we're just here for the food

You all thought we were kidding, didn't you? You'd ask, "Montreal for your honeymoon? Have you been before? What's the draw?" And we'd blithely respond, "For the food." You probably laughed and thought to yourself that you would have chosen Hawaii this time of year.

Did you attend the same wedding we did? Between the banquet spread (thank you, Simpatica) and the toasts that focused on Amanda's appetite, it was kind of hard to mistake the true purpose of our big day: the food, we mean, our undying love for one another. So if it wasn't already clear, we love food and we love each other. And we celebrated both on our honeymoon (follow along and see if you can figure out which love outweighed the other)...

TA DA! DAY ONE (with parts of the first night)!

After a poorly thought-out and incredibly long trip on which we left at midnight Sunday, went through two Northeast cities, and hopped a bus to Montreal, we got into the city late Monday evening. As we often do in unfamiliar places, we arrived at a time of day when everything appears large and scary, and every person we pass seems to be speaking in a foreign language. Oh wait, that was French. We happily found our b & b, made a run to a drugstore for cold medicine and tissues and decided to begin our Quebecois dining experience properly. With poutine.

La Banquise 24h was luckily only a few blocks from our place, so we headed over to this all-hours hipster casse-croute (fast food joint). It had the vibe of a late-night college hang-out, like a college-town burrito joint, only this place had a menu of 22 poutines (and a couple dozen ways of cooking hot dogs that we can't remember). A went for the classic, literally, the poutine classique - fries, brown gravy, snowy white cheese curds. P felt like a little fusion and went for the poutine kamikaze, which delivered a wallop of merguez sausage, pickled hot peppers and tabasco sauce on top of the basic poutine. That is the beauty of poutine - no matter how many toppings you add, you don't subtract the basics.

In the light of the morning (which was beautifully clear to all of you "go to the tropics" naysayers), we awoke to a spread of coffee, juice, fruit, scrambled eggs, yogurt, and our first taste of Montreal bagels. Unlike in New York, where bagels are boiled, the bagels here are dipped in honey water then baked in a wood oven. The result is a crisp sweet exterior with a pleasantly chewy interior. We knew we'd have to get more on this trip. Our b & b, Le Plumard, had comfortably modern furnishings, cute style and a Portugese host with a broken arm and a penchant for making bad jokes about her cast. Louise was a warm and gracious host and her breakfasts each morning were such a great respite from traveling and eating out every meal.

We set out after breakfast to get a sense of the neighborhood our b & b was in. The Plateau is a vibrant mix of brownstone apartments and neighborhood restos (not an obnoxious abbreviation, just what they say in Quebec) that runs along Ave. Mont Royal and Boul. Sant Laurent (the Main). The Main used to be the dividing line between French and English Quebec (and by used to, we mean "early 90s"), but has recently been repopulated by families and hipsters moving back into the city. We kept saying that parts of it looked like New York while other parts looked like London. Some guidebook we saw described it as "Williamsburg in a beret," but like all of Montreal, it was actually unique to itself.

After getting the lay of the land, we dropped into Montreal's most famous Jewish deli for lunch. What distinguishes Schwartz's is their smoked meat. No, its not pastrami. No, its not corned beef. We probably would have called it both, but they were very particular about their product. Schwartz's is just that kind of democratic lunch counter you find in New York, where locals and tourists alike put up with gruff treatment for the outstanding food. A got the "stuffed chicken" sandwich - the biggest stack of cold bologna between two mustard slathered pieces of white bread she had ever seen. P went for the house special, which you don't order by size, but by fat. P got the full fat. We both ordered half-sours and black cherry sodas to go with our sandwiches and because we hadn't had poutine in almost a day, we rounded it out with fries.

What to do after a meal like that? We waddled back to our b & b for a nice little nap. Now, mind you, A had gotten horribly sick the day after our wedding (who among you was sick? fess up, because you aren't coming next time...) and P was only a day away from following suit. This was but the start of a full week of dozing off around 9:30 or 10 and not rousing from bed until 9 the next day (including daily 4 o'clock naps).

Because A was still a bit drowsy, even after her hour-long nap, P dragged her up to Mile End to an Italian cafe Louise had recommended. Club Social was in the heart of a predominantly English neighborhood, served an Italian clientele and was filled with markings of the dominant French presence. If we thought we were having trouble with French, now we had a room full of people speaking three languages we had experience with. Now Montreal is many good things, but a town of excellent coffee and tea it is not. We were yearning for those Portland-style small batch roasts we so loved, but at least an Italian place like Club Social made a decent espresso.

Well, after brunch, lunch, and coffee, it seemed high time for dinner (trust us, you'll begin to notice a trend here). Exhausted after a long day of struggling through French, we went the take-out route from Chuch, the casual cafe side of Chu Chai, a vegetarian Thai restaurant in our neighborhood. Neither of us had ever seen such a panoply of fake meats as Chuch offered and the verisimilitude of those little TVP duck breasts was uncanny (right down to the fake layer of fat). They didn't taste like duck, but that was probably fine, since this was one of the rare meals we managed to avoid meat on this trip. Seitan a l'orange, ginger green beans, curried eggplant, udon and tofu - you'll just have to imagine how good it all was because we forgot to take pictures of this one meal. Since there is nothing classier than Thai takeout when you're jet-lagged, we popped a bottle of champagne and enjoyed some truffles that A's parents had arranged to have waiting for us. And, seeing as it was around 9:30 (6:30 Pacific?!), we promptly fell asleep.

(PS. Hopefully you've noticed the changes around the site, but if you haven't yet seen, there is a link on the left to our flickr page. Follow the link to view the full set of images from our trip. We'll keep posting on the rest of our honeymoon and as soon as we get our pictures from the wedding back from our photographer, we'll post those as well. Thanks again for sharing our wedding with us and making it such a memorable event. -P&A)