These recommendations are highly biased (what on this blog isn’t?), and all the hotels are located in Old Montréal. If you want to stay elsewhere, feel free to point your Google at downtown hotels or hotels on Sherbrooke, but here’s my list of recommendations if you want the charm of the Old City, and you want to avoid the most heavily “touristed” area of rue St Paul E. Prices range from about $170 a night to around $300.

Auberge-style hotels

• Auberge Les Passants du Sans Soucy: we stay here every holiday. Nine rooms, each quite beautiful, friendly and helpful staff, with a great breakfast included.
• Bonaparte: This place has 30 rooms; the best are Terrace rooms, facing the gardens of Notre Dame Basilica. They’re a little more expensive compared to other rooms in the hotel, but the view is wonderful.

Boutique hotels

• St Paul Hotel: an old bank building, I think. Beautiful, high-ceilinged rooms. Extremely cool space. This hotel makes a statement and feels regal, but comfortable.
• Hotel Gault: another hotel that’s extremely cool, although the rooms don’t make the same vaulting architectural statement as the St Paul. But if you don’t need a 15-foot ceiling, and you want a sleek, modern aesthetic, you’ll enjoy the Gault.

Recommended tourist hotels

• Le Saint-Sulpice: We’ve not stayed in this hotel but it comes highly recommended by all kinds of people. Its look is more conventional, but very tasteful.
• Hotel Nelligan: Same situation – we’ve not stayed here but we know people who have and they like it, although I’ve seen a couple reviews say the rooms are small.

Chain hotels

• W Hotel: You either love the W or like it, or hate it. We love it. Last I knew (December 2008; I’ll check again next week), this hotel hasn’t been converted to the new white look of the W, so the rooms and hallways are dark and shadowy. The bars are cool and there are always beautiful people to look at.
• Le Westin Montréal: The new Westin opened in 2009, located at the edge of the Old City. For the past two winters, we’ve walked by the old Gazette printing press facility and watched its transformation into a huge atrium for the hotel. It’s new, and yes, it has the Heavenly Bed. Enough said.

This is the question that vexes the traveler who isn’t planning to spend the holidays with family or friends. And the holidays are a great leveler because whether you’re new to a city or a frequent visitor, you can still be frustrated when you start to feel hunger pangs and you face the prospect of block after block of closed restaurants.

We’ve been spending the holiday in Montreal for 6 years now, and every year, we subject our long-considered list of desired restaurants to the reality of holiday hours. Most of the time we can make it all work out. We arrive about a week before Christmas and leave shortly thereafter, so we can manage our reservations around what’s open on a particular night.

But it’s not easy. Not only do most restaurants close for a few days (or longer) but others close capriciously – and here’s what I mean by that: last year, we reserved at Bronte about 3 weeks before our trip – it had been on our list for a couple years and we wanted to check it out. A week before our trip, Bronte called. They wouldn’t be able to fulfill our reservation on Open Table because they were actually closed that night. Why they’d not communicated that with Open Table? I’m not sure, but during the phone conversation they told us they’d be open on Boxing Day and they could accommodate us. So, we reserved for 12/26. On the afternoon of 12/26, Bronte called again: “We’re sorry but we won’t be open tonight.” It’s likely they looked at the number of reservations for the evening and decided it wasn’t worth bringing in the staff. Understandable, but frustrating, and Bronte is now off our list.

Christmas Eve is usually workable. A number of reputable restaurants are open because families and large parties often eat out before Midnight Mass or other celebrations. Christmas night is another matter. With the exception of hotel restaurants or Chinese restaurants, most everything is closed. Our Christmas dining record? Four Christmas night meals at Otto (W Hotel) and one dinner at Koko (Opus Hotel).

Whenever I mention Otto as the Christmas Night meal, it seems, a Chowhound or foodie will write to say something like, “I hardly think Otto is a great choice for someone interested in food.” To which I always respond with a sanitized version of, “Duh, but please suggest a better restaurant that’s open on Christmas Night.” I’ve never received a suggestion.

Chinese restaurants are a well-known option for Christmas Night because many of them are open. That’s something we’ve considered, except that our other Christmas Day tradition, dim sum for lunch, provides us with enough Chinese food for the day.

Locals can’t often provide much help with this question because most of them are at home with family and friends, recovering from a huge Christmas dinner.

But surely someone – tourist or local – has gone to a restaurant on Christmas Night in Montreal. If you’ve done so, where have you gone? What can you recommend?

photo: Christmas Day dim sum consumption at Ruby Rouge