Vive la cuisine à Montréal!

The question on my mind was always: "Where should we go for lunch?" Followed by the inevitable: "Where should we go for supper?" A week in Montreal provides numerous culinary options: Lebanese, Italian, French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Iranian, Thai and the near ubiquitous English and Irish pub fare. I wanted to explore them all; I wanted to take in everything Monteal had to offer and view the city from the inside out: inside restaurants looking out to the crowded streets and breezy thoroughfares. But I'm getting ahead of myself, first it was a few days in Ottawa, also known as the Land Where Nobody Works on Holidays where the downtown skyscrapers flicker with the glow of screensavers and call forward telephone beacons.

Yes, Ottawa on Good Friday was dead, because apparently everyone is a Christian of some derivation except McDonalds and Tim Horton's--both proprietors are long dead and probably postumously baptised as Mormons by now--but there was one other option: shawarmas. The narrow restaurant was what I mistakenly referred to as a "donair" place and having enjoyed a delightful donair in Vancouver last year, I was ready to bite the bullet one more time. I asked the Turkish man behind the counter if I could have a donair and he said: "I don't serve donair's, I serve shawarmas."

"Shawarmas?" I inquired, "Is that like a donair?"

"No... no... no..." He replied sternly, "I use fresh meat, it's a shawarma."

I tried it. Fantastic: shaved lamb and beef, with onions, tomatoes, turnip and smothered in a garlic sauce. My new adage was "Donair-don't care. Give me a warma shawarma!" Maybe he could use that line to lure the donair crowd.

So that started off the culinary delights of Upper and Lower Canada. Montreal also would not disappoint. Who could resist the famous Montreal smoked meat sandwich, the meat piled so high the bread is little more than afterthought, like bookends on the unabridged Encyclopedia Britannica, or the complete works of Ghandi or even George W. Bush's list of books he'd never read. (Unlike the History of Salt that apparently made a great summer page-turner). But the sandwich comes with a mountain of fries (frites in Quebec) as well as pickled peppers, regular pickle slice, then spiked with a toothpick the size of a pool cue.

Of course, what visit to Quebec would be complete without a massive plate of steaming poutine. Some places serve so much poutine, it's reserved in a special square on the menu. There's poutine with chicken, poutine with sausage, poutine with Chorizo, you name it and they'll mix it in poutine. The real magic of poutine is in the cheese curd. When the plate comes to you, the curd sits in lumps, nestled amongst the fries, but as you eat, the curd softens then starts to melt. By the time you near the end of your poutine, the cheese has degenerated into stringy ligaments of rubbery perfection. Unlike most foods you eat, poutine gets better the more you eat. Near the bottom, what are you left with? French fries sitting in a pool of gravy and covered with melted cheese, what could possibly be better than that?

Then there's the famous crepes. We explored this French delight at a weird Hawaiian restaurant run by gypsies. All the crepes were displayed on boards plastered to the walls and each crepe was surrounded by the ingrediants inside. In the picture my crepe was beside a block of cheese, a green pepper and bowl of olives. (I traded the olives for tomatoes--olives in the morning, I don't know). Julia's crepe was next to a pile of mushrooms. It was an interesting little display, but as much as we liked the crepes themselves, that is, the eggy sleeve containing the filling, Julia's crepe had mushrooms and uncooked, undiluted mushroom soup in it. Ick. She finished mine and I finished hers after she tortured herself with about two thirds. She kept saying:

"The crepe is good, but the filling is crap."

I saw someone in the Hawaiian crepe place that I could have sworn I knew from somewhere. I hate that. You try to judge if you actually know them to see them, know them to speak to them or if you were best friends in some alternate reality. I figured I knew her to speak to her, but seeing someone in a Hawaiian crepe place, in Montreal, that's run by gypsies, is totally out of context for most people. She was sitting under a plastic palm tree and speaking with some guy I didn't know and Julia kept saying "these mushrooms are canned... this mushroom soup is gross... I like the crepe part though... can I have some of yours?" A confusing morning. I will learn to make crepes and avoid that Hawaiian place altogether.