Montreal.

He’s written a brilliant essay about the mix-and-match quality of Quebec culture – its francophone backbone, filtered by centuries of immigration, and with a layer of working class America for good measure.

Geoffroy uses a perennial Joe Beef favorite for his example: Crevettes de Matane à la Russe:

Here we have a French recipe influenced by Russian taste and made using local ingredients. PEI potatoes, New Brunswick caviar, garden herbs and vegetables from Little Burgundy, Matane shrimp, and B.C. salmon are featured in the dish, bound by a staple of French cuisine – fresh mayonnaise – and conceptualized by vestiges of Russian taste.
It’s French market cuisine, everything done from scratch, except of course those things that are full of nostalgia like Spam, Velveeta, and cocktail sausages. These North American working class charms sometimes find themselves alongside elite cousins such as a duck egg, foie-gras, or Chambertin.

This is a great essay and along the way, you’ll discover some of the secret sauce of Joe Beef, from the chalkboard menu to the tightly arranged tables.

While I’m thinking about it, this is a good moment to recommend The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts by David McMillan and Frédéric Morin. Sure you’ll add another cookbook to your collection, but even if you rarely cook (like me), you’ll gain a new understanding and appreciation of life in Montreal and Quebec. There are long, engrossing chapters on the romanticism of train travel in Canada, oysters, a lyrical tribute to French wine that will make you want to open a bottle right now, and a culinary history of Montreal that explains the deep connections among the great chefs like Normand Laprise, Martin Picard, McMillan and Morin.

I don’t read a cookbook from front to back; this was the exception. Highly recommended.

Montreal 2012-06

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Since 2006, my trips to Montréal have limited to an annual vacation for the Christmas holiday. It’s grown from three days to as many as ten days, so I’ve had a lot of time to absorb the vibes of my favorite city. But distance and cost reduced my options the rest of the year.

Seven weeks ago, I moved to Boston. For the first time, I’m within easy driving distance and airfares are around $200 less roundtrip, compared to my previous location.

And so, I’ll be spending a long weekend in Montréal on June 15-18! The annual holiday trips traditionally get a version number (2011 was v.8) but trips inside the year will officially be designated as yyyy-mm. Errr… so…

As is my wont, I’ve spent some time thinking over the restaurant choices. Here’s our plan:

For such a short trip, by comparison, the plan was easy: pick a restaurant we’ve been to before, and add two new ones to the mix.

400: I’ve written more about Marc-André Jetté, Patrice Demers and Marie-Josée Beaudoin and their restaurant homes, than any other chefs on my blog. These three (Beaudoin oversees the wine program) have created an exceptional restaurant and it continues at the highest level. It’s one of a tiny number of Montréal restaurants that are Michelin caliber.
Comptoir: People in the service industry consistently list this restaurant among their favorites, if you ask them. That’s a good sign. I’ve had this buried in my list for a couple years, and it rises to the top for 2012-06.
Chronique: Similar story… this restaurant has been on the list for probably 3-4 years, always hovering in the wings, never called upon. So it gets a spot in the dining list.
Activities: besides the obligatory daily workouts at Nautilus Plus, I think we’ll check out the McCord Museum. And as much as I love Montreal in winter, I’ll be excited to see the city in summer for the first time since 2005.
Looking ahead to Montréal v. 9.0 in December: still in the early planning stages, but for meals, I’m thinking of an homage to the chefs who have played a role in making Montréal in the modern era. Normand Laprise, Graziella Battista, Martin Picard, David McMillan and Federic Morin, Derek Damman, Marc-André Jetté and Patrice Demers, among others.
I think it will be fun!

Photo: The kitchen, as seen from the bar: Le Chien Fumant