Tag: Montreal

Cafe Ellefsen in Montreal

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

When I last visited Montreal, I visited Cafe Ellefsen, a Scandinavian restaurant. I had lunch there with V., a frequent commenter and one of the very first readers of this blog. They serve really great, beautiful smorrebrod, and the prices are very modest.

Here are some photos of their great smorrebrod:

Sausage and fresh cucumber smorrebrod

The saltiness of the sausage is offset beautifully with fresh cucumbers, which makes the smorrebrod absolutely delicious.

And here is a different kind:

Grilled cheese smorrebrod

This one was my favorite:

Egg and caviar smorrebrod

They also serve fresh-pressed orange juice and really cool, huge lattes. And the environment is very good. I highly recommend this place to all lovers of Scandinavian cultures.

The menu also contains something called “Norwegian poutine.” I didn’t get to try it this time but if anybody has and can tell me what it is like, I will be very grateful.

Modern Motherhood

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This is a true story.

A mother approaches another mother in daycare.

Mother A: So it seems like our 2-year-olds are friends.

Mother B: Yes, they adore each other.

Mother A: So. . . I’m sorry, do you work?

Mother B: Yes! I work. You?

Mother A (looking relieved): Oh yes, I work. Do you want to arrange a play date for our kids?

A Day in Montreal

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Everybody is publishing photo reports, so I decided to create one, too. Tell me how you feel about photo reports as a regular feature of this blog.

Two minutes after I left my sister’s house, I came across this street:

I’m sure everybody understands why I had to take a photo of it. Montreal is always building, expanding, transforming. It’s a very vibrant city that is constantly alive. Unlike the St. Louis where I live, Montreal never looks, sounds, or feels dead.

I walked down St. Denis Street, which is one of the most fun streets in this great city. St. Denis is filled with galleries, small quaint stores, coffee-shops, restaurants, bookstores, etc. You can spend all day long exploring this street and still have a lot left to do here on the next day, the day after, and the day after that.

St. Denis is a place where many of my favorite stores are located. This is the amazing Kusmi tea store:

Kusmi teas are expensive but they are extremely delicious. When you brew a pot of Kusmi tea, your entire house fills with the delicate aroma of the tea. If you do decide to try it, please don’t buy it in tea-bags. A tea-bag is a nasty perversion of a beautiful creation of nature that is loose-leaf tea. And it isn’t that hard to brew loose-leaf tea. If you are new to the idea of brewing tea, I highly recommend this extremely easy to use and inexpensive teapot.

This is how Kusmi Tea looks inside.

After buying tea, I decided to indulge my secret taste in cheap gyro plates. There isn’t a cheap gyro restaurant for a hundred miles from where I live, so I have to sneak out to get a plate whenever I’m in Montreal.

I ate the entire thing and it was lovely. And then I went to buy pants. Which probably wasn’t very smart, given that I’d just devoured a huge plate of food.

Here are the pants:

Please notice that I tried to be as American as possible and even tried on a pair of jeans. At this rate, I will probably end up buying my first pair of jeans before I retire.

Today we are going to Ottawa, and I promise a photo report from that city, too.

I’m a Soviet Engineer

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

There is this old joke about a Soviet engineer. “I tell my wife I’m with my mistress,” he says. “And I tell my mistress that I’m with my wife. In the meanwhile, I just hide in a corner and work on my engineering designs.”

I’m that Soviet engineer, people. I’m sitting right in the middle of Montreal’s beautiful Old Port, the weather is lovely, there are many cool places to visit, great stores and restaurants to patronize, friends to meet, and relatives to greet.

I, however, am stuck at home with my computer doing my committee work.

Shodan Restaurant in Montreal: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

Since I’m posting pictures of food today, I wanted to share these photos of the best sushi restaurant I have ever visited. I’m a passionate sushi lover (for the dirty-minded among us: in the gastronomic sense), so I’ve been to many Japanese restaurants in my life. Here in Edwardsville we have two fairly good ones. But Montreal’s Shodan on Metcalfe Street is on an entirely different level.

Their sushi look like little works of art and taste heavenly. They are also very light because the heavy globs of rice aren’t used like they are in many Japanese restaurants on this continent.

Here is an appetizer called pizza-sushi:

It looks beautiful but, to be honest, there are places in Montreal that serve a much better version of pizza sushi. For some reason, Japanese restaurants in the US seem to have no idea what a pizza sushi even is. Whenever I ask, people look at me with pity and say, “This isn’t a pizza place. Pizza is Italian. We don’t cook Italian here.” It isn’t a real pizza of course. It’s made entirely out of seafood, covered with fish roe and has spicy mayonnaise added. Yum! Shodan’s version was stingy on the spicy mayonnaise, so the appetizer tasted bland.

Of course, as you must have guessed, the restaurant is very expensive. I’m a simple American professor, so I couldn’t really afford it on my own. This is why my sister, a Canadian businesswoman, had to invite me. 🙂

As you can see, we ordered enough food for a platoon of hungry soldiers. Whenever my sister and I start ordering food at a Japanese restaurant, the waiters always ask how many more people will be joining us.

“Oh, this is just for us,” we say. “And please don’t take away the menu. We are just getting started here.”