A staggering number of chain cafes and coffee shops in Montreal
haven't yet cornered the market on favoured hangouts. We Montrealers
enjoy our home-grown locales. Café Utopik is such a place that seems
to thrive on its independent situation...
Read the rest of: "Café Utopik"»
Canadians have a reputation for loving their beer, but the mental
picture most often associated with your average beer drinker is not
generally a positive one. Loutish frat boys drinking cases of
mediocre mass-produced brew is an image that lovers of good beer
abhor.
One Toronto restaurant is determined to polish the reputation
of both the drink and the drinker -- their logo says it all --
changing the way people think about beer.
Read the rest of: "Changing the Way People Think About Beer"»
Say "Indian food" to just about anyone and they'll swoon over chana
masala, paneer, maybe tandoori chicken. Say the word "dosa" and their
faces will get a confused expression.
India, like many countries that are long in length and encompass a
variety of distinct geographic areas, has many different cuisines.
Most Indian restaurants concentrate on the cuisines of the northern
regions; heavy on dairy, tomatoes and meat. In the south of India and
Sri Lanka, the food is very different. Dairy is rare, the spices are
hot (deep fried chili peppers make a common and tasty snack) and the
heavier breads of the north are replaced with large, light,
crepe-like breads called dosa...
Read the rest of: "The Other Taste of India"»
“MMMMMM!" was the exclamation of pleasure from a life-long New Yorker
when first sampling Montreal bagels. This was high praise indeed. This Long-Islander went on to concede that these bagels even rivaled New York's otherwise unrivaled bagels. Montrealers have known for some time that
their bagels were world class. In fact, beyond smoked meat and poutine,
perhaps no food characterizes Montreal more than its bagels. Like their
smoked meat brethren, Montreal bagels are originally a contribution of
the city's sizeable Jewish community. And just as debate might wage
between smoked meat at Shwartz's or The Main, a similar competition
exists between Montreal's top bagel bakeries, Fairmount and St Viateur...
Read the rest of: "Fairmount versus St-Viateur"»
If you've read the New York Times recently, you can't help but notice the craziness going on at the auction houses in New York. Paintings are selling for all time highs- I'm talking hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars. Meaning, the richest jerks get to enjoy the world's finest art- all to themselves. Imagine a Picasso or a Cezanne hanging in your living room?! Unreal. Unfair!
Well, thanks to a trip to Sotheby's with my grad school class, this outsider art lover found out something I'd wish I'd known years ago...
Read the rest of: "Secret Museums"»
