L’Express is another one of those famous bistros in Montreal that I’ve been meaning to try, so my coworker and I were happy to be able to find a couple of bar seats last night as we did not have reservations for this place.  Well, at least the maitre d’ didn’t turn us away like they do at Au Pied de Cochon.

This place is totally an old-style Parisian bistro.  There is no sign for with the restaurant name at the front door, but you will see the name L’Express when you walk up and look at the tiles on the floor.  The menu is written in French hand-writing, so we were quite confused until our waiter gave us the English menu.

I wasn’t in the mood for another duck confit, so I decided to try the risotto special with shrimp, zucchini and zucchini flower.  Based on my experience with bistro risotto in Montreal, I was confident that it would taste great.  My coworker got the hanger steak frite and we ordered the wild mushroom salad as an appie.

I think the best dish was the wild mushroom salad.  You can’t go wrong with sauteed porcini on a bed of arugula.  My risotto was average to good.  It was a smaller portion which was actually a plus for me because risotto always end up being way too filling.  My coworker thought his steak was average as well, but the fries were thicker than the nice thin fries we are used to getting from Montreal bistros.  They tasted better than they looked.

We placed all of our hopes onto the dessert as that would make or break this dining experience.  We ended up going with the waiter’s recommendation of the floating island.  The floating island is supposed to be a classic French dessert composed of an “island” of meringue floating on creme anglaise.  This particular version is covered in caramelized sugar.  The dessert was fluffy and light with lots of air bubbles in the egg white which popped when you put it in your mouth.  But seeing as we did not finish the entire dessert, it was not as impressive as we had hoped.

Overall, we thought this restaurant was overrated and that we have been extremely spoilt and are now too picky to enjoy average to good restaurants.