Beyond good or great restaurants, there are benchmark restaurants. These are the spots that represent the end of your scale of comparison, that you refer to mentally when assessing other restaurants. Joe Beef will be a benchmark for me.

Our dinner Friday evening was wonderful and uncompromisingly rich. If food can be voluptuous, I think that description fits as well. While described in some reviews as French, to me the food was much less pretentious than my image of French food, and more rustic than my experience with real French food.

For me, Joe Beef is a benchmark for exceptional comfort food. Benchmarks for other styles of food that come to mind, like the iconic El Bulli, or Loam, are wonderful but not as laid back. Loam is one of my favorite restaurants, but it is still more classical music and Joe Beef is blues or jazz. While obviously non smoking today, a few years ago I might have expected a smoky haze in the dining room.

While our server was superb, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and a perfect English speaker, the menus for food and wine are exclusively French. We did our best to use our dated high school French, then our server helped interpret, and her advice was perfect.

While canard (duck) and cheval (horse) are pretty easy, I was less familiar with lapin (rabbit) and cerf (elk or deer).

Don't come to Joe Beef expecting to leave hungry. The food is rich and the portions are large.

We each had starters, mains and shared a dessert.

Cath's smoked fish starter changed her opinion of smoked fish. My PEI oysters were exactly what I hope for in raw oysters, cool as the northern ocean and tasting of the briny Atlantic coast.

Cath had duck for her main and I had horse. The duck, "Magret de Canard, links, un oeuf" was a playful interpretation of a rich diner breakfast.

My horse, "Tournedos de Cheval 'all dressed', rings" was an earthy take on traditional steakhouse fare, with plenty of fixings on the steak, accompanied by perfectly fried onion rings.

With a stiff Bloody Mary, this dish would cure any hangover. Perfectly cooked duck breast, duck heart sausage with breakfast sausage flavoring (e.g. sage), a duck egg, potatoes and bacon. I think there was also a fried tomato, but no one ate it. We brought the leftovers back through customs ("no sir, we don't have any food in our bags") and they were great two days later.

**Tournedos de Cheval "all dressed", rings**

This was my first experience eating horse meat. While many animals have a polite expression for the eaten form of their meat (we say beef not cow meat) I am not sure what the equivalent is for horse. Whatever I call it, the meat was delicious.

I do think the meat may have been over dressed. You can see the anchovy, pickles, bacon wrapping and the white stuff is shredded fresh horseradish. There was also a small chunk of blue cheese. I don't think the pickle worked well, suggesting a sour flavor that I do not associate with good meat.

The bacon went perfectly, the meat juice was great and the horseradish added a nice bite. It may not be clear in the picture, but the cut of meat under the fixings is quite large. I would guess at 3/4 pound, or maybe 400 grams. It was bigger than I could eat even after I worked at it for awhile.

Our dessert, which was ice cream and some berry sauce over poached pears was also wonderful though I am not sure how we found room in our stomachs to get it down. This was a big, rich meal and a great start to our weekend in Montreal. I would love to go back to Joe Beef on a very empty stomach and explore the menu more broadly. Everything else was so good, I might even be up for trying the tripe.

Joe Beef - Montreal

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