Feasting on Montreal's Charms

I knew I must tend to this vital errand, stat, while I still could. For Kathy, as fate would have it, is a doctor.

Along with the requisite eggs and home fries, my plate was promptly piled with four kinds of pork: ham, Canadian bacon, sausage and the salt pork that the beans were cooked in. As Charlotte the spider wrote in her web of her friend Wilbur, this was "some pig."

La Binerie surely wasn't the reason Gourmet magazine devoted an entire issue in 2006 to Montreal's culinary prowess, but the dowdy lunch counter earned its mention. My repast, enough to make a long-haul trucker groan, was frighteningly tasty.

Just in time to save my health -- or to try -- Kathy flew in from Boston. Immediately, we started walking.

Nearly everyone who crossed our path was unrelentingly friendly. Even the illuminated "man" in the crossing signals has a spring in his step; check it out. Along Rue St. Denis, a beautifully dressed woman stepped out of an elegant bakery with an elaborately wrapped sandwich and handed it with a smile to a homeless stranger. By the time a Metro toll taker wished us a good life -- and seemed to mean it -- we weren't especially impressed.

We walked along the lovely Rue Laurier from east to west, from a low-key weekend street market to the decidedly upmarket blocks of fancy shops west of Rue St. Laurent. That street, also called "The Main," has historically served as the unofficial line separating the city's French culture from its English-speaking stronghold.

These days, it could be said that there is more to divide the city, culturally speaking, but that fewer things do. French speakers may have lost a war or two, official and otherwise. But they won the battle for their language, with more than half of the city's residents declaring French as their first language, though most speak English as well. After thousands of English speakers left the city at the height of the Quebecois separatist movement in the 1970s and '80s, the proportion of those who speak English as a first language has been estimated at about one in five.

Sights, Sounds, Tastes

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Today's Montreal is often a wonderful jumble, with strong strands of distinct cultures living amongst one another. It's been called a salad bowl -- the concept of Canadian diversity as separate components complementing each other, as compared with the American ideal of the melting pot.

In few places is this more true than in Mile End, a historically Jewish enclave that was one of my favorite discoveries of the trip.

Mile End, the boyhood home of the late novelist Mordechai Richler (along with his famous protagonist, Duddy Kravitz), is gentrifying rapidly. But though the challenge of change in the neighborhood just north of the swanky part of Rue Laurier riles some, others revel in it.

To the outsider, the place offers a kaleidoscopic array: The Asian teenager with an Orthodox Jew's side locks ambles along Rue St. Viateur. At a street corner, black-clad Goth girls check out South American pan flutists. Butcher shops of seemingly every Eastern European persuasion line the streets.

Here's where you get your Montreal bagels, smaller, denser and sweeter than their American counterparts. Their supporters insist that these rounds, boiled in honeyed water before baking, are the real deal; the recipe allegedly was brought over by Romanian Jews in the early 1900s.