The husband and I drove up to Montreal last weekend to celebrate our one year anniversary. Yay! We stayed at the little
Auberge de la Fontaine B&B, and we loved it. Other than the service, the best thing about the Auberge was the location - a gorgeous neighbourhood in the heart of the plateau. We were close to everything we cared about (and mostly, we cared about food).
Our first night, it was bitterly cold and raining cats and dogs. We ditched our stuff at the B&B and went to
Schwartz's for dinner. The smoked meat was delicious. Unfortunately, the service was highly questionable, and the place was pretty filthy - like health-code-violation filthy. Had we known, we would have grabbed some smoked meat as take out and eaten in our room. Still, I felt like it was the kind of authentic Montreal experience one has to have.
After cabbing it back to our hotel we decided to crack open a bottle of wine that we had gotten as a gift at our wedding, and foolishly decided to save for our one year anniversary.
Sadly, the wine was corked. We gave it a proper funeral by pouring it down the drain. There was a funeral march and everything.
Thankfully Quebec, unlike other provinces, is not afflicted by a liquor board, so we ran to a local convenience store and purchased two bottles of wine, half of which we promptly consumed in our hotel room. Already feeling the effects of half a bottle of wine, we stumbled over to the aptly named
Le Lab - a ridiculously hip cocktail bar located in the next house over. You know it's cool when the website is in French only. There we met some friendly locals, and imbibed deliciously awesome cocktails - like this one, which tasted like sweet meaty smoke and came garnished with beef jerky. Yum.
We were pretty buzzed by the time we left the Lab, but we weren't ready for bed yet. J and I wandered around the park for about an hour, taking unfortunate phone-camera pictures of the foliage.
Part deux of our adventures to come soon...
