(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)
It’s not often that you hear about a warm winter weekend in Montreal. But that’s exactly what we had on our recent visit!
The first part of our visit focused mainly on food and shopping. We once again purchased a weekend transit pass, allowing us to travel around the city and hop on or off whenever we felt inspired. We started by returning to Verdun, for a clothing shop we discovered on our previous trip to Montreal. Before shopping, however, we had to make sure we were properly nourished.
We chose a Peruvian place just down the street from the clothing shop. My hopes were high, as I saw both lomo saltado and chicha morada on the menu. I have a nostalgic attachment to these items, as I prepared lomo saltado during a cooking course I took in Cusco, Peru. And I had many delicious glasses of chicha morada throughout my Peruvian trip in 2014.
While it was nice to revisit Peru on a winter’s day in Canada, it wasn’t quite the same as what I remembered from 6 years before. I guess this isn’t surprising – almost everything tastes better in the place it comes from. Eating in Peru is great!
The next day, we ventured to the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. We had no particular destination in mind: we had just heard that there were a lot of bookstores and independent businesses that might be interesting to look at. This was true, but what really struck us was the number of bakeries and pastry shops…and also the number of pet-oriented businesses! The pets of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce certainly ought to be well-amused and well-groomed.
From there, it was off to the neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. This time, the attraction was an allegedly high number of ethnic restaurants. We decided to simply roam and stop in for lunch wherever the “vibe” was right. Nothing truly called to us until we saw a basement restaurant called La Republika. There was no menu posted outside: we just knew that the food was from the Philippines. We took the plunge, as there seemed to be many local residents dining despite the low outside profile.
It turned out to be the culinary highlight of our trip. My wife had a very enjoyable pork dish called tosilog, while I had grilled shrimps. I was somewhat surprised to see that the shrimps had not been shelled (or otherwise processed) before being grilled. The waiter brought me some gloves and I spent quite a bit of time trying to shell the slippery-sauced shrimp. All turned out well in the end, even if I made a complete mess and the grilling sauce ended up everywhere. There was no question that the dish was freshly made!
We walked off our lunch feast on Mont-Royal, the small “mountain” that provides excellent views of downtown Montreal (see photo at the top of this post). After an extended hike, we caught another bus to the Plateau neighbourhood…home of my favourite record store (“Aux 33 Tours”). It never fails to surprise me with unexpected vinyl treasures.
Cookies and hot chocolate followed in the Plateau, and eventually a late dinner at Qing Hua near our hotel at the edge of Westmount. Qing Hua is a Montreal institution specializing in “Chinese dumplings”…name a filling, and it’s probably available in at least one of their large steamed dumplings. I tried beef curry, as well as vermicelli-mushroom-cabbage.
Stay tuned – there’s more on Montreal!