Parse for the Cours

    Travelogue: It’s been a fine weekend here in Montreal.  After a trip to Mont Tremblant was cancelled due to weather on Saturday, I’ve been able to enjoy more of this fantastic city.   For the non-Canadians out there, today is also Thanksgiving here, so it’s been a 3-day weekend for me.   I’ve enjoyed my schedule of working early and then exploring later in the day, and taken a bit of time to watch some of the MLB playoffs (don’t get me started on the one-game wildcard).   I’ve done some aimless wandering around the city, but my two primary excursions this weekend were done in pursuit of food and drink.   It’s alimentary, my dear readers.

     By late Saturday afternoon the weather had improved somewhat, so I ventured on the Metro to the Plateau Mont-Royal district with a couple of specific destinations in mind.  My first and highly anticipated stop was the Dieu du Ciel brewpub.   I had been unable to find time for a trip here during a conference in 2011 and knew it would be one of my first stops.  I was not disappointed.    The pub was busy but not packed when I arrived around 4:30 and I took a seat at the small bar.  The beer menu (16 on tap that day) was on a chalkboard behind me, and the brewery was 15 feet to my right.   The taps were simply, though not orderly, numbered 1 through 16.  I decided to do a tour of some of their pale ale varieties.   I started with the Corpus Christi, a rye pale ale.  I’ve had both Sierra Nevada’s Ruthless Rye (just OK) and our local West Mountain Brewery’s rye (which I recommend), and this one was on another level, medium bodied, beautiful balanced, subtle rye overtones, and a moderately bitter finish all at 4.9% ABV.  Next was the Decibel Extra Pale Ale (5.2%), which was in classic Extra or IPA style, extremely floral nose and solidly bitter at the end but not overwhelming.   The Corne du Diable (devil’s horn)  was an American Pale in a similar style but not as memorable or distinctive.  Finally, I tried the Route des Epices (6.2%), one of their flagship ales, brewed with peppercorns and …   This rye brew was stunning--a pale ale, yes--but with a complex bouquet and non-overpowering spiciness that I loved.  Only toward the bottom of the glass did I start distinctly tasting the pepper on the tip of my tongue.   I ordered a second (I was drinking half-pints, so I wasn’t THAT drunk) and savored it as the sun set and the pub filled with a nice variety of beer-lovers.   They have a small menu that comes out of a tiny kitchen, and also have a small wine and scotch selection .    I will return to sample their other styles, and a couple of other brewpubs are on my to-do list as well (more on that later).

     Though the food looked good, I didn’t eat because just a couple of blocks away from Dieu Du Ciel is Fairmount Bagels, one of the venerable bagel shops in this city.   They are open and making bagels 24 hours a day, there’s no place to sit, you just come up to the counter and order yours with some schmear or get a bag to go.   The sesame bagels are Montreal’s favorite and are made all day there, cut and shaped by hand, boiled, and then baked in a wood-fired oven.  I ordered one with cream cheese to go and few more to take back to the apartment.    A chilly rain had started to fall, so I hustled back to the Metro and dug into the one with cream cheese as I waited for the train.   I really liked the bagel—it was chewy and a bit crisp (due to the wood fire) on the outside, had an ample if uneven coating of sesame seeds, and with a slightly sweeter bread than we are used to in a savory New York style bagel.  The bagel was also a lovely size (not huge) with a large hole in the middle and not the ‘bagel-shaped bread’ that has become commonplace.  It reminded me a lot of the bagels I remember eating growing up in NJ (with the addition of some sweetness).    There are other bagel shops in town (St. Viateur is supposed to be great) to try.   I toasted another one when I got back home and never went back out as I had originally planned to do.

     Sunday dawned sunny and cold, but by the time I had put in my writing time, it was close to noon and warming up (towards 11 celsius), and I decided to walk to the Marche Atwater near the Canal Lachine, a couple of kilometers from my apartment.  Picture this:  it’s the day before Thanksgiving and instead of Wal-Mart, you get to go to an indoor/outdoor market with produce vendors, bakers, fromageries, boucheries, charcuteries, patisseries, etc.   I was overwhelmed with the selections I had (and word has it that the Jean-Talon Market is even better), but after a circuit or two around the place, I settled on several shops and gathered some choice morsels for my own little Thanksgiving feasts.  For lunch today I had Toulouse sausages (pork, a little smoky, heavy on the garlic) braised in ale, 3-year-old Beemster gouda from the Netherlands, kosher caraway rye, Dijon mustard, Seville olives, and rainbow carrots, washed down with the rest of the Griffon red ale.   For dinner, it will be (I’m writing this on my balcony overlooking Boulevard de Maisonneuve during the afternoon) petites brochettes d’agneau romarin and de poulet a l’estragon, mixed greens, Tomme de Grosse-Ile cheese and Empire apple from Quebec, une ficelle (a small baguette), and a 2009 Brouilly.   Une bonne journee, indeed.   I should also mention that I had an outstanding pork bun at Satay Brothers at the market.  Next weekend is their last weekend before they close for the winter and I WILL make a return trip.  I only got a couple of pictures as my phone was out of charge.

Psychologue:   So the language stuff is going OK.  I conducted about ¾ of my transactions at the market in French, though the butcher’s accent was nearly impenetrable.   When I struggled, the merchants switched easily to English or, in one case, patiently waited until I made myself clear in French.  One of the amazing feats of spoken language comprehension is the ease with which we find the beginnings and end of words and phrases to effectively parse the speech stream into its meaningful units.  There are distinct acoustic markers that help us with this task (think of the subtle difference between hearing “catch it” vs. “cat shit,’ but knowing that intellectually doesn’t always help in real time.   Listening to French language television and conversations around me helps, as do contextual conversational cues, but one still makes mistakes.  

     Or at least I still make mistakes.  The couple next to me at the bar at Dieu du Ciel struck up a conversation about which beers we were drinking, and after about a dozen conversational turns in French, monsieur switched to English to ease things along.  He told me  about a couple of other brewpubs I should visit, Le Cheval Blanc (the white horse, easy enough) and what I was sure I heard as “La Mere a Boire”  (I know I’m missing the diacritics) on Rue St. Denis.  “Ah, La Mere a Boire,” I replied confidently in the most authentic accent I could muster, “as in The Mother of  Drink.”   “No,” he replied, “not la mere.”    Not deterred by my mistake, I chuckled and said, “Then it must be La Mer a Boire, The Sea to Drink?”  The Quebecois shook his head and laughed, and then pulled out his tablet and showed me the web page for “L’Amere a Boire.”   Now given the context, and the number of times I wrote the word “bitter” earlier in this piece, I should have put deux and deux together (amere is French for bitter), but I did not.   Is it a play on words by the pub?  I would guess so, but at that point I would have loved to have found un cheval blanc on which to ride away, with what little of my multilinguistic pride still remained.