For my last team dinner in Montreal, we took a recommendation from a local and went to try A L’Os.  This is another cozy little bring your own wine gig in the Plateau area.  Their entree and main prices are slightly more expensive than a bistro, so we decided to go for the $55 5-course tasting menu for the value.

They started us off with an amuse of sweetbread nuggets.  This was my first time having sweetbread, but since the sweetbread nuggets were deep fried, I felt that I didn’t get a true enough taste of what sweetbread should taste like.  The texture was harder than foie gras, but of course anything deep fried tastes good…

Next dish was grilled octopus and ostrich tartar.  The octopus was good but the ostrich I found to be a little bland.

My favourite course was the fish dish, which was a black cod marinated in miso with a butter yuzu sauce.  I didn’t taste much yuzu in there, but the fish was done perfectly.  The fish sat on a bed of zucchini spaghetti which was also very yummy.

The main course was a lamb shoulder stuffed with chorizo.  The meat was so tender that it broke off my fork and fell onto my lap.  Thank goodness for this dish and napkins.

For dessert, we had chocolate mousse cake with cherry ice-cream.  The combination was perfect because the tangy taste of the cherry ice-cream balances out the rich chocolate mousse.

I think we got great value and quality for the price that we paid.  Again, Montreal proves to have great food everywhere you go!

Next week will be my last week on my 15-month long assignment in Montreal.  I think the part that I will miss the most about Montreal is the French food!  Before my time is up, I wanted to try one of the restaurants that my coworkers and I have been meaning to try for the longest time, but have not yet had a chance, because usually you need to make reservations a week ahead at the Liverpool House.  Since I’m in Montreal alone this week, I thought I’d try my luck and see if I can get a seat at the bar. 

Picture from voir.ca.

I arrived at the restaurant just before 7pm and was seated at the bar.  I was surprised to find that the restaurant was not busy, yet it would’ve been impossible to reserve a table for more than 4 people on OpenTable.  The restaurant has a very rustic charm to it, and of course chalkboard menus are what I like.  The menu was all in French, but I was able to decipher that there is a scallop dish served with eggplant.  It turned out to be seared scallops with fresh yellow and red cherry tomatoes on a bed of eggplant paste similar to baba ganoush.  The combination was awesome and the tomatoes so fresh.

For dessert, I decided to indulge and got the mille feuille with lemon custard and raspberries.  The pasty was so flaky and the custard was nice a tart to my taste.

Overall, Liverpool House offers a great culinary experience and the service was friendly and attentive.  Hopefully, I’ll return soon to Montreal to try out their other two restaurants Joe Beef and McKiernan Luncheonette!

Last night, my coworkers and I visited the trendy new restaurant called Brasserie T by the chef of Toque, Normand Laprise.  The restaurant just opened near the end of June and I have read some good reviews about it.  The design of the restaurant is uber chic and modern.

There was a male host that brought us to our table.  We had originally made a reservation for 6, but only 5 of us ended up going, so the host decided to remove one of the 2-seater tables and we were made to seat 5 of us in a table meant for 4.  Good thing another hostess walked by when our 5th guest showed up and she decided to give us back the extra 2-seater table to make the seating more roomy…was kind of an awkward situation at first but turned out to be ok.

Our waiter was very friendly and gave us a good explanation of the menu items.  We started off with a large charcuterie plate and fried cheese.  The charcuterie plate came with a sauce made with vinegar, honey and dijon, which I don’t find you get at other places that serve charcuterie.  And, how can you go wrong with fried cheese?

For my main, I ordered the Coquille St Jaques, which was a shell with scallops, spinach and mushrooms baked in a cream sauce with a side of salad.

My meal was delicious.  My coworker had the hamburger which was highly recommended by the waiter, so I think I will have to get it next time I go there because it seemed really good!

For dessert, we had the tiramisu dessert special.  It was so creamy and tastes different than the typical tiramisu that you would expect from an Italian restaurant.  I think I prefer this one more!

My friends crazyC and crazyPyxo have been telling me about the restaurant that they went to during their wild Montreal bachelor party weekend, Le Bleu Raisin, so I decided to bring my coworkers there last night since we haven’t had French food for a while.  It was a bring your own wine place, so we brought along a bottle of white and a bottle of red for the meal.

It was a pleasant evening, so a table in their little patio was a great start to our meal.  The friendly waitress explained the menu to us in English and we all decided to go for the $49 4-course tasting menu since the a la carte would’ve costed more money.  The tasting menu consisted of an amuse bouche, an entree, a main and dessert.

For our amuse, we were served with blood pudding, cured duck breast, and pickeled mushrooms.  I have never tried blood pudding before, it looks just like the Chinese pig’s blood except it is seared.

For my entree, I picked the escargots with wild mushrooms.  It was very yummy.  My coworkers tried the foie gras terrine and it was very very smooth!

For my main, I got the Thazard with risotto.  The fish tastes kind of like tuna or mackerel.

I think the only disappointing part of the meal was the dessert.  I was supposed to get the blueberry and vanilla creme brulee, but they ran out and they gave us jasmine tea creme brulee instead.  It didn’t taste that good because the bitter tea taste was too overpowering, but my coworker got the bread pudding and it was awesome.

My coworkers and I have been trying to get reservations at Garde Manger in Old Montreal for a long time, but have never had any success because we try to get a table last minute or the day of.  Today since I was having dinner by myself (the life of a traveller), I decided to walk over to see if I would get lucky and find a seat at the bar.  Turns out the bar was reserved but there was a table open for me for an hour before the next reservation, so I took it!

Chuck Hughes from Chuck’s Day Off owns this tiny little, unmarked restaurant.  They specialize in seafood and have a fresh menu daily.

I couldn’t say not to the lobster poutine appetizer, but I thought it would be too heavy to get another main, so I decided to go with the tomato salad with avacado and cheddar frit.  (Ok fine, their dishes were kind of pricey, so I decided to go with two appetizers instead!)

The tomato salad was very refreshing and very appetizing for a hot day.

The lobster poutine was less exciting than I expected.  There were a few chunks of lobster which I initially though tasted pretty sweet, but then I realized that it was actually the gravy that tasted sweet.  The fries were good, but the cheese curds were not as squeaky and chewy as I would have liked.  When comparing this poutine to another gourmet poutine like the foie gras poutine from Au Pied de Cochon, this is definitely the loser.

The table across from me ordered the seafood platter.  It was more like a huge toolbox full of seafood and it comes with a hefty price tag too, Small $45, Medium $85, and Large $150.

On Tuesday night, we went out for a celebratory team dinner.  Our manager wanted a place that was “cool & casual” so one of our Montreal coworkers suggested BBQ, which is a cheaper, more casual version of the high-rent Bar & Boeuf, both in the Old Montreal area.

This is such a cool new restaurant for enjoying a night out with friends and great food.  They have an extensive beer and cocktail menu and the food prices were quire affordable.

I loved my coriander and cucumber gin and tonic very much.

We ordered a bunch of appetizers to share.  BBQed octopus, charcuterie plate, foie gras terrine, and escargots with gnocchi, which I didn’t get a picture of, but they were all delicious.

For my main, I decided to give the BBQ carbonara a try.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the nice crispy piece of pork belly!  The dish also came with tuna, which I thought was kind of weird, but still tasted great overall.

For dessert, we went with the BBQ carrot cake, which came with yummy cream cheese icing, carrot confit and carrot jelly.  Dessert is always the greatest part of the meal!

Since I fly Air Canada every week, I get excited whenever there is a new enRoute magazine in the back pocket of the seat in-front of me.  This month’s issue had an article on Montreal.  A lot of times, this is where I get my food sources from.

When I saw that Le Chien Fumant (The Smoking Dog – not the cigarette kind of smoke, the flaming kind of smoke!) was mentioned in the magazine article, I decided to look it up for some reviews.  The reviews, the chalkboard menu, and the whole look of the restaurant looked promising.  Even the house cocktail of brandy, sugar water, sparkling wine and lemon juice boosted our expectations for a great meal.

I wouldn’t say that I was disappointed by the food, but more so by the long wait time for my food.  We ordered Cajun-style crab cakes to start, followed by baby-back ribs.  They also served dishes such as deep fried Cornish hen cooked Southern style, lamb filet, lamb shank with pasta, and clams in black bean sauce.  With our appetizer, we got a free order of Chinatown calamari.  Both tasted very good, but I didn’t get to snap a picture of the calamari.  The food doesn’t sound like conventional bistro food at all which gives this restaurant a distinctive twist in the menu.

While we waited impatiently for our mains to show up, they served us another free appetizer, the beef carpaccio cut thick.

Here’s my ribs served with tamali and corn.

The food was pretty good.  We had to wait but at least we got free food and enough food to pack lunch the next day!

After reading about the Gold Medal Plates Canadian Culinary Championships win by the chefs at Kitchen Galerie, our team has been meaning to try out this restaurant for months, and finally found the time last night to pay the tiny restaurant a visit.

We were served by owner/chef/waiter Mathieu Cloutier who explained their menu consisting of a three-course meal created fresh daily with whatever ingredients are available at the close-by Jean-Talon Market.  Given choices of several different types of foie gras, oysters, pork belly, scallops, and short ribs, the team had high and hungry expectations for an unforgettable meal.

My foie-gras-loving coworker jumped on the dishwasher foie gras bandwagon as soon as the chef introduced it to us.  I was a little skeptical myself because I couldn’t get around the idea of a piece of foie gras being literally poached in a jar inside a dishwasher…I much prefer pan seared foie gras myself, so I opted for the porsciutto bits, melon and arugula salad as my appetizer.  It turned out that the dishwasher foie gras tasted much like a foie gras pate, but my arugula salad tasted awesome.

The chef recommended that I “super-size” my scallop main dish with black truffle shavings, so you could smell the wonderful scent of truffles from a mile away.  The vegetables were cooked with big chunks of bacon, so needless to say, they tasted amazing.

We were disappointed by the dessert though.  It pretty much eliminated Kitchen Galerie’s chances of becoming one of the restaurants in our top-3 list.  The desserts were simple and unintriguing.  I had the creme brulee and I’ve had better.

It has been a while since I blogged about restaurants in Montreal.  That’s because our team hasn’t really been actively going out for dinner lately.  Last night we tried a new French restaurant in the Plateau area called Monsieu B.  The restaurant is a cozy little spot and you can bring your own wine.  For the price of the food, it is definitely worth a try, but make sure you make reservations as the place is quite tiny.

With your meal you will get a free cup of soup.  The one we had was a curry carrot soup.  It tastes better than it looks.  I’ll take it if it’s free!

For my appetizer, I ordered the tomatoes done three ways ($9): bloody caesar shot with oyster (it was a small oyster so it didn’t show up in the picture), polenta with sundried tomatoes, and yellow tomato with mozzarella.  I really liked the presentation of the dish and it tasted great!

For my main I went with the good-old beef tartare ($20).  It was a huge meal so I barely finished half of it.

For dessert, we tried the cheese cake which came in a glass.  It was very rich and creamy.

My brother came back to Toronto for a visit, so he and my mom decided to take a trip to Montreal for the weekend.  They were only staying for two nights, so I didn’t really have anything planned for them except that we were going to try out some good restaurants in the area.

Thursday night was Au Pied de Cochon, which I thought would be a good way to start things off, but when we got to the restaurant they had lost our reservation!  They offered to get us a table as soon as possible but we still had to wait another 40min before getting seated.  Well, at least they didn’t turn us away like they did to the other cutsomers who didn’t have reservations.  My mom and bro found the foie gras poutine to be absolutely amazing, but my mom was not so impressed with the Duck in a Can and the Happy Pork Chop.  I think it was a bit of a meat overdose for her, but I don’t blame her.  I mean, look at the size of that pork chop!