One of the main reasons that Bryan chose Montreal as our destination is because I’m a Habs fan (Montreal Canadiens). I grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night with my dad who is also a huge Montreal fan as is my mom. These days we are very much a family divided. Bryan, Evan and my brother Eric are Red Wing fans while my parents, Grace and I are for Montreal. As a side note, my sister-in-law Katie cheers for Toronto but we don’t discuss it 😉 . Bryan was able to get his hands on some tickets for the hockey game on Tuesday night and as you can see I was ready by Tuesday morning! Since the game wasn’t until 7:30p.m., we had lots of time to explore more of the city. We decided to jump on the subway head up towards the Mile End neighbourhood which features some excellent food options. Our first order of business was breakfast and I had heard some amazing things about the local bagel shops.
After a good 15 minute walk from the subway we found St. Viateur Bagel Shop. It isn’t fancy and doesn’t even have a place to sit down inside but I tell you, the bagels they make in there are the best I’ve ever had in my whole life!!
We ended up purchasing 3 different varieties: sesame seed, everything and plain and we ate all 3 of them. They were a little hard on the outside and nice and chewy, almost stretchy on the inside. I wish I had brought an extra suitcase just for bagels! After filling up on bagels we naturally decided it was time for donuts 😉 . We made our way down to another neighbourhood eatery called Chez Boris.
The plan was to pick up some breakfast to enjoy in our room the next two mornings. The donuts are quite small so we opted for a dozen. We were offered a choice of 3 flavours: cinnamon, sugar, or chocolate to which we said “Yes please!” I mean how can you go wrong with any of those? What we didn’t realize until we got there is they make the donuts fresh in front of you so they’re still warm when you get them…drool. It was tough but we managed to close the bag and not eat a single one of them right there. I should add that by this point in the morning it was just starting to snow…a nice gentle, pretty snow. After walking around some more and admiring the neighbourhood, we headed over to Lester’s Deli. Bryan couldn’t leave Montreal without having a smoked meat sandwich. We decided the best thing to do was to share one with a dish of coleslaw.
It’s a good thing we decided to share, look at that thing! It was delicious though and well worth it. Afterwards, we made our way back to the subway and went to our hotel for a little break. At this point the snow was starting to accumulate a little so we thought it would be a good afternoon to check out Montreal’s underground mall. Montreal, as you may have guessed, can get quite snowy in the winter months so quite a bit of the downtown is accessible through underground tunnels including quite a bit of shopping areas. We were heading to the hockey game for about 6:30 so we had a few hours to explore the underground and grab a bite to eat 😉 . The tunnels are accessible from the subway lines so I imagine, if you really knew the system well, you could stay inside much of the winter months. We did see folks walking around without coats, in fact, one guy had shorts on! Seeing as we had had such a great morning of local food we decided the afternoon shouldn’t be any different so we searched out some poutine. Now I’ve had many a plate of poutine in my day but there is nothing quite like Quebec poutine. The cheese is so much better, in fact it squeaks when you bite into it!
Ahhh, delicious! We ate a place called Frites Alors! I had the regular poutine (for those unfamiliar with this dish it’s basically fries topped with cheese curds and gravy) which was delicious and Bryan went for something a little more exciting.
Along with curds and gravy, his had sausage and onions on top as well. He tried, he really did, but he was unable to finish the entire plate 🙁 he was very sad about that. Afterwards, we made our way back to the subway and over to the Bell Centre for the game. Again, it was still snowing but nothing crazy. In hindsight, we probably should have been concerned because the wind had really picked up.
The game didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped with the Canadiens losing 4-2 but it was really cool being there and we did walk out with some souvenirs from the gift shop. By the time the game was over it was approaching 10p.m. As we followed the crowd towards the subway, we realized that no-one was being allowed on and were instead being funnelled outside. The storm was in full force and had clearly been that way for a couple of hours. Once we reached the street outside and saw busses and cabs stuck in the snow, we knew we were going to have to walk the almost 2 miles back to the hotel in the blizzard! Thank God for cell phones with GPS. We found a spot out of the wind so we could look at the map on Bryan’s phone and then just started walking, running, climbing snow drifts until we made it back to the hotel.
That’s me just as we arrived at our hotel. Now I certainly wouldn’t want to walk through that on a regular basis, and if we’d had little kids with us I’d have been a bit stressed, but it was actually kind of beautiful. There’s something very peaceful and quiet about a snowstorm and I’m glad I got to experience a storm of that magnitude. Stay tuned for my last Montreal post….Montreal Part 3: The Aftermath!
Do you have a favourite local dish?
Where was the last place you went on vacation?
Shauna says
Good food, good company, and good fun! Can’t get any better than that1