Offbeat Eats

As our regular readers know, approximately every two years we do a group trip up to Montreal, rendezvous with friends, and head out to the surprisingly rural outskirts of the Montreal area (St. Benoît de Mirabel) for Au Pied de Cochon annual Cabane à Sucre maple celebration. You can read up on previous visits of ours in 2014, 2017, or 2024, or their similar fall harvest dinner in Fall 2019. The basic formula remains the same: a sumptuous feast featuring maple and seasonal dishes, served up in an unending serious of generously-portioned family-style courses. Over the years, the actual meal varies a bit (some years are more traditional, some more experimental, and some have been tightly themed, like 2017’s Japanese-theme), but it remains one of the Montreal-area’s more difficult reservations to get (usually setting an alarm for when ticket sales start in December for the winter Cabane). This year’s culinary Olympic feast was for myself and 9 colleagueswas in mid-March, during a brief recurrence of winter during the spring thaw.

After a weekend of doing the Cabane à Sucre and visiting several delightful breweries and beer bars around Montreal, it was time to head home, stopping off in Le Plateau for a brunch. We used to go a lot to Lawrence for this, but Lawrence has retooled their concept and menu and isn’t much of a brunch spot any more. And another former area favorite of ours, Universel, moved and isn’t convenient anymore. But just around the corner from Lawrence is another spot known for brunch, Fabergé, that our friends Rick and Sarah had gotten as a recommendation, so we all headed off there for a proper sendoff breakfast.

As you can see from our recent review, we again found ourselves heading up to Montreal for a weekend of particularly excessive Quebecois dining. This usually leaves me craving a lighter, healthier meal at some place, and in the past, we’d often hit up Yuan Vegeterien for some light vegeterian-based Japanese and Chinese food. We decided to do that again this trip, and ran into a slight hitch: Yuan isn’t quite there any more. Around January of 2022, it re-branded as Oplante. It is mostly the same concept, but shifting from vegetarian to vegan, and focusing more on serving all-you-can-eat buffet-style food (although they still offer an a la carte menu, which is what we ordered on).

As our regular readers know, one of the periodic traditions here at Offbeat Eats is to pile in the car, drive up to Montreal, rendezvous with friends, and head out to the quiet town of St. Benoît de Mirabel west of Montreal to the Cabane à Sucre of famed Montreal restaurant Au Pied de Cochon. You can read up on previous visits of ours in 2014 and 2017, or their similar harvest dinner in Fall 2019, but it’s basically always a sumptuous feast featuring maple (Winter), or Fall harvest (Fall) ingredients, served up in an unending serious of generously-portioned courses, usually with a total of between 9 and 14 courses (often with a variety of supplements available as well). It’s one of the Montreal-area’s more difficult reservations to get, and the whole Pandemic thing caused this event to get canceled twice, and then we were too busy with other travels to attend. But this year, everything aligned with availability, and our friend Elizabeth took the lead in securing reservations, scoring a noon-time seating in late April.

After a flight back into Montreal, I usually like to stop off for a smoked meat sandwich on my way back home, usually ducking into Montreal proper for this. But a handful of minor delays at CDG resulting from luggage that had lost its tag had us arriving an hour later into Montreal, which meant that the normally bad traffic around the airport had grown to excessive, and going into the city just for a smoked meat sandwich would not have been efficient. Luckily, most residential parts of Montreal have pretty good shops and delis that will also sell you smoked meat sandwiches, so instead of battling traffic, I ducked into Southwest Montreal’s Côte-Saint-Paul neighborhood to check out Les Aliments Félix Mish.

The life of an engineer with international travels means that, in addition to my own recreational travel, I’m often having to dart off to distant locations for work, on a tighter schedule than I’d usually book. In this case, I had to fit a trip to Grenoble and Paris in France in between two other personal trips, and the best overall location for both cost and schedule was catching the red-eye out of Montreal Trudeau International Airport. As I’ve discussed many times here at Offbeat Eats, airports aren’t exactly focal points of good cuisine, and the typical fare is both expensive and disappoint. But every once in a while I’m pleasantly surprised, and this time it was in Area 51 of the YUL airport, between the main screening area and the smaller international departure lounge sits Archibald. This was the perfect opportunity to fortify myself for an overnight flight with that cornerstone of Montreal cuisine, the smoked meat sandwich.

As regular readers know, every few years I try to go to one of Quebec’s bigger culinary events, the Cabane à Sucre (“Sugar Shack”) event run by Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon. It’s one of the Montreal-area big ticket events, and a bit of effort is required to score a reservation, usually requiring waking up at midnight to get a good spot on the waitlist. It is truly a culinary “shock and awe campaign”; you can read my writeups of my trips there in the winter of 2014 and 2017, but both of those visits were to the winter maple sugaring event (which is mostly a “how many dishes can a chef come up with that involve both foie gras and maple?” sort of event). But this year, we decided to mix it up a bit. In addition to their annual maple sugaring feast, Au Pied de Cochon also runs a fall harvest season event, focusing on apples and other fall harvest fruits and vegetables (with, again, an implausibly large amount of foie gras worked into the menu as well). So this year, I arose very early on April 1st, and managed to score a table for 8 in late October. So, rounding up an assortment of my local friends, we drove up to Montreal for a merry weekend of excessive dining, Montreal-style.

Back in 2013, I did a brief review of one of my favorite Montreal beer bars: Reservoir. Since then, I’ve had half a dozen revisits there, ranging from just stopping in for a pint, having dinner, and, well, everything in-between. On our recent trip to Quebec, we needed a light “fill in” meal to tide us over to a feast the next day at Au Pied de Cochon’s Cabane a Sucre, and this turned out to be the perfect opportunity to stop in and do a follow-up review of reservoir, including some of their mid-day menu.

(Closed) On our usual trips to Montreal, one of our primary goals is usually “eating”, since Montreal has an impressive assortment of restaurants, including several cuisines that we don’t normally see at home. However, since this trip was built around our meal at Au Pied de Cochon’s Cabane a Sucre, an important strategic choice was to preserve some stomach space for that legendarily excessive event. But despite that, it’s hard to resist the siren call of many of Montreal’s more interesting restaurants, so we decided to also do a light dinner at Agrikol, a Haitian place in Montreal’s Gay Village neighborhood.

Since it’s now mid-February, that means it is starting to become Mapling season throughout the Northeast and Quebec, and that also means it is time for the annual Au Pied de Cochon (PdC, for short)’s Cabane à Sucre harvest breakfast! It’s one of the Montreal-area’s toughest reservations (usually involving getting up at midnight on 1 December, cursing at the constantly-crashing website, and then waiting weeks for your callback on the wait list), but as you can read about in my previous writeup, it really is worth the trouble, since it’s one of the most amazing culinary experiences. When we last went in 2014, we had an amazing time. But there were two lessons we took from that experience: (1) to starve ourselves more beforehand, since it truly is a massively excessive amount of food, and (2) the experience you got as a party of two was just a fraction of the experience the larger, full tables got, since many of the items are best served up table-side (better to receive entire cakes than just slices, for example). So this time, when they opened up the waitlist in December, I immediately signed up for a table of 8 and got a combination of local and online friends to come up and join me. Thus, on 18 Feb 2017, we found ourselves again in the outskirts of St Benoit de Mirabel, QC in an enlarged sugar shack, waiting for items to arrive from the kitchen.