What Ste-Anne-De-Bellevue Has That Montreal Doesn't

It seems like there are a lot of the same vendors at the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Farmers' Market and the Mile End and Plateau Farmers' Markets, so why trek out to Ste-Anne if you're not lucky enough to live there already? It's a bit touristy, a bit fake, and beautiful in a soon-to-be more touristy and fake kind of way. It's also a calm, beautiful escape from the city. It also has a whole lot more producers that don't make it into Montreal, like Ferme Tourne-Sol (such a great name: "Sunflower Farm", but more literally, "Turn the Soil Farm":

The abundance of produce is impressive. I think they get a lot more customers at this market. Supplies are limited at the other markets because they're smaller. Here there seems to be more of everything, and vendors don't run out of products until later in the morning. Farmers' Markets are not like stores where everything must be in stock all the time; they only bring what they expect to sell, or a little more if they're feeling lucky or outgoing or generous that day.

You won't see this in Mile End: Huge blocks of maple sugar to be grated. GRATED! It's like cheese.

Or choose from this vendor's whole line of maple products, including pure light (for waffles and pancakes), amber (a bit stronger) and dark maple syrups (bitter and strong like molasses), as well as crushed maple sugar, chocolates, fudge, suckers, and dessert sauces. If you can make it with maple, this guy has.

I saw these and was immediately confused, and then very impressed. Who buys enough bread that gets hard fast enough to care about buying a bread bag for them? Apparently some people do. These are double-lined to be specially-insulated. Since buying my favourite loaf of bread ever at the Plateau Market (hazelnut) and nearly dying of joy eating a few pieces that day, I was saddened to not return to bread heaven the next day at breakfast. I think the same bread-saving (non-hardening) effect can be achieved by wrapping the bread in a tea towel before putting it in a plastic bag, but these are just so beautiful, the bags, that for $5 if I had a bit of additional income, I'd invest. The woman who makes them loves her bags, and obviously loves her bread. I respect that. You can even get one bag to hold your baguette and one to hold your miche. Only the French...

I like the honeywine guy at the Plateau and Mile End Markets (Ferme Desrochers), but I like that the honeywine here in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue is from a different wine-maker: Les Trois Acres. Of the honeywine selection at the Montreal markets, the dessert wine is the only really great one (the Cuvée de la Diable). I might cook with the others (white, rosé, and red) but only for something that needed some extra sweetness, like the white in a chicken recipe with white wine, orange and a little honey in it anyway. These Trois Acres wines could be used similarly and are a little less expensive ($12 for the dry white. "Dry" being a relative term because it is honeywine after all). I also love that the name of the white wine is La Musicale.This doesn't make any sense at all. Perhaps drinking it leads to outbursts of song. Or you drink it while you're singing and it makes you seem better, or at it seems that you sing better.

Because it's not the Montreal markets, Les Trois Acres can also sell their skincare products, all made with beeswax. Or you can go for their vinaigrettes or honey-mustards. I think one of the nicest things about farmers' markets are the little info pages on each farm. You can just ask the vendor any questions you may have, but the pictures of the farms are worth a thousand words. I suppose I should stop writing now...

Oh, there was one more honey vendor whose products were too beautiful to not include. There were SO many kinds of honey. Now they're not my favourite Manuka honey from Australia that you can only get at St-Lawrence Market in Toronto and will cost you about $36 a bottle, and whose health benefits of it are incredible, but these are as close as you can come in Quebec. We just don't have the bees and the environment ("terroir") here. These clock in at about "no-where-near-as-good-for-you, but still a little bit so". The variety and price are incredible. It's also unpasteurized, and you're bound to find a creamy, clover or buckwheat variety that you like. 

They also do "cooking" demos here. I only put the quotation marks because the day I was there the demo happened to be a juicing demo, not so much cooking. I usually hate drinks sweetened with beets, but there were enough carrots in this mix to make it savoury enough for me. The apples didn't even bother me. If I see a used juicer I will buy it quickly. These things are expensive, and the old ones are generally stronger and better. Yard sales or friends looking to get rid of them? This is how I got a pasta maker...

If I had a car, a ride, or public transit that could get me to this market every week, I would want to go. I would skip the Thursday Mile End Market (sorry) and enjoy a leisurely morning in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. I'm not a country person, but this is just enough of an escape for me. 

Where: 107 Ste-Anne Street, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC

When: Saturdays, 9am-4pm (but supplies don't always last, especially for the muffins...)

Who: Some of the best of the province's organic producers and artisans

Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Farmers' Market and My Addiction to its Muffins

Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Farmers' Market

107 Ste-Anne Street, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC

I am addicted to these muffins. I'm almost 100% sure they're the from the same farm as my Plateau Farmers' Market muffins. It's a different guy who was doing the selling, but rest of the market stall's offerings were the same - the "healthy" seed cookies, the date squares, the same kinds of breads. If I had bought a bread I would know for sure. Alas, I stopped myself at a muffin.

I want to live in a quaint small town sometimes when I forget how much I love urban centres. It almost makes me want a cottage. I draw the line at a cottage, though. No, I think I draw the line at a dog. A cottage wouldn't be so bad. I mean, it's not like a cabin or anything (I'm from Newfoundland, where there's a HUGE difference between a cabin and a cottage. After moving to Toronto and venturing to Muskoka expecting no running water, I was a bit blown over by the satellite TVs everywhere...cottages are second home, or better homes, and cabins are shacks in the woods that your Grandfather maybe built himself) and Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue is close enough that it doesn't take an age to get there by car.

You could bike it, like one vendor does. She actually lives in my area and jumps on the Lachine Canal bikepath with all her handmade bags every Saturday. I thought about trying it once but I got lost looking for the Lachine Market, and that's supposed to be a whole lot closer.I figured it'd be a bit more dangerous to get a few hours into the trip and only then realize I'm horrendously lost. Maybe if I just stayed on the bike path I wouldn't end up on the highway going the wrong way like I did last time?

That's the nice thing about this market - the diversity of the products. It's a farmers' market, but it also has crafts and things that don't come from a farm. Some people aren't okay with this, like the Marché Fermier organization in Montreal that runs the Plateau and Mile End Markets.

One vendor here who sells beautiful photographs of flowers isn't allowed to have a booth at those markets because he's not food-related. Makes sense, but I bet no customers would mind. I suppose then it's not fair to artisans from Montreal who would want booths as well.

This market also felt bigger than both of those markets, which are the biggest farmers' markets in the city besides the public markets. I loved that I recognized some of the same vendors here, though. Stairsholme Farms was there with their organic beef products. The Wasselton family farm was represented with their sambusas, injera, sweet loaves and some produce (the producers for Organic Campus at McGill - check out my Food Audio tab above to access my radio feature on them). Then there was the Ochado Tea makers:

(they're so lovely, and have very high quality red, green, white and black tea blends)

They're not from a "farm" either, so the fairness is a bit sketchy, but they're "food and drink-related"). Then there's the apple donut, chili sauce and marmalade husband and wife team from the Plateau Market:

They're from McMillan Orchards and sell big bottles of fresh apple juice and cider for VERY reasonable prices. The wife is also the queen of canning. I need a weekend with her to learn these important things, but I fear the havoc to be wreaked on my digestive system from the apple donuts.

The cheese people from the Plateau and Mile End Markets, Le Ruban Bleu (the ones whose goats' milk cheese is used by every guest chef at the Mile End market), are represented here as well, but they offer more variety to sample and buy. Their name means "the Blue Ribbon" and they do specialize in very delicate blue cheeses (not stinky as you may expect - and I love) but they also have some very nice orange-ribbon-ed offerings with peppers and spices.

So these are the food-related vendors that you can find other places in Montreal, plus some of the non-food ones. Next post I'll feature the ones you can't find in the downtown area on any day of the week, plus a woman who makes special double-lined bread bags for specific kinds of loaves of bread. This woman...so very endearingly Québecoise.

Where: 107 Ste-Anne Street, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC

When: Saturdays, 9am-4pm (but supplies don't always last, especially for the muffins...)

Who: Some of the best of the province's organic producers and artisans

Mile End Farmers' Market: Corn

The Mile End Market is run by the same organization as the Sunday Plateau Market, but some of the vendors are different. Most important, La Perle and her baker aren't there, so no muffins or incredible bread for me, malheureusement.

On the upside, however, there is always a guest chef. Often they'll bring something half pre-done, like La Montée du Lait's chef did when he brought his eggplant pancakes, then put some goat's milk cheese available at the market on top and covered it all with some fresh arugula. Voila, snack.

Another chef from...hmm...I forget...somewhere that specialized in pig. Anyway, this chef made tacos with pork butt. I ran before they were done. Better to run away than explain my reasons for not-eating pork.

So my favourite stall is currently the corn and raspberries guy. The corn is a recent addition to the stall's offerings. I met him about three weeks ago when I was busily not buying raspberries. I was walking around the market and seeing all these raspberries that looked delicious but I'd try them and they just weren't. Nothing special, not worth the high price tag, but then I got to this guy and he had some that were bigger, and normally to me that's a bad sign. It often means they're genetically modified, like the oversized everything at normal grocery stores or even Atwater Market. Except the Mile End market is all organics, so I asked why they were bigger, and he said they were a different varietal of raspberry, a little sweeter...good salesman. So I caved and bought them, and yes, the bigger ones were sweeter, but they were mixed in with smaller ones that I didn't like much. Still, I somehow managed to get through them, force them down and all, while waiting for that day's chef to decide to make yet another salad with goat cheese...

Now what really got me with this man was that he immediately said, "First time? I don't think I've seen you here before," and he was right. Then when I came back two weeks later, he said, "I remember you," and I believe he did, even though I was wearing my contacts that day instead of my glasses, a very Superman-like change in appearance.

So I decided to buy his corn. I love fresh corn. I was in Appleton, Wisconsin one summer and bought corn by the dozen off the back of a truck. That was the sweetest, most amazing corn I've ever eaten. You don't even cook that corn. I've had good corn since then from the corn guy at Atwater, but so far this year neither his corn nor this Mile End Market corn guy's corn has compared. I'll try again in a few weeks. It's not bad, and I like this guy so much now that I will continue to buy his corn anyway. I mean, it's better than potatoes as far as starchy vegetables go, especially with some lime juice and salt, but it's not amazing. It's the human element that brings me back; this man remembers me. Maybe his week is a little more complete if he sees me, and mine a little more complete if I buy corn or berries from him.

Laperle et Son Boulanger at the Plateau Farmers' Market, Sunday 10am-2pm

I'm very picky when it comes to Farmer's Markets, but it is summer, and I've been making the rounds.

Tuesday is Organic Campus at McGill
Thursday is the Mile End Market or the Coop La Maison Verte on Sherbrooke in NDG
Saturday is Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue (only went once since it's far) or St-Henri or Little Burgundy Market
Sunday is the Plateau Market (but starting this week it's also the Outremont market) and I generally also get to Jean-Talon on Sundays on my way to the Plateau.

Sundays are my favourite for one reason: the muffins and bread at the Plateau Market from "La Perle et Son Boulanger" (adorable name: "The pearl and her baker", or more likely "Someone whose last name is Laperle and his or her baker". The raspberry blueberry muffin is incredible. the fruit are fresh, not frozen, and they make the whole muffin juicy. They also actually taste like something. The muffin itself is so moist and flavourful. I swear this guy has amazing flour. Two weeks ago was the first time I bought the bread. Now I've been making my own gluten-free bread lately and figured bread was not high on my list of things to buy, but they only have food there (lunch-style food like the fresh gazpacho I had once) sometimes, and I was hungry and a loaf of chocolate cranberry (bread, not loaf, really, since there was no sugar and it a simple loaf with small pieces of bittersweet chocolate and dried cranberries) was very tempting. Oh wow, was it good. I think there might be a little bit of sourdough in all the breads, because even though it wasn't a sourdough loaf, it had that slightly fermented taste to which I'm completely addicted. The chocolate wasn't anything special in terms of taste, but it was soft and a little warm in the Montreal heat when I bought it, and the cranberries got plump and juicy.

So I went back last week looking for another loaf. They were sold out, so I bought a loaf of hazelnut, along with a muffin and a chocolatine (pain au chocolate or chocolate in pastry, for all you non-Quebers). No I did not eat all them at once. I'm big on tasting. The bread was absolutely amazing. It's the perfect bread for dips (I just blended some chickpeas and some steamed turnip greens. The bitterness of turnip greens and the nuttiness of the cooked chickpeas worked really nicely with the bitterness of the fermentation and the hazelnuts), but only when fresh. The next day it's about half as good, and the day after that, even less. It dries out fast since it's so fresh, so I think I need to start wrapping it in a tea towel and then in a bag to keep it fresher.

The muffin was ridiculously good, and I wasn't even really attracted to the pain au chocolate, which looked a little squished. After trying the chocolate in the bread I wasn't expecting much, but I was so very wrong. There was so much butter in the pastry that I could have died of French heaven on the spot. The chocolate was again a little gooey, but this time it was semi-sweet chocolate, and so when it combined with the butter...

Thank goodness I'm lactose-intolerant or I would have eaten it all. The knowledge that I'm going to get really sick if I keep going is usually enough to stop me mid-pastry. Still, I'll be back for more bread next week. They've turned me into a loyal customer through addiction. Good work.

Pho Lien

Pho Lien
5703 Côte des Neiges
Montreal, QC
●●●●●●●●☺○○
8 1/2 out of 10

All I've had here is the pho and the cold vermicelli rolls. Sure, they have other things at this restaurant, but you just don't order those. They are nothing special by comparison.

This is the best beef broth I've found in the city, and until I find better (since I'm not convinced it is the best ever) I will come back here when I am craving a rich, sweet broth of star anise, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and not in the mood for half a day's worth of broth-making.

I came here once and was absolutely blown away by the broth, but I came here again for lunch and was completely disappointed. For once I couldn't complain that the broth was too salty and tasted like MSG, but where once there had been cloves, now there were none. I feel like I spend my life in Vietnamese restaurants asking, "Where are the cloves? I don't taste cloves!" Cloves are a hard-to-miss flavour. They're what make a pumpkin pie taste like Thanksgiving. Sure, there's mace, a strong, bitter spice from nutmeg, but for me, it's all about cloves. Then star anise - that's the fennel flavour. It shouldn't make the broth taste like black licorice, but it should be present. The cinnamon shouldn't be overpowering either, but it should complement the cloves. The broth just was more lacklustre this time. Nothing really stood out about it. So maybe the lunch broth was made differently or by a different chef than the evening broth. Or maybe it had needed to simmer longer but the chefs (the kitchen help that started the broth) didn't arrive until later that morning. Maybe it was an off-lunch. Still, it was not what I wanted, and if I'm going to eat beef, it had better be good.
I'll get the boring things out of the way. The imperial rolls were fine. The crust seemed pretty crispy. If you like such things, these are a decent rendition. The dipping sauce is simple.
The cold vermicelli spring rolls ($3.00 for 2, tax inc.) were pretty good just because the peanut dipping sauce is incredible. I'm too scared to ask what's in it, bad food reviewer that I am, because I know there'll be something in it that I won't want to eat, like MSG-laden bottled sauces or ingredients I can't pronounce, or ingredients that start with the word "condensed", all of which are bad. The sauce here is served slightly warm and topped with tasty, fresh peanuts and somehow tastes a bit like the richness of beef. Do they put broth in the dip? Probably not. Probably I'm crazy, but I'm certainly not going to ask. One unique thing they do is put beef in the actual roll. Yes, you can see shrimp in the picture above, but there is also cooked, finely sliced beef, like what goes in the soup. It has a lot of flavour, and as long as you aren't really upset to discover beef in the roll, you'll like it. It's the first Vietnamese restaurant I've seen that does beef in the rolls. It really does add flavour.
The Chicken Pho Ga. Now this was interesting. The chicken was shredded from a full bird that had been boiled to make the broth. Thus the broth was mild and clear. It's a good broth. Some people prefer the chicken broth to be seasoned with the same spices as the beef broth, but chicken is a milder flavour and I don't think it holds up to the strong spices as well. It gets kind of overwhelmed. Doesn't know how to react. Would you if you were swimming in cloves? Have a little compassion for the chicken broth.

If you're looking for a very simple chicken broth to cure what ails you, this is it. Thick globules of delicious fat swim in the broth and raw onions garnish. Throw in some bean sprouts, basil and then bite into a lime and it's very satisfactory.
I don't look for "satisfactory" in a restaurant, however. I look for epiphany, perfection, and I expect the best. Otherwise it's a waste of my money and I should make a better version at home. I have incredible lamb broth in my freezer. I can make my own broth, but it's not pho, real pho. We are all capable of making delicious soup broth, but every cook's broth is slightly different and so every restaurant is a slightly different experience, whether or not it's better or worse. This beef broth at Pho Lien is real pho, but only when done correctly. It's much better than Pho Bac #1 in Verdun. It's better than Chinatown.

This is probably the only restaurant I will recommend getting take-out. Now you wouldn't think you'd want to order raw beef soup and carry it home to eat. The heat promotes the growth and spread of bacteria, so ideally you'd want to eat at the restaurant to not give those guys a chance at procreation. I always say there are too many children in the world anyway.

But here, you want to take the soup to go. It gets packed in two separate Styrofoam (I know, awful for the environment, but the only way to travel with hot soup) containers, with the beef left uncooked in one along with the noodles and bean sprouts, and the soup in another. So when you get home you heat up the broth and add only the amount of noodles to it that you're going to eat in the next 5 minutes. Then you put half the raw beef in a bowl (not the pot) and scoop out a ladle of broth and noodles. Add some bean sprouts and basil and have your lime at the ready. This way the beef is barely cooked when you eat it. Raw beef is tender when it's good quality. If you wait at the restaurant to be served (even though service is fast) your raw beef will not be raw when it arrives. ALSO by the time you get halfway through your soup the rest of the "raw" beef has become very "well-done". So if you're at home, you can only eat as much beef as you want at a time. You eat some, and then when you want more you put more in your bowl (keep it in the fridge while you eat the first bowl) and then ladle more of your heated broth from the pot into your bowl. The reason you don't want to add the noodles all at once is they get too soft when they're left sitting in the broth, and if you refrigerate leftovers they'll be mush when you heat them up the next day. So heat up a portion in the broth, then get them all into your bowl, and leave some of the broth sitting on the stove in case you want more beef in 5 minutes. At that point you can just add more noodles to the broth. This re-heating process takes no time at all. Just don't boil off too much broth. The flavour will concentrate more this way, but you'll end up with less broth overall. So it's a trade-off. You're also supposed to trust that the chef got the broth to the perfect concentration in HIS kitchen, and you're not really supposed to mess with that.

At the restaurant you can order all raw beef ($7 for a small, $8 for a large, $9 for two days worth of food, aka XL, all tax included), but that's ridiculous because you won't possibly be able to eat it all while it's raw. By the time you make it through the bowl of beef, only your first few mouthfuls would be raw and then the next would be medium, and then the next would be well-done. So order a combination bowl to make it worth it. You can also order the "cow in a bowl" (my words, not theirs) - tripe, tendon, rare, brisket, and well-done flank ($.25 more than the other soups). I love that nothing is wasted, but tripe and tendon are acquired tastes. The tendon has the texture of fat and much less flavour. I couldn't find a piece of brisket, but the effect of the tender meat is lost in soup where it all falls apart anyway.

Another reason to take out is because they give you a little container of hoisin mixed with hot sauce, two things I generally don't use in my pho, but do use in my other cooking. You also get to keep any leftover peanut sauce from the cold spring rolls, which is worth it in and of itself. You can keep your garnishes, say, if you don't want all the bean sprouts at the time. You actually waste less of what's put in front of you at a meal of pho by getting take-out, minus the Styrofoam and plastic containers and plastic bag. Oh, and of course you save a little money. The environment is screwed either way, so it's your choice.

So in my opinion there may be somewhere better for pho in Montreal, but I don't know where that is yet. Yet.

Expect To Pay: $12.50-$14.00 for soup and an order of cold spring rolls.

Hours: Mon, Wed-Fri 11am-10pm, Sat-Sun 10am-10pm
514-735-6949

Restaurant Pho bac #1

Restaurant Pho Bac #1
4707 rue Wellington
Verdun (Montreal), Quebec
●●●●●●☺○○○○
6 1/2 out of 10

I was first introduced to Vietnamese noodle soup (pho - pronounced somewhere between "phuh" and "phah") in Toronto. It was cheap, delicious, and filling, and it was soup so it had to be healthy, right? Well, I kept having digestive problems and started wondering what could possibly be in pho that was bothering me so much. I always got the chicken kind, pho' ga, and all it was was broth, noodles, chicken, bean sprouts, basil and cilantro. I didn't even add the hoisin and hot sauce that came on the side.

MSG. Like all cheap Chinese food, the secret to making delicious pho without the work of making a good broth is in adding MSG. The bad cook's cheat. That's why I kept getting sick. I don't get headaches and cramps like some people who have more severe reactions, but my reactions were enough to turn me off noodle soup, no matter how convenient and affordable.

Until Montreal. I've been sneaking pho. Once I was having a really awful day and I was completely exhausted, but I needed a good, comforting dinner. That would be chicken noodle soup in any form, in many countries, Canada and Vietnam included. I was around Pho Lien, the Montreal establishment generally accepted as having the best pho, on Cote-des-Neiges. So I went and I ordered some. Beef! I ordered the beef! I hadn't eaten beef in...well, a long time. I reserve it for very special occasions and ensure the highest quality. So I figured this was breaking my rules, but the chicken pho apparently was cooked in beef broth anyway, so I might as well just get the regular beef option. Well, it turns out there are about 8 beef options involving different cuts of beef (raw, well-cooked, tendon, tripe, etc.) and the server told me to go with the one that was a combination of raw and well-cooked. The quality can't be bad if they're daring to serve raw beef. It's basically cut very thin like Chinese fondue and cooks only once it's added to the noodle broth just before serving. The broth, brought to a boil, barely needs to soften it, and as long as the quality is high there shouldn't be a risk of contamination. It's like beef carpaccio at a fancy restaurant, but about $30 cheaper.

Long story short, it was perfect. The broth...it was rich but not greasy, a little sweet, flavoured with cloves, cinnamon and star anise. This was a real pho' broth, the likes of which is hard to find in a city masquerading in "traditional" Vietnamese restaurant outfits. The raw beef was incredible. For the well-cooked, I couldn't have cared less. Nothing special. So I realized I'd been missing this all along, and decided to do a pho comparison. My next stop was Phobac #1 in Verdun, pictured here (not to be confused with the Pho - not number 1 - on boulevard St-Laurent. I do not eat Vietnamese in Chinatown...).
It's a simple menu, printed on a sheet of paper kept under the glass-topped tables. Very convenient, since you can't spill anything on it and the server doesn't even need to bring it to you.
This post is not about the spring rolls.
The accompanying peanut sauce was a million times better at Pho Lien than at Phobac, but that's not why you go to these restaurants. Well, it's not why you go to Pho Lien. I wouldn't go to Phobac for the Pho anyway, I've decided.
There was nothing special about either the beef broth or the chicken broth at Phobac #1 (here the chicken is actually served in a chicken broth). The reason? The chicken in the soup wasn't even cooked whole in the pot to make the broth in the first place. There was probably something added to the broth. It may even have been not a home-made broth. Maybe. I just know it wasn't traditionally made since the chicken in it was grilled. I actually loved that it was grilled, but more traditionally a whole chicken is used to make the broth for the soup and then the meat is shredded and put back into the sieved and simmered broth. There really wasn't a complexity to the broth anyway, but chicken broth is supposed to be simpler than beef, being a lighter flavour, and often not made with the same strong spices.

The beef was a disappointment. I tried a few bites and then reverted to my anti-beef stance. It's not that it was bad, just that it didn't make me want to stop not-eating beef, like Pho Lien had. The beef broth was...not very beefy. I'm afraid there's no way to describe what it was, just what it wasn't. There was no cinnamon, no cloves. The noodles were hand-made, which was a highlight, since my dining companion pointed out the fact that they were cut unevenly.

So I would very much like to try their other noodle dishes with chicken, since they grill a good chicken, after all. So in a dish where the chicken is actually supposed to be grilled this could be amazing. Maybe some Vietnamese bun here (vermicelli noodles with lettuce and herbs, often meat and a spring roll, served with a little bowl of sweetened fish sauce to pour on top) or another cooked dish would be another Vietnamese epiphany. I doubt it...but it would probably be very good for the price, and the bike ride there is a lot more level than the long, arduous climb uphill to Cote-des-Neiges and Pho Lien.

Pho Bac #1 really doesn't pride itself on its food. When I asked to take mine to go they put the noodles in one container with the broth. You're not really supposed to do that because the noodles get soggy. Basically it ruins the soup. They'd probably keep them separate if I'd gotten it to go in the first place, but after having eaten half, it's a bit of trouble to do, and so a restaurant won't do this unless it's important to them to ensure the quality of the leftover soup. Of course, I am not Vietnamese, so it's very possible they assumed I know nothing about pho and don't really care if my noodles get soggy. I'll eat happily like the next culturally unaware pho newbie.

Unfortunately, THAT I am not. Disappointed, I am. Next stop, back to Pho Lien to make sure I wasn't hallucinating the first time around and should just never eat beef again...

Expect To Pay: $8-$12 for lunch or dinner of soup and a spring roll
514-362-1022

Montreal Bagel Throwdown: St-Viateur vs. Fairmount

THE CRITERIA: Freshness, Sweetness, Texture, Crust, Size, Overall Bagel Experience

The Methodology: To objectively compare Montreal's finest bagel establishments I drove from bagel shop to bagel shop, having a few bites of the fresh bagels and taking notes just after purchasing. At the end of the trip I did a direct comparison between all the bagels purchased. The following day there was another comparison of all the bagels purchased (the photo above with lemon as a palate-cleanser. Bagels are serious business). While this was mainly a comparison of Fairmount and St-Viateur bagels, to cover all the bagel ground in the city, I also compared D.A.D.'s Bagels and R.E.A.L Bagel. Sesame seed and Poppy seed bagels were purchased at each bagel shop, along with unique or specialty bagels at certain establishments, but for the the purposes of this study, only the sesame and poppy seed bagels were used to determine the winners in each category.

The 5 bagel shops tested were (in order of purchase):
D.A.D.'s Bagel (5732 Sherbrooke West), R.E.A.L. Bagel (6160 chemin de la Cote-Saint-Luc), St-Viateur Bagel (263 St-Viateur West), St-Viateur Bake Shop (158 St-Viateur West), and Fairmount Bagel (74 Fairmount West)

A Brief History: Fairmount is the original Montreal bagel shop, but long before there were "Fairmount bagels", there were Chaim Seligman and Isadore Shlafman. In 1919 Shlafman started selling bagels in an alley off St-Laurent, but according to Jewish historian, Joe King, Seligman was the original bagel guy, selling his strings of bagels from the back of a horse-drawn buggy up and down St-Laurent. Seligman then went into business with Jack Shlafman (of the Fairmount lineage) and a new-to-the-scene bagel-maker, Myer Lewkowicz. That didn't last long. One big falling-out later, the Shlafmans moved into the current Fairmount Bagel location in 1949 and Seligman and Lewkowicz got it together to open St-Viateur in 1957. The names and the traditions were born, and they were connected. In 1963 Joe Morena took over St-Viateur. Flash forward to the 1990's and Montreal-style bagel offspring R.E.A.L. Bagel and D.A.D.'s Bagel (I don't think there's any real blood connection. Definitely not with D.A.D.'s Bagel, whose owners are Punjabi) opened, using the same bagel-making method.
The Bagel: There are only 8 ingredients in a Montreal-style bagel. These are flour, sugar, yeast, oil, honey, egg, malt, and Montreal water. The quantities and quality of the ingredients are what make the difference. They're what make your bagel slightly more of less stale the next day (more or less egg probably), determine the fluffiness of the dough (type and quantity of flour based on amount of gluten, amount of oil, amount of egg, and use of honey in the dough itself which will make it dryer) and the all-important sweetness (whether honey is used in addition to sugar in the kneaded dough, and the flavour of the malt). The standard these days is to use an unbleached white flour, though each shop's brand of choice may differ and may have changed over the years.
In all of the above establishments similar bagel-making equipment and methods are used. The ingredients are mixed and kneaded in a giant dough-making machine, then left to rise for about 45 minutes. The huge block of dough is then sliced into bagel-width strips and hand-rolled and twisted, one at a time, into bagel shapes. The bagels get thrown into a big vat of simmering honey-water that looks a bit like a deep-fryer, for about 5 minutes. They then get fished out, dragged through sesame or poppy seeds, and placed in lines on long, thin, planks of wood, and baked in an open wood-fired oven for 10 minutes.
What happens in the oven is very important. The bagels start close to the heat for about 5 minutes, then are slowly moved away from the flames to finish on the cooler side of the oven. The inconsistency and unpredictability of the flames are what give the bagels the darker-in-some-spots look. They're also what turn the sesame seeds into a real topping, so you feel like you're eating a bagel slathered with toasted, delicious nuts when it comes out fresh, instead of a bagel covered in something generically chewy. The poppy seeds get toasted too, but the effect isn't quite the same. So for sesame bagels you don't really need anything on top of them, but smoked salmon or cream cheese, or both, work really well. Since there's no salt in the bagels themselves, adding smoked salmon doesn't feel like you're eating a week's worth of sodium.

THE RESULTS
Freshness: St-Viateur
It has to be fresh! The most important revelation of this taste-test was that all of these bagels were good as long as they were hot out of the oven. Be warned, bagel-eaters, that while all these places use wood-burning ovens, Fairmount actually uses an electric oven for its wholesale operation. So if you buy outside of the Fairmount bagel shop you're not getting the real deal.

Sesame was the most popular flavour at all the bagel shops, and it was the only one that was ever really fresh. Not that it's a better flavour, just that more people buy it, so if you prefer poppy seed you have your work cut out for you to either find a consistent way of getting your bagels while they're hot (a bagel bell?) or make poppy seed bagels more popular so they're baked more often. St-Viateur doesn't even make a new batch of poppy seed until the last ones are almost gone, but their sesame bagel was my best bagel of the day. R.E.A.L. Bagel and Fairmount were both working on batches of sesame at the time of purchase so if you want more fresh poppy seed bagels in Montreal you'll need to start an uprising to turn the market trend in your flavour favour.

D.A.D's bagel only bakes in the morning and at night, so if you come during the day there's absolutely no way your bagel will be really fresh. The sesame at R.E.A.L. Bagel was warm, but not hot. Not good enough. At Fairmount, like St-Viateur, only the sesame was fresh. Forget about buying at the grocery store; you need to go to the source. Often in the bake shops themselves they'll even sell you the cooler bagels because that's what makes financial sense - get rid of the old product to bring in new - but that's not what you want. It has to be hot.
Sweetness: Fairmount
D.A.D.'s was too sweet, R.E.A.L. Bagel was bland, and St-Viateur was just neutral. Normally I would say the sugar wasn't really necessary, just addictive, but you're dealing with multiple kinds of sweetness from the sugar, honey and malt. The most flavour comes from the malt, and so Fairmount's higher malt and sweetness created more overall flavour for the bagel. I'll be honest, I could taste the difference in sweetness a lot more the day after, once the bagels had cooled down, but when the bagels were fresh it was a tough comparison. I kept trying the St-Viateur and Fairmount the day after to make sure I wasn't wrong about the sweetness, but Fairmount was just better.
Best Texture: St-Viateur
The texture was so smooth and soft without being doughy, but ONLY when it was fresh. Fairmount was a bit fluffier, but I only preferred this the day after, when St-Viateur became very crunchy and hard but Fairmount stayed relatively chewy. I'm certainly not going to buy a bagel for its 'day-after' attributes. R.E.A.L. Bagel and D.A.D's just couldn't compete in this category because the texture was automatically not as good when the bagels weren't hot. It shouldn't feel like work to chew a Montreal bagel.
Best Crust: St-Viateur and Fairmount Sesame Bagels
There's really only a good crust when the bagels are hot. You can re-toast, which is fine, but your toaster or toaster-oven is not a wood-burning bagel oven. Both St-Viateur and Fairmount sesame bagels (because they were the only really fresh ones) had a crispy, nutty outside to contrast the smooth, luscious inside.

Size: St-Viateur
St-Viateur, both the shop and wholesale bakery, were the only place to consistently and correctly size all their bagels, from sesame and poppy seed to all-dressed and cinnamon raisin. Montreal bagels are not big and fluffy. This is not a roll. This is not a pillow of flour-y fluff. This is smaller, finer affair.

Fairmount had well-sized poppy seed and sesame but the others expanded from there. Honestly, I liked the blueberry bagel and cinnamon raisin a lot, but not as Montreal-style bagels. A purist would reject them outright. Pumpernickel had a pretty good flavour, but muesli was just weird. Maybe if you live on muesli but are dying for a bagel you'll appreciate it more? R.E.A.L. bagel seemed huge by comparison, though their sourdough (made without eggs and sugar) was actually really good and deliciously tangy from a good sourdough culture, but the size and flavour made it more like bread than a bagel. Perfect for a bagel sandwich, but not really a Montreal-style bagel at all. The R.E.A.L. Bagel poppy seed version was more appropriately 'Montreal', so the bagel-roller was just a little inconsistent. D.A.D.'s were a good size but just by looking at the batch made that morning you could tell that the consistency just wasn't the same as St-Viateur.

Overall Bagel Experience: St-Viateur
I'll be honest, all these bagels are very similar. What can set a bagel apart is the experience that goes along with its purchase. St-Viateur (263 St-Viateur West) was hands-down the friendliest place I went into. Yes, there was a steady stream of patrons, but never did I feel rushed out of there. Actually it was kind of hard to leave because I started asking questions like I always do and ended up in a long conversation with the man at the cash. He'd started coming in as a patron Friday night/morning (it is 24 hours), buying some bagels, and hanging out for a few hours. It got to the point where the owner said that if he was going to come in every week and hang out, he might as well work while he was there.

And he's been working there ever since. He chats with customers, but he doesn't waste time. Now this is just one worker, and on a different day at a different time I could have had a different experience, but St-Viateur is cultivating that family-friendly appearance that makes you feel welcome and invited. This was emphasized by the total contrast of walking into Fairmount and feeling crowded and unwelcome. The ordering space isn't any smaller than St-Viateur, but it feels more closed off from the bagel ovens, and getting to the cash feels like a pressure situation. Go, go, go! Pay! Get out! I started asking questions, which was not appreciated. Pictures were frowned upon. The cashiers couldn't tell me exactly how the different bagels were made or even what was in them. They were just employees, not people who cared about and knew about the bagels.

At R.E.A.L. Bagel I had another good experience, and the guy at the cash was a little tickled that I had such an interest in the bagels. I mean, it's not St-Viateur or Fairmount, so tourists don't head out to that bagel shop too often to discuss the finer points of bagel-making. D.A.D.'s was also wonderful. The friendly man explained that while the shop is both a place for 24 Hour bagels and Indian food, it started out as just bagels. THAT is what his family figured would sell in Montreal at the time. they were right, but the tandoori chicken looked amazing. Convenience store food this is not. If you like Indian snack food, like bhajis, get them fresh. The home-made samosas stay at their best a bit longer, but not all night. So this place has more than bagels going for it.

Walking into all these places it was incredible to see how far the Montreal bagel has come. Joe Morena, the owner of St-Viateur after Lewkowicz, summed it up in 1988 when he said,

"What I really am is living proof that you don't have to be Jewish to make or love bagels."

Thanks, Joe. Montreal can be proud to call you its own. The diverse bagel establishments in this city all do a great job, and as long as the bagels are fresh, you won't be disappointed at any one of them.
But...

OVERALL WINNER: St-Viateur
While I actually prefer the taste of Fairmount, loyalty is what the Montreal bagel is really all about, and I want to give my loyalty to the St-Viateur company. They seem to care more about the bagels, and their bagel-making and selling philosophy. When you walk in to the shop you feel like you're walking into Montreal history, not a commercial operation. While I wouldn't turn down a bagel from D.A.D.'s if I was in NDG late one night, and I wouldn't turn down a trip to R.E.A.L. bagel if I was out by cote-st-luc, on the Queen Mary (4940 chemin Queen-Mary), or near the original in Dollard-des-Ormeaux (3702 boulevard Saint-Jean, Dollard-des-Ormeaux), I am slowly placing myself in a St-Viateur bagel-loyalty group.

Hopefully I'll have lots more Fairmount bagels before I turn into an old person in a rockin' chair telling stories to anyone who'll listen that start with, "Back in my day, when Morena was running St-Viateur, long after the original Shlafman had passed on his Fairmount legacy, people swore by the best Montreal bagel..."

To listen to a radio program describing this Bagel-testing adventure, follow the link to the CKUT archived audio stream of the Friday Morning After Show from July 9th, 2010. The bagel discussion can be found half-way through the stream.

Cafe Velo Quebec

Cafe Velo Quebec
1251 Rachel East

Montreal, QC

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7 out of 10

Café Velo Quebec is a perfect location, just on the north side of Parc Lafontaine. In addition to a café, the Velo Quebec building is the place to go if you're planning a cycling trip either in Quebec or abroad. It houses a boutique full of guidebooks and maps (in addition to the café's lamps which are actually maps of the Montreal bike paths), a bike travel agency, as well as the offices of a whole lot of the city's bike-related companies, including the publishing company Velo Quebec Editions. Probably these offices have stationary bikes instead of desk chairs.

The café part of the building is a huge draw for the loyal clientele of obsessed cyclists, neighbourhood locals, and anyone looking for an affordable, homemade meal. It's not all delicious, but it's certainly made with good intentions.

The sandwiches all look amazing. The bread really is as good as it looks - freshly heated in a panini press to give it perfect grill marks and bring out the melted butter taste of the flaky dough - but the homemade vege-pate tastes a bit like textured nothing (I also really hope I'm wrong about there being butter in the bread since it's used for one of only a few vegetarian sandwich offerings. If you're vegan, you may be stuck with the ubiquitous hummous option).

Turns out the pate is mostly potato, and, well, therein lies the cause of the textured nothing problem. Maybe they should try sweet potato next time, or some spices. The spinach and tomato inside are very fresh and flavourful, but can't save the sandwich.

Other options with things that have a taste, like cheese, are bound to fare better. Choose your sandwich wisely.

Or choose a muffin. The muffin options change daily, but the day we went there was an incredibly moist pear and chocolate chip version. It was still a little warm, and the chocolate made it feel like dessert for lunch.

The sandwich by itself is a little expensive for the size, but add on a side salad and beverage and you get a nice little lunch deal out of it. Just make sure you don't get over-charged. The staff didn't know anything about the sandwich/salad/beverage special, which was printed on the board outside on the terrasse. Also skip the beet side salad if it looks like it's been sitting there too long, like it did when we went. You should probably also ask for the salad dressing for your organic greens on the side, since it's just bland oil with a tiny bit of watery raspberry puree. Fortunately the organic lettuce actually tastes like something, so there's hope for the salad if the dressing was just having an off-day.

The desserts (the actual ones, since muffins don't count, even if they have chocolate), like the sandwiches, look incredible, but after the let-down of the vege-pate I didn't want to get my hopes up. The chocolate mousse turned out to be more air than chocolate, but it wasn't bad. Where the muffin had benefited from not being too sweet (the pears did all the work), the chocolate mousse needed, but didn't receive, a bit of an extra kick. The butter was pretty mild in the icing, so it wasn't particularly tasty, and while the cake was light and fluffy, it didn't shout "chocolate". The fruit tart fared much better. The butter in the crust was very nice and rich this time. It had a perfect texture and cracked nicely around the fluted edge. The blueberries were even Quebec blueberries, the tangy, sweet little ones, not the big New Jersey ones that taste like nothing (a different kind of nothing than the potatoes, mind you, but nothing none the less). After getting excited about how good the blueberries were it was really sad to find that the raspberries were still frozen (it's neither raspberry season nor blueberry season quite yet), and the cherries were pretty bland. At least they weren't bottled maraschinos.

Still, I like this café. You can get Bierbrier, a good Montreal micro-brew, as well as a few other local micro-brews, you don't have to even think about preservatives since it's all fresh and homemade, and it's not really expensive. I'd stop here for a muffin, or maybe a tart in the middle of summer when more fresh fruit is available. I'd also cross my fingers and hope that the other sandwiches are better since it's harder to mess up meat and cheese. Those aren't made from potato.. It's a fun place to hang out - very relaxed - and there's free WiFi.

Hours: Mon-Thurs 8:30am-7pm, Fri 8:30am-8pm, Sat-Sun 9am-8pm
Expect To Pay: $12, including sandwich, salad, a drink, tax and tip
www.velo.qc.ca
514 521-8356