J’adore Montreal. Beaucoup. There. I’ve said it. And now you know. Because with those three little words, I have done far more than simply profess my feelings for a new favorite city; I have just confessed, however obliquely, my recent infidelity to the city of New Orleans, my long-time secret sharer, keeper of all my best secrets, and my first North American love.
Yes, I’ve been unfaithful to New Orleans. I’ve strayed. Just please don’t tell anyone.
Of course I regret making a cuckquean of NOLA, really I do in that kinda-sorta way all philanders maintain, but my beloved Crescent City will surely understand—and better than most—that life is often a messy enterprise, a non-linear, often-myopic, and always-hopeful stumble from one relationship to another, and that each of us ultimately has precious little say in the matter of whom we love so truly and deeply—the way I now love Montreal.
My love affair with Montreal was never supposed to happen. The divide between us seemed far too enormous ever to cross. There was me: a devotedly dirt-covered Americanist and student of all-things Southern (both the holy and repugnantly profane), whose bourbon-soaked soul and deep-fried gastronomic sensibilities have invariably led me to find fulfillment in some fried chicken shack at the end of a Mississippi gravel road. And then there was Montreal: haughty and aloof and insistently, irretractably Quebecois in mien, whose legendarily indifferent Francophone heart and long-held self-awareness of her old-world beauty has made her impervious to the envy and scorn of newer settlements across the North America cityscape. That I should fall head-over-heels for the City of Saints was beyond unlikely. But the moment I stepped out of my rideshare onto the Boulevard Saint-Laurent, I was smitten. Because what I found in Montreal was a funky, perfectly-dirty, two-fisted drinking town smelling of freshly baked bread and freshly smoked marijuana, whose streets were teaming with young, well-inked, I-give-no-fucks fashionistas, who, to the person, looked to be in desperate need of a bath. My kind of town. But more than that, I found Montreal to be without peer in its mastery of the low-to-high gastronomic spectrum, a town where cooks and chefs operate, sans irony, in kitchens that are clearly and avowedly no-bullshit zones.
J’etais amoureux.
To say Montreal is a repository of gustatory joy would be a rhetorical understatement in the extreme; it is a gastronomic wonderland, a culinary Valhalla. Every restaurant I visited, every dish I tried, was, in some disquieting and wholly unexpected way, a whispered revelation. Because the food of Montreal seems utterly unfettered by an orthodoxia to any one fixed position on the low/high continuum. Menus delight in the subversion of that hierarchal expectation by unapologetically juxtaposing perennial snout-to-tail classics against the latest and more fashionable golden boys du jourof the culinary haute monde. What follows then is not a Homeric catalog of ships to guide hungry travelers to the many, many restaurants and drinking establishments of Montreal I found glorious and good, but the eateries that I believe best represent the quiescence of gastronomy in the City of Saints. Three meals in one day. The basics. And by no means are any of these establishments “new” discoveries by any measure. Each is a venerated Montreal institution and has, in most cases, been around for decades; each has been celebrated in food media the world over. But despite the attention and accolades they’ve yet received, none of these eateries has, by all reports, been changed by the sparkle and wonder of sudden fame; each has stayed true to its primary mission of feeding the masses of Montreal what they’ve always served, the way they’ve always served it, the Food Network be damned.
BREAKFAST
You’ve had bagels before. I get that. But unless you’ve been to Montreal, you haven’t had these bagels before, boy-o. These are different. These, inarguably, are better than any you’ve had in New York or the contiguous lower forty-eight. Fighting words, I know, but please hear me out; the differences between the two are produced, fundamentally, by their respective terroir: the municipal water supply of New York City is lower in magnesium and calcium carbonate, resulting in softer gluten strands and a far more pillow-like bagel. Bagel makers of Montreal add sugar to their dough and poach their hand-rolled bagels in honey-infused water. The Montreal bagels are then baked in wood-burning ovens, producing bagels that are smaller, denser, and inarguably crispier than their American cousins, with a noticeably larger center whole. To eat a Montreal bagel for the first time is to surely experience the epiphany of a Magellan or Vespucci: a new world of hitherto unseen culinary vistas opening before your very own eyes.
Of the myriad bagel shops in Montreal, two reign supreme: St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel. Located just blocks from another in the neighborhood of Mile End, both produce the kind of bagels whose savor will make your eyes roll back in your head; both are open 24/7 for the drunk and sober alike; both produce feverishly and deeply cult-like opinions among eaters as to which shop produces the superior bagel—divergent devotions that have reportedly divided families, ruined friendship, and sunk otherwise seaworthy marriages.
Founded in 1957 by Krakow native and concentration camp survivor, Meyer Lewkowicz (now deceased), St-Viatueur is Montreal’s oldest and arguably revered bagel shop. Down the street stands its archrival, Fairmount Bagel, who, beyond producing equally delicious bagels, boasts having sent the first bagel into space in 2008. The good news: as a visiting American, no one will ask you to swear allegiance to either bagel shop. Just do what I did: eat both.
BREAKFAST REDUX
Or…
If your breakfast needs demand fare of greater piquancy and heft, then you must, must, dear friend-o, have yourself delivered by foot, by car, to Beauty’s Luncheonette, which, happily enough for you, is just down the street. Established in 1942 by Hymie Sckolnick to feed the hungry workers of Montreal’s long-storied Jewish garment district, Beauty’s produces an omelet that instantly, and upon my very first forkful, became a favorite. The Mish Mash Omelet is a mélange of hot dogs, eggs, green peppers, onions, and salami. It’s also a veritable first-class ticket for a synesthetic thrill ride back your own culinary childhood when eating hot dogs for breakfast was de rigueur. As the Mish Mash Omelet shows us, it still should be.
LUNCH
Let me be crystal clear about my feelings about Wilensky’s Light Lunch: this is now my favorite restaurant in North America.
My. Favorite. Restaurant. In. North. America.
Put another way: I love Wilensky’s more than any other restaurant in which I’ve eaten. Ever.
You dig?
So why, in a lifetime of eating, is it Wilensky’s? Why? Because Wilensky’s was built and 1932 and looks every year of it. Because Wilensky’s offers a very short, very worn lunch counter over which nine—and only nine—luncheoneers may perch on nine very wobbly stools. Because there is no flatware with which to eat; there are no plates—just the thinnest of diner-issue paper napkins comes between the decades-old Formica and your beloved Wilensky Special. And because at Wilensky’s there are rules, each as immutable as a commandment:
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| Wilinsky's Special |
1. Every sandwich will come with mustard (eaters who request a sandwich sans mustard are fined 10 cents per request)
2. No sandwich will ever be cut in half, no matter how emotional the entreaty
3. No tipping, ever
But it’s by the tenets of this it’s-our-way-or-you-can-fucking-leave gastronomic and aesthetic austerity that allows the good folks to focus their efforts on making the extraordinary Wilensky Special: one slice of all-beef bologna, five slices of all-beef salami, with either Swiss or Kraft American cheese—your choice—and served on a Kaiser bun that’s been grilled on vintage, Canadian-made Serv-All sandwich presses that Moe Wilensky bought in 1932, on credit, and paid off at twenty-five cents every week. As for the two pickles spears you’ll want to order, they come in two varieties—sour or extra sour—and are served, like your sandwich, on a paper napkin.
Paul Scheffer made my Wilensky’s Special (with Swiss and four pickles). Paul, a long-time employee of Wilensky’s, is the Leonard Cohen of all culinarians; one senses something beatific and deeply meaningful in his most cursory gestures or observations. We made small talk while he worked the tiny grill—when the Expos might return to Montreal, the forecast for rain—then Paul put my sandwich on a napkin and pushed it across the counter at me. He leaned in slightly as if waiting for me to eat. So I lifted my Wilensky Special and took a bite. Paul arched his eyebrows and leaned in further still.
“So?” he asked.
And that’s when I told Paul Scheffer that the grilled bologna and salami he had just made me was the best sandwich of my entire life.
INTERMEZZO
La Vieille Europe
Let’s blame the F.D.A. Their draconian insistence that most cheese sold in America be made from pasteurized milk has made us mediocre as makers of fine cheeses. And that’s good for Canada. Because topping the litany of all things that Canadians do far, far better than their continental cousins of the lower forty-eight—a list of Canadian superiority that most certainly includes ice hockey, maple syrup, and the saying of soorry—is cheese. Because in Montreal, as elsewhere in Quebec, they’ve got the good stuff: cheese made from raw milk and sold without the 60-day age incumbrance that leaves most American cheeses—even the very few made from raw milk—toe-tagged and gastronomically dead on arrival. Not in Montreal. Here, cheesemogers proffer varieties of extraordinary freshness and unabashed aggressiveness that never fail to hit the eater’s pallet like an umami bomb fired from a pretty blue gun.
So it was with my own intermezzo of two raw-milk cheeses—the sublime Le Riopelle and the dazzling Bleu D’Elizabeth—procured from Le Vieille Europe on Boulevard Saint-Laurent and eaten avec baguette atop a grassy knoll within the summery embrace of Parc La Fontaine, just as every cheese from Quebec should.
DINNER
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| Duck in a Can |
If there is one restaurant that singularly best exemplifies the gastronomic zeitgeist of Quebec and the epitome of culinary Montreal, it’s this: the ever-luminous Au Pied du Cochon. Founded in 2001 by Chef Martin Picard, the current high priest of Quebecois gastronomy, Au Pied du Cochon reigns supreme as the oink-to-quack temple of all-things-meat in a food world now increasingly beset by the dogma of plant-based diets and all of its attendant finger-wagging of the cultish quinoa-and kale bowl folks. Not here, friend-o, not in the vegetarian-free zone that is Au Pied de Cochon. Here you’ll find the very best of the nasty bits. Foie gras. Head cheese. Beef tongue. Boudin noir. The celebrated classics on every true carnivore’s playlist of all-time greatest hits—the same playlist with vegetables, few as they are, being relegated to occupy the obscure B-sides among the darker nether regions of Au Pied’s long-playing menu of carnivorous delights.
These were my people.
This was my tribe.
But what to tell New Orleans? How to break the news that there was a new city in my life, a favorite surmounting all others for my greatest favors, and one that excited me in gustatory, pheromonic ways I never thought possible?
Luckily for me, the French have a phrase for such polyamory: a menage a trois.
Go to Montreal. Eat. And please tell her I love her.
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| A Montreal Cuisinier in Repose |
