Street food. Why are people obsessed with it? For the same reason my room is painted bright red and I’ve already planned to name my first child Ferrari – we want what we don’t have – my dog is also named Kim Kardashian. Back to “street food”. We don’t have it a legit street food scene here, which leaves us with a crater-sized craving for the things we’ve seen fetishized on tv and Youtube. If you’ve watched that NetFlix Docuseries, you’d understand what I’m talking about. Sure we have food trucks and open-air food festivals, but that’s not the same. No matter how hard we try, we’ll always have a pathetic, second-rate attempt at something authentic and so bastardized it becomes a caricature of itself. This is why when you’re looking for authentic street food, you have too look indoors. This week I checked out a cozy spot in Montreal West serving authentic Chinese street food – Montreal Crêpes & Dumplings Chinois.
Montreal west
Montreal Chefs on Instagram
I love taking takings of my food – which is quite obvious if you follow me on Instagram and because I write this blog. I like to consider myself an amateur food pornographer, if that’s even a thing. It should be, because that’s what I am. If you don’t know what “Food Porn” is Wikipedia defines it as: “Food porn is a glamourized spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, blogs, cooking shows or other visual media, foods boasting a high fat and calorie content, exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat or the glorification of food as a substitute for sex.” That pretty much sums it up. Who better than industry chefs to be the finest purveyors of food porn. So if you’re down to get dirty with some deliciously porny food pictures, here are some Instagram accounts of Montreal chefs that will give you a glimpse of what happens behind the line and a look into their kitchens.
Montreal Asian Grocery Store Round Up
A friend of mine once asked me for a fried rice recipe and I gave them my trusty chicken fried rice with gai lan recipe. I followed up with them the next day to see how it went and they said it was good, but something was different. They asked me what “gai lan” was and I explained to them that it was Chinese broccoli. They said that they weren’t able to find it at their local grocery store and used regular fleurette broccoli and that by using soy sauce, would rationalize it as being “Chinese“. After I stopped pounding my head against the wall, I tried to figure out if the problem was my friends or the fact that I didn’t specify where to get the ingredients… especially after I found out that their pantry soy sauce was the kosher-gluten-free variety.