I’ve been asked multiple times on my social media and especially during polls on Instagram; where is the best banh mi in Montreal? And it’s always the usual suspects. The weird little shops that sell random sweet treats and sandwiches or the awkward counters inside Asian grocery stores. You know, the ones with aunties slathering homemade liver pâté, delicately holding raw-dogging – without protective gloves – a freshly sliced baguette, cramming it with miscellaneous ingredients then giving you your change from an old Costco-sized mayo bucket. But there’s a place that I’m pumped to tell you about. So stop asking, I’ve found it; the best banh mi in Montreal. Its at Sandwicherie Sue.
Saint Michel
The best pho in Montreal. There, I said it. I don’t make proclamations like this lightly. I ate over 50 bowls to bring you the best. When I say something is the best, there is a reason and theory behind it and I take this kind of responsibility seriously. I’ve written about the best pho in Montreal a couple of years ago and decided recently that it deserved an update. Not to say that the previous listing is no longer valid, but because I’ve been to so many more Vietnamese restaurants to have pho since then that I needed to share my discoveries. Pho is one of my favourite dishes. A comforting hearty bowl of rice noodles, beef, veggies swimming in the most flavourful, aromatic broths that soothes the soul and warms the coldest of hearts. With so many options in the city, I made it a personal goal to find the best pho (tonkinese noodle) in Montreal.
You know how you drink hot chocolate in winter to warm up after an hour of digging your car out? What do we do in summer to stay cool? Swim, eat copious amounts of ice cream, stand naked and pose like Captain Morgan in front of a fan after a shower? Try eating spicy southeast Asian food! Sink your gob into a steamy bowl of hot soup noodle or chow down on a plate of spicy noodles. I remember when I spent time in southeast Asia, the spicier the food was, the cooler you became. I’m not going to give you a science lesson on how sweat cools you down and how spicy foods make you sweat that would perpetuate the evaporation of moisture to give your body a cooling effect. I recently visited this Thai restaurant in Villeray serving up some authentic Thai and Lao cuisine that made me sweat in places I didn’t even know I had glands.