Even a week after our food-intensive vacation in the San Francisco area the JJ and I were still stuffed. Looking for a light dinner and feeling like much more of a wine geek than usual having tramped up and down the Napa and Sonoma valleys we headed to Bü for the first time in a year or so.

Bü is the granddaddy of the Montreal wine bars and I was surprised to see it half empty on a Friday evening. Bü offers a selection of hot and cold appetizers to accompany its extensive wine list as well as daily dinner, pasta and risotto specials and a few other main courses  such as eggplant parmigiana, pizza or pasta. We settled into a banquette at the back of the room and started with the  Il Follo, Prosecco di Valdobbiadene Cuvee Rustot, a light prosecco with hints of citrus, the cod brandade and  the country bread with fresh garlic. The brandade and accompanying toasts were excellent. Although, I prefer a little more texture in a brandade, this creamy cod version was delicate and not overly fishy. The country bread, toasted, rubbed with garlic and topped with olive oil was another winner.

I opted for the dinner special, osso bucco milanese with mashed potatoes while the JJ chose the pasta special, a casarecce with tomato, zucchini and salmon. The osso bucco was very average: basic home cook stuff, not particularly tender or flavourful but not bad either. The pasta was  quite bland and left a deep oily, red slick at the bottom of the plate. Not terribly appetizing. The barbaresco, a 2000 by Guiseppe Cortese, a producer of value Piedmont wines of some renown, was the high point of this service.

For dessert we share a semifreddo which though tasty was as hard as a hockey puck (note: its supposed to be a semifreddo, not an ultrafreddo). Disappointing but not tragically so.

This will go down as my least favourite meal at Bü to date. In all fairness our appetizers were quite good: it’s probably much better to come with a big group of friends and nibble at a selection of appetizers than to try your luck on the mains.  But the food here takes a definitive backseat to the wine. And while the wine we had was excellent (and I suspect not easy to find in Quebec) there were only about 15 selections available by the glass–far too little for a serious wine bar.

Cost: $120 with tax and tip. Far too much for what we ate.

Rating: Two and a half stars

Bü
5245 St-Laurent
514.276.0249