(As with nearly all photos posted at F&V, you may click the image to open a new window with a larger photo; you may also view our full set of Montreal photos.)

It was too short a trip and I will have to go back soon, but even on a short visit (which also included a really short sidetrip to Quebec City) it is obvious that Montreal has zoomed near the top of my list of favorite cities (along with, in alpha. order, London, Paris, Prague, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver…).

Montreal is a great city for walking around and viewing varied and beautiful architecture. The city is loaded with great restaurants (about which more below), has a few world-class microbreweries (about which more in a separate planting), and some fascinating museums (of which the Archaeology and Ramezay are especially notable).

I am a fan of Moshe Safdie’s work,* and the above photo shows his famous Habitat ‘67, built for the Expo of that year on a peninsula in Montreal’s harbor.

From the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in 1967 (during the Expo, which commemorated Canada’s Confederation centennial) Charles de Gaulle declared “Vive le Québec libre,” much to Ottawa’s chagrin. Inside, the council hall is the most beautiful municipal chamber I have ever seen, with numerous stained glass windows depicting Montreal history. With the dark interior and bright light coming in, most of the photos did not reveal the beauty of the windows, but this one did so reasonably well:

Now, about those restaurants!

I doubt there are very many cities where one could dine on Tibetan, Uighur, and Reunonaise cuisine. All these meals (as well as the unforgettable evening sponsored by the conference organizers at La Prunelle) were scrumptuous. I have seen a Tibetan restaurant in San Francisco, and we have always talked about going, but it is far out on Lombard and we are usually in the city without a car. We spotted this one in Montreal while walking down St. Denis on our way to one of the breweries (L’Amère à Boire, on which more in a separate post), and for one of the very few times in my life I immediately decided on a detour to a non-beer restaurant while on my way to a brewpub. We were glad we did. As one might expect, the food (or at least the items we sampled) reflect the geographic location, combining some northern Indian elements (yogurt-based sauces) and Chinese elements (e.g. dumplings).

The next day we headed out to an Indonesian restaurant that was indicated in our guidebook. (We often go to an Indonesian restaurant in London or San Francisco when we are in those cities.) The restaurant apparently no longer exists at that location. However, a block away on St. Laurent was the arch for Chinatown, so we decided to see what we could find there.

High on a building I noticed a sign that said Cuisine Uighur. The Uighurs are the Muslim Turkic people of China’s western Xinjiang province, and, as with the Tibetan, the Uighur foods reflect the geographic crossroads–in this case Turkish influence (lamb kabobs and the like) as well as Chinese (more, but very different, dumplings). The experience also provided me more evidence of the Central Asian origin of foods we think of as Italian, as what I ordered looked for all the world like a pizza, made of a nutty and delightfully chewy bread (perhaps a cousin of nan), on which there was some tender stewed and spiced mutton (on the bone).

Then, just around the corner from this very interesting building at St. Hubert and Duluth, we had dinner the last night at Le Potin de la Fournaise.

(The reader with the keen eye will note the truck bearing the logo of a Quebecois beer, though not one I tried, as I do not need to go to Quebec to have an “American-style lager.”)

Named after a Kilauea-like volcano on the island of Reunion (an Overseas Department of France in the Indian Ocean), the restaurant introduces its diners to the amazingly exotic flavors of that island–a real Creole mix of indigenous, Indian, East African, and French influence that is a treat for the taste buds and eyes.

Wow, what a city!

[Too bad I did not know of the Montreal Food Blog before we left, but as you can see here, we did OK.]

And, as I have alluded to several times, the beer was great, too. However, I will put that in a separate planting, as we also stopped over in Chicago and sampled a fair number of beers there before returning home. It this makes more sense to discuss the beers of the trip together. (At least it makes sense to me, and whose blog is it, after all?)

Our time in Quebec City was far, far too short. It is a charming and beautiful city, with its full fortifications intact. There is quite literally nothing like it in North America, and when there it is almost hard to believe you are not in Europe. It is very touristy (for a good reason) but fortunately we were there well ahead of the peak tourist season, so no crowds were over-running the place.

We had a great dinner with one of my grad-school mentors (who was also in Quebec for the conference) and his wife at Café de la Paix (guinea fowl in Calvados and caribou in juniper berries!!), and then topped off the evening with some Quebecois beers at the St. Alexandre pub while watching the end of the Stanley Cup series (wrong winner, alas, but they were after all the no. 8 seed and they made it all the way to Game 7).

Oh, by the way, the conference was really good, too!

* Which includes the recently built campus of Eleanor Rossevelt College at UCSD, just outside my office, and in which I played the tiniest of roles as a member of the Building Advisory Committee and got to meet Safdie.