Joe Beef - Montreal

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.  

Joe Beef, 2491 Rue Notre-Dame Ouest

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).  

Joe Beef Menu

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.

Magret de Canard, links, un oeuf

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.  

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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.

Nora Gray - Montreal

Cath at Nora Gray

Cath and I just returned from a brief weekend in Montreal, I think we were gone about 50 hours.  We ate out enough in Montreal that a friend asked if we were on a food tour.  It seemed that way at times, though we also shopped, visited the Musee de'Arte Contemporain, went to the Marche Atwater farm market and walked.  We walked a lot.

Saturday evening we went to dinner at Nora Gray.  We were very lucky to get into Nora Gray.  I had a list of restaurants for Saturday, and was calling through the list.  I kept dialing Nora Gray and getting no answer.  Finally a very nice woman answered, and said she had just hung up with a cancelation and told me we were SO lucky to get in.  I think the food gods were smiling on us.  

All of our food at Nora Gray was superb.  I had a scallop starter and hangar steak as the main.  Cath had a grilled radicchio starter and grilled mackerel as her main.  The mackerel, normally an oily fish, was done with lemon that nicely balanced the fish. 

While all of our food was good, that standouts were the wine and the dessert.

2010 Arianna Occhipinti Il Frappato Sicilia IGT

Our server at Nora Gray was a model for what I hope for in a good restaurant.  Extremely knowledgeable, passionate about food, engaging, and not pretentious.  She steered us well on all of our food choices, and her wine recommendation was perfect.

My limited experience with Sicilian wine has been positive, and Arianna Occhipinti's 2010 il Frappato was excellent.  It was soft enough to go with both the mackerel and hangar steak, but complex enough to be a  valued partner to the food.  The wine is great example of a red that goes well with fish.  

Arianna Occhipinti is a young winemaker who farms organically with no chemical intervention.  I look forward to trying her other wines.  

The other standout from our meal at Nora Gray was dessert.  We had a 'no flour' orange cake with almond ice cream and poached pears.  I thought the pears were a bit superfluous, but the cake and ice cream were amazing.  

We were told that the cake is made from cornmeal, and includes two whole oranges in each cake.  It is crumbly as you would expect without wheat flour, and has the intense orange flavors that come from using a lot of orange zest or rind.  

The almond ice cream nicely balances the orange, providing a nutty smoothness to balance the sharp bite of the orange.  This dessert would be worth a return trip.

Orange cake with almond ice cream and poached pears

 

Nora Gray is on a street where I would not have even looked for a restaurant if we had not had the exact address.  We walked to it from the Old Port, and the last four or five blocks seemed like vacant industrial lots and rows of apartments.  We did not see any other restaurants, shops or street life.  Nora Gray is in a nondescript block, marked only by a few potted plants on the sidewalk in front.

Once inside, the atmosphere is wonderful.  The staff was friendly, the small dining room with a nice 'eat at' bar is inviting.  This was a relaxing fine dining experience that would stand out in any city.