Just a few from Montréal

It's been grey here in Portland lately. I've been doing slightly dweeby things like grinning like an idiot while flying down a hill on my bike, or composing small prayers of thanks to the universe, for warm grey spring days and muscles to take me places and the ability to feel contentment and joy. (I said they were slightly dweeby)
I might be doing all this normally, true, but my reason of late is that I just got back to the city. You see, I spent the past week and a half in Montréal.
Montréal, Montréal, Montréal. It's even got an accent over its "e". How much more delightful can one city be?
Someone told me that Montréal is this bizarre little outpost of Europe, tucked in neatly on the right side of North America, and it really is. It's kind of like being told a secret, or stumbling upon a rabbit hole that dumps you out across the world. We took a day trips out in a rental car, and I could not wrap my brain around the fact that there are highways in and out of the city; that it was connected to the rest of Canada and didn't just exist as an island floating in outer space.
Which is to say I liked it.
Of course I immediately took up with the food. Day Three was spent entirely on a self-devised "walking food tour". My father rolled his eyes a lot as I sacrificed cathedrals and museums for the sake of hitting up every single bakery on my list, but I think he understood after he had his first bite of a real bagel. And when I say "real bagel", I mean a bagel unlike any other bagel I've tasted, even in New York. It began with a craggy, lumpy, almost-too-thickly-crisp exterior, and then gave way to an interior that was soft yet feistily chewy, unlike the normal, easy, cotton-like interiors of your average inferior bagel.
It was from the Fairmont Bagel Bakery and it looked, well, a lot like this, actually, except his was sprinkled with muesli. Yes, raisins and oatmeal and nuts.

We, brave souls, took only the smallest of breaks before continuing on to our second bakery of the day: La Croissanterie Figaro, a bastion of French cooking and pastry art at the crossroads between Montréal's ritzier residential areas, and the more run-down sections surrounding Little Italy. They are adorable in the way that only Francophone establishments can be, with curly writing all over their menu and flowers all over their wrought-iron terraces. They also make what I've been calling the best almond croissant I've ever had. Ever. That's something big, by the way... "ever".
Their other croissants weren't quite as good, a bit too dry and a tad bland (although still very good, of course, just not, you know, the best I'd ever had), but, in case it hadn't gotten through, it's all worth it for their almond croissants. If you had to walk across the entire city of Montréal, in the middle of August, with snowshoes and a parka on, I would still advise it, just for the sake of their almond croissant. (If you go, make sure to order the almond paste. They have two types of almond, and the almond cream was a bit too reminiscent of a donut for my taste).

Their food is quite good, also, and their coffee is the cheapest I found in the entire city: under $2 (further proof for my theory of the inverse relationship between coffee quality and coffee price). We sat down for brunch a couple of times, and so I can highly recommend both the smoked salmon-cream cheese sandwich (you can even get it on one of their croissants!), and their rather impressive selection of quiche. Oh, what am I saying? I'll recommend the entire menu without even trying it all. This bakery, this bakery on its own, made me consider dumping it all and moving. Goodbye Portland, hello apartment directly next to authentic French bakery.
We then moved on to the Marché Jean-Talon and, err, well yes, another bakery. Before I continue with the details of our bakery crawl, though, a word about Montréal's marchés.
There are several throughout the city. They tend to be based around, if not completely contained within, buildings, so that they are permanent parts of the city. They're reminiscent of farmers' markets in the States, but with a few key differences: the biggest being that they're not entirely operated by farmers. Much of the produce is not from Québec, or even Canada, although they say that the local produce is much more of a fixture during the true summer. Then again, the summer only lasts about three months, max, so the rest of the year is heavily based on imported produce. That was rather disappointing, but, ah, well, it's another reason to love home. They also house several other kinds of food stores, from cheese shops to bakeries to nut-roasters. There are even some chains in a few; we spotted an Au Pain Doré or two. That said, everything we found was quite delicious and high-quality.
Our favorite marché was by far the Marché Jean-Talon, which featured our favorite nut-roaster and our favorite gelato shop, as well as several fantastic bread bakeries and produce stands. We went to some other marchés at first, but once we went to Jean-Talon, we didn't really go back.
The bakery I mentioned was nothing more than a stop for dinner baguette (but organic sesame-whole wheat!), luckily, but I should mention my favorite vendors there. The first was Havre de Glaces and their gelato. OH, what gelato. They had a wall fairly covered in newspaper articles raving about their quality and ice cream texture and "adult" flavor combinations (like strawberry with peppercorns, blood orange, fresh cheese, dark chocolate, burnt caramel, and "lulu", which is apparently some sort of tropical fruit that I'd never even heard of). I do believe one article was titled "Ice cream not just for children anymore". I find it comforting that my ice cream was mature since I hadn't even known that I was supposed to have outgrown it years ago.

The marché also contains a nut-roaster, whose name I can't recall for the life of me (it might not even have a name, now that I stop and think about it). It's not a large place, though, so one good tour of the place should lead you right to the display of almonds, pistachios, pecans, and the like. They have a mixed nut selection coated in savory spices that I spent days evaluating (I eventually came out with the dominant flavors of coconut milk and rosemary, but eventually gave up on the more subtle contributors). And we fought over the maple pecans.

We also discovered, way too late into the trip, a tiny little gourmet grocery market tucked away into the Village. I, forever making vows that I will never keep, declared that I wanted to move to the Village and live a completely self-sufficient life there: working and shopping at this store, and going to the huge assortment of clubs and bars when I got bored or had a night off. The prices are amazingly good for the chichi products they peddle, and the selection was pretty amazing considering that it was all crammed into a space not much bigger than our hotel room. There is a big problem here, unfortunately, in that we don't remember, at all, what the name is. I enlisted my father; we searched through receipts, we looked at price tags, we scoured the internet, and, nothing. If you'd like a nice adventure in Montréal, though, I recommend walking through the Village along rue Saint-Catherine. You'll stumble upon this shop, and since I can't give you a name, you can even say you discovered yourself.

And last but not least, the organic grocery and deli only blocks from our hostel, Marché Serafim. Despite a fairly limited selection of groceries, they still manage offer all your, well, gourmet basics like crackers, bread, cheese, drinks, and fruit & veg. The prices are definitely a bit more than we were used to paying, but coming from a tourist glut of white breads and fruit that tasted like chemicals, we managed to keep our enthusiasm up in the face of (gulp) $8 deli salads. Plus the man working the register informed me in exotically accented French that I was "particularly beautiful". You're not really going to get anything better than that handed over with your receipt, anywhere, I can assure you.


Tiny Directory
La Croissanterie
The website calls it "un petit coin perdu de Paris" (a little lost corner of Paris) and damned if it isn't.

Havre aux Glaces
...is inside the Marché Jean-Talon.

Marché Jean-Talon
7070 rue Henri-Julien, one and a half blocks south of rue Jean-Talon

Marché Serafim
393 rue St. Paul Est & Bonsecours

Fairmont Bagel Bakery
74 Fairmont Ouest

Photos by Savannah Naffziger