Look out the window, now look at your watch, is it dark? Look out the window, now back at me, if your watch says 4:30pm but looks like midnight outside, then I’m sorry to say my friends, that winter is near and white stuff is inevitable. And with the cold nip at your nose comes the insatiable quest for warm food… comfort food… Pho. If the abundance of palatable Pho options in Montreal leave your head spinning, look no further, Shut Up and Eat has teamed up with Emilie from La Bouche Pleine and compiled the Ultimate guide to Montreal’s best pho (Tonkinese soup).
I’ve been following the couple behind BBQ Black Strap for a while now. As they documented their travels through the southern states in a barbecue pilgrimage, I drooled over their twitpics of BBQ for breakfast lunch and dinner, and knew it was love at first rub… if y’know what I’m saying. So when they let it be known that they were opening up a barbecue joint of their own, it was on top of my hit list… and by “hit list” , I mean a place whose food I will murder with my face.
Hunger… it’s a funny thing, take cannibalism for example. How bad do things have to be before you decide to eat Steve? I guess desperate times, call for desperate measures… and my desperation led me to the land of the people who don’t stop at stop signs, drive 10 minutes to the nearest grocery store and whose weekends comprise of picking out tiles at Reno Depot or driving their kids to soccer. Wait, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t headed out to the west to eat humans, but my desperation to find quality Creole cuisine led me 25 mins down the 40 into D.D.O.
Did you see the recap of September’s edition of Shut Up and Eat with Me at BAXO Cuisine and Bar? Check out the eye candy and read about all the fuckery that transpired here. Make sure you’re at October’s dinner event.
Having an extensive restaurant “to try” list is sometimes a bit daunting. Obviously I want to be able to pick through and prioritize the list in order to write about places that are tasty and worth going to and weed out the crappy ones is a hit or miss. Like trying to pick out a good Kinder egg – picking each one out of the box and comparing the weight of each one to try and pick out the ones with the good toys – honestly, how many times have you gotten the shitty toy that’s just a statue, nothing to assemble… it just sits there… does nothing. I mean hook a guy up with a sticker to put on or something.
This fall season marks the first edition of Chef (and diabolical genius) Martin Picard’s apple harvest season version of his Au Peid de cochon’s Cabane a sucre – which is aptly called “La Cabane aux pommes”. Like geeks flocking to get in line for the newest iBoner gadget, foodies and fans alike, patiently wait for a phone call confirming email reservations to this mecca of duck fat and temple of porky goodness.
I’m not a big fan of DIY anything let alone when it has anything to do with food. Having to put together my girl’s Ikea closet unit last week, I went through six different tools, an extension cord, two t-shirts and googling the instruction booklet (having ripped it when it got trapped under the stupid thing and when I brilliantly tried to pull it out.) The shit said that two people would be able to assemble this two-metre tall unit, but they failed to mention only if your names and Bjorn and Sven and are 7-feet tall and can bench a deer. So imagine my dismay when I was expected to cook/assemble my own food… especially when I was a paying customer at a restaurant.
Whether it be during the holidays, or entertaining guests from out of town, if you admit to it or not, we’ve all be guilty of over eating and all the wonderful stuff that comes with it. The post-glutton depression, the various “sweats” brought on by various meats and that sinking feeling at the bottom of your stomach, this my friends is the “event horizon”; the moment when you started to feel full, starts to be eclipsed by the feeling of you hating yourself. All the things that happen when you find yourself heaved over the side of the sofa living an anti-acid TV commercial. That being said, to exercise these caloric daemons and detox my body of impurities, I couldn’t find a better way to cleanse my emotional palate than to break some Indian food against my face.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the concept of “brunch” is so arbitrary to me, it’s been fetishized, set to a bunch of unspoken culinary meal to time matrix regulations that people dictate their sundays based on when and what they eat – as I so eloquently expressed my view here. I mean, I understand how sometimes cereal is good at any time of day, and how some times people will have “breakfast for dinner”. I actually knew someone who wouldn’t eat pancakes or eggs benedict because those foods are reserved for sundays ONLY – I nearly had an aneurysm when she tried to explain her reasoning to me… Man, I don’t know if people are starting to get more and more annoying, or I’m starting to hate more and more people.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, you would have noticed the influx of my tweets bitching about how I wanted pizza; and even by that I wouldn’t say it was bitching, more than it was a deep yearning that bordered on obsessive and annoying. Like a 5 month old wants a boob when he or she is hungry; the shrill cry of the animalistic response taking over its little body, screaming and shaking and turning red until the soothing comfort of a mother’s milker touches his or her’s lips… now picture that, but instead of that, picture me slamming the keys on my laptop making sure people know how badly I want pizza… thick crust, thin crust, stuffed crust, pepperoni, sausage, bacon, arugula, anchovies, fucking pineapples, I wanted it all, I.needed.it.all.
When I ask people for recommendations or ask their opinion of what was the best “…” they’ve had, more often than none, the most common answer (no matter what it is I’m asking about) is, “My mom makes the best”. Ok, listen, unless you’re going to get your mom to make me that magical whatever-it-is with the pork that’s fed with wheat picked by foot by nuns with no arms, or with chives grown on the hills of the village where your grandfather grew up, harvested at the special time of day when the unicorns go out to pasture – I don’t want to hear about it; plus… your mom is tired of me calling her.
I’ve come to a point where the ethos of this blog has cause the ultimate internal conflict, do I share? I must. This Spot on Sommerled in Montreal-west has been my go-to place for whenever I’m jonesing for cakes made on a pan… It is with great resentfulness that I divulge my pancake pusher… my flapjack fixer, the masters of batter pimping-griddle kings… I give unto you, Restaurant B&M.