I noticed last night at 8:30pm that the sky was almost completely dark… you know what that means… It’s one of my favourite times of the year: ask all the teenagers and pre-teens in you life if they’ve started school yet, or ask when they start or if they’re ready to start school and watch them flip their shit. The best. But more importantly, we’ve still got some summer left to squeeze out a few more trips to La Ronde, fire up the grill and piss off your neighbours, sit on the balcony and watch your old Italian Neighbour hose down the sidewalk for 3 hours and pound down a few more litres of the quintessential summer frozen treat, ICE CREAM. If you follow me on social media, (Twitter or Instagram) you’d know I’m a complete fiend for ice cream and have traveled across the city to find the best. Here is my second instalment (part 1 here) of my favourite ice cream shops in Montreal.
Villeray
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.
My Favourite Ice Cream Shops in Montreal – Part 1
Let’s be honest here, one of the things that is most synonymous with summer is ice cream. I remember when I was young, my mom always hesitated buying ice cream for us because 1) it would melt before we got home from the grocery store, 2) not only are Asians amazing in ping-pong, badminton and in maths and sciences, but we also own the shit out of lactose intolerance. Lactaid didn’t exist back then (or so we thought) and ice cream was a treat that included a long walk down to the local ice cream shop – long enough to rethink and really consider what we were going to have, being fully aware of the repercussions and consequences this after-dinner treat would entail. Little did we realize that the forced integration of dairy products into our diet was slowly grooming our lactose kung fu resulting in a tolerance that now rivals my patience with stupid people driving and my ability to abstain from road rage. Here are some of my favourite ice cream shops in Montreal