Montréal Madness

We took a trip to Montreal recently and got to try out a few restaurants:

St. Viateur Bagel was a 20 minute subway ride from downtown where we were staying. It was in a lovely neighbourhood (where Jay Baruchel lives!) and it was nice to see another part of Montreal. I would recommend taking the subway (aka. Le Metro) because (compared to Toronto) all the stations are so lovely - they all have high vaulted ceilings and interesting - albeit 70s - art installations.

I recommend getting the day pass which is cheaper than single tickets if you take 2 round trips. You can only buy the day passes at the self-serve kiosks (not at the ticket booth). The ticket that the machine spits out is a proximity card so you just place it on the top of the turnstile and the light turns green! (Don’t try to feed it into the slot on the turnstile - the day passes don’t work like that - as I found out!). 

Back to St. Viateur Bagel… If you’re not that hungry I would recommend getting a bagel with a few sides instead of a bagel-with-something-on-it option (which are huge!). A bagel with cream cheese and fruit is great for a light lunch. If you’ve never had a Montreal bagel before they are awesome! They’re hard to explain but Montreal does bagels right.

At night we asked at our hotel for a restaurant in Old Montreal (which is a cute historical area). He suggested Moda Vie which took us forever to find since his directions were wrong. However it did make for a nice wine-fueled walk around Old Montreal.

I wish we had come here during the day! (note the Land Rover in the picture below).

Moda Vie was a little expensive and bland for our taste. LB and I both got the truffle chicken pasta which was not too truffley and reminiscent of our brie-arugula pasta mess. I suggest doing an upscale restaurant for lunch so the prices are a little more manageable.

For breakfast the next day I googled “crepes” on Google Maps and came up with The Brioche Lyonnaise - only a few blocks from our hotel.

The crepes were rather good but be forewarned they’re about $8 and there is only one or two ingredients. The egg & hashbrowns breakfast seemed like a better deal. But I suppose crepes are always overpriced. Lovely atmosphere though.

Overall I find the best restaurants to be the ones you stumble upon. On our trip last year to Montreal we stumbled into a place on Rue St. Denis called Faste Fou. It had the most amazing gourmet burgers which all kinds of interesting toppings. I promise next time I will actually take pictures of the food instead of just the restaurant.

     

Do you have any restaurant suggestions for my next Montreal excursion?