Thursday, June 12, 2008

Another Country

Claude Postel - 2 stars
75, rue Notre Dame Ouest, Montreal

I've always thought Montreal would be a nice place to visit - I could indulge my francophilia and maybe eat some good desserts, without having to fly across the Atlantic. But when I visited last weekend with my wife, our daughter, and my wife's parents, I quickly gave up most attempts to speak French. Not that I couldn't understand Québécois (the accent is a little different from Parisian, but no more so than some of the French regional accents, and a few of the words are different, but nothing you can't figure out), or that they couldn't understand me - it was just that everyone there speaks English so well it seemed pointless. I hear as you get away from the center of Montreal this is less true, but it's an astonishingly bilingual place.

With a toddler in tow we were somewhat limited in our restaurant choices, but we did have some very good French-style desserts at Claude Postel in Old Montreal, near the Notre Dame Basilica. For lunch you can get custom-made sandwiches, a selection of panini, salads, pastas, soup, and so on; I had a tomato soup that was almost certainly made on the spot (I could tell by the tiny bits of tomato peel and the little fragment of bay leaf that you wouldn't find in a processed product) and a fresh Greek salad. We had a raspberry tart, a pear-frangipane tart, and a chocolate cheesecake, and the raspberry tart was the best.

Unfortunately it was the same weekend as the Grand Prix of Montreal (a Formula One race), so the downtown hotels were wildly expensive, and we stayed in Laval, which in French must mean, as my wife pointed out, "the land of great shopping malls." As an American I'm used to having the biggest of everything, but I have never seen an expanse of strip malls like this, just planted in the middle of an enormous field around the intersection of two highways. But luckily, to prevent us from getting too homesick, Ronald McDonald was in town for a convention.

My daughter and I visited the enclosed mall one afternoon so my wife could rest, and when she started to melt down I bought her a soft-serve ice cream, and she sat down on the floor to eat it, just like at home.

The main event was our friends' wedding in a little town called Oka, northwest of Montreal, out in the middle of an apple orchard. The bride and groom were both bilingual, so the English-speaking officiant read the vows in English and the groom repeated them in French, and the French-speaking officiant read the vows in French and the bride repeated them in English - translating on the fly, I might add. It was a hot but beautiful day in an isolated, quiet place, just like the day and the place that my wife and I were married, nine years ago.

No comments: