Montreal Week 1

Haven't been back to Montreal in over a year.  I'll be spending two weeks here for work, so I took the chance to try out some new restaurants.
You've probably heard about how Laurier BBQ fired Gord Ramsay recently.  Despite the fact, we still gave the restaurant a try to see what gourmet rotisserie chicken tastes like.  The restaurant is a very nice hang out and there were still lots of diners at 8:30pm on a Tuesday night.  I got the 1/4 chicken leg with fries and coleslaw.  Their gravy was pretty good.  We kept comparing what we were eating to another rotisserie chicken joint called Scores.  I preferred Laurier BBQ's gravy and coleslaw, but I think Scores has better fries.  My fries were a bit over-fried.

Scores would definitely give you a bigger bang for the buck, but they don't have desserts like these at Scores.  We tried the carrot cake and the bread pudding with ice-cream.  Very yummy!

 

Another restaurant we tried is Van Horne, which was rated as the 6th best new restaurant of 2011 in Canada by enRoute Magazine.  This was a very small, cozy restaurant and the dishes were all very artistically prepared.  We tried almost everything on the menu.  For appetizers, we had the foie gras, goat cheese with honey (This was VERY good, probably the best goat cheese I've had.  I'm not a big fan of gamey stuff, but this wasn't gamey at all.), the mussels, and the octopus.

 

 

 Then we had the amuse bouche which was a little salad with ricotta cheese.

For my main course, I had scallops with boudin (blood pudding).  The boudin's texture was quite soft, but it doesn't taste like blood at all.

Before dessert, we were served a dessert amuse bouche of chocolate ganache and sour cream.

For dessert, we tried the pecan pie, a verrine, which contained panna cotta, fried carrot cake and meringue, and the chocolate coffee cake.

 

 

Overall the experience was a great one and the food was amazing, and you can see that it takes a lot of effort to prepare these intricate dishes.