DINNER July 18, 2008

Living in Montreal one has to lament how difficult  it can be to get good ethnic (i.e. not Western influenced) cuisine. Thai food is a good example. While Thai food has become so mainstream over the course of the past 20 years that you can’t push a stroller through a food court without bumping into a pad thai, I have not eaten at a Thai restaurant in Montreal that I would recommend as anything other than entry level cheap eats.

Every once in a while I get a hankering for Thai though, at which point I trundle off to the next contender on my list, which is how I ended up outside of a boarded up Restaurant Thailande that had closed for the construction holidays. Luckily, we had heard some good things about a new restaurant, Mai Thai, just a few blocks up Bernard in the old Papaye Verte space. Continue Reading…

DINNER June 27, 2008

On its travels from its original home on a seedy stretch of St-Laurent to a short dalliance next to a strip club on Ste. Catherine and finally to its current home in Mile End, one thing has always remained true: Nonya makes great food at low prices. While Nonya may be the most prominent Indonesian eatery in the city it is not a household name. Which is a shame because this restaurant, and the cuisine in which it specializes, is well worth getting to know better.

Indonesia is a giant, fractured country composed of a great number of religions, ethnicities and cultures. This diversity is mirrored in the country’s food culture with trade spices like cumin and cinnamon influencing the cuisine in some parts of the country while local galangal and terasi (fermented shrimp paste) predominate in others. Religious orthodoxy in parts of Sumatra can result in austere preparations quite different from the often elaborate cuisine of central Java. Layer on the influence of Dutch colonizers, seen most notably in elaborate rijstaffel meals, and you have a cuisine with endless possibilities. Continue Reading…