7 Montreal Restaurants
A very personal guide
Here is a brief dining guide to a few Montréal restaurants I have enjoyed recently. It’s personal and reflects the tastes of a middle-aged man who likes a good bistro, preferably in the company of his wife, or colleagues. It is directed at the tourist, or business traveler. It makes no claims about any place being the best at anything, or having the best of any thing. (Except, of course, L’Express, which just is and has many.)
Other than loving the city and its restaurants, I have a few qualifications. For one, I have lived in Montreal, and though I was a poor student, I knew some people who worked in restaurants and a few others who were interested in them. In the first four years of the 1990s, we would sometimes blow our budget on dinner, and have to make up for it with ramen and tuna for days after. I’m not an expert on the history or present of Montreal restaurants, but at 21 years old, I at least knew who Norman Laprise was and my way around the city.
Another qualification, which sounds like a brag, but bears relevance, is that my current weird life as a wine writer takes me to France regularly. Sometimes I pass through Paris long enough for a jet lagged lunch before catching a train, or an end of the trip dinner before catching a plane the next day. When I don’t, then I am in wine country where there are always good restaurants and things to eat.
The French trips are relevant because of the cross-pollination of restaurant culture between Quebec and La République. But also because when I travel from Toronto to Montreal, the kind of restaurants I am particularly interested in show Gallic influence and its interplay with Quebec’s own distinct restaurant sensibility. This is all a complicated way of me saying I know what I’m writing about.
Finally, now that I have kids who have reached university age, the two of three that have opted to go to school in Montreal. So far, this has meant an average of two touristy visits a year for the last five, on top of whatever work stuff might bring me there as well. If kid number three follows the family way (his mother also went to school in Montreal), then I’ll have skin in the game for another five years. I am invested.
This is a wine Substack, so the restaurants below are all ones that serve wine, well made at a reasonable price. They are suggested for lunch, dinner, or either, but not breakfast, obviously.
LUNCH
Bar Bara (Saint-Henri)
If you go to lunch at Bar Bara, you have to be prepared to sit at the high-top communal table that runs the length of the bar in this long and narrow Italianish restaurant, wine bar, caffé, whatever it is. Lean into it and pretend you’re a bohemian resident of not quite gentrified Saint-Henri, which is more or less down the hill from Westmount, but quite different. The classic move is the Mortadella sandwich and one of the salads, which could be happily split by a couple. Getting there is fun, if you walk along Notre-Dame West from a point of departure in one of the other two cool Southwest neighbourhoods. For instance the Arsenal art gallery in Griffintown, or Atwater Market in Little Burgundy.
