A C Zoom

List of all my favorite restaurants and food markets in Montreal. Some of these are described in more detail in the links. Photos are available in the Montreal Photo Gallery.

A map showing locations of all these restaurants is in the Montreal Restaurants Map posting.

Schwartz's Jewish Deli

Schwartz's Deli 3895 St-Laurent Blvd, 514-842-4813.
Food: Value:
Excellent smoked meat sandwiches -- spicy, tender, succulent meat that falls apart easily with the touch of a fork... accompanied with a black cherry soda or hot tea, it is truly an unique experience. Take a seat at the bar-stool at the deli counter, and enjoy the food amidst the hustle and bustle. More on Schwartz's

Le Petit Alep

191 Jean-Talon East, 514-270-9361.
Food: Value:
Syrian/Armenian food. Great food and excellent ambiance - the best dish is Ciche Kebab Terbialy which is filet-mignon with a special spicy sauce. Open Tuesday through Saturday. Can get crowded during lunch. Their weekday lunch specials are also excellent. Wine and Coffee available. More on Le Petit Alep

Marché Jean-Talon

7070 Henri-Julien St., south of Jean-Talon St., near the metro stop for Jean-Talon.
Food: Value:
Jean-Talon Market bustles with activity in summer certainly and winter too. It is truly a fantastic market - all fresh vegetables, fruits you need, as well as bakeries, food stalls (bison sausage anyone), maybe the best calamari you can have in a paper bag (at Aqua Mare). And cheese too - inside the market, as well as at La Fromagerie Hamel close by at 202 Jean-Talon St. East. On your first day at Montreal, get down here, get yourself a supply of fruits, continue to replenish every few days. And then to eat you have crepes, fish, pastries, cheeses, and so on. Just outside the market is Marché des saveurs du Québec selling local products, at 280 Place du marché du nord, on a side street.

The most memorable experiences in my travels are invariably the local street food vendors. In Buenos Aires, there are two places that are great for this - Costanera Norte, and Costanera Sur.

In picking a street vendor in Buenos Aires, the key thing to look for is the range of condiments available! This is such a great advantage over restaurant eating where you get only one or two choices, out in the street they lay out all the options for you to see, and pick out. There can be multiple variations on the chimichurri sauce, the standard red one, one with ají picante (excellent, and quite spicy), one a la provenzal (green parsley and garlic, maybe spicy or not). There will be mustard, mayo, ketchup and salsa criolla (onions, tomatoes). Never in a restaurant will you get all this, even in street vendors, not all street vendors serve all of these options, but it is worth walking around to find one with the range you need.

As for meat, it is of course parilla style, grilled meat. Bondiola (pork), hamburger, and the best of all - choripan is available. The paty bread for hamburger was never very good, texture and quality is poor. The choripan or bondiola uses pan for the sandwich, somewhat similar to large french bread loaf and much better tasting, though can make for messy eating since it is a bit tough. Add the other oily condiments, and maybe the cheese which also is invariably oily in Buenos Aires, and this is really messy eating, but it is all worth it. The taste, the experience, is something that will be cherished for a long time.

Costanera Norte

Is email on the way out? That is probably not yet an easy question, but the amount of spam seems to be holding steady, with periodic bursts of spam email storms.

Here are some graphs of spam at one of my mailboxes. This is for a very public email address. The spam detection is using spamassassin which runs under procmail with a customized whitelist and blacklist. Over the few years I've used this, there have been only 1-2 false positives for spam (of course, detection of false positives is not easy since this requires digging through 100s of spam messages, but I have no reason to believe that false positives are more prevalent). There have been quite a few false negatives - messages that are spam, but missed by spamassassin. These are usually around 1%-10% of the total detected spam messages, which is low enough that the graphs below are still useful to show the trend of spam message counts.

2007 Spam Counts

2008 Spam Counts
The 2008 Spam Counts images are updated periodically, usually every day, to include data of the previous complete 24-hour period.

The data from the graphs above came from procmail log files that were filtered using a perl script. The graphs were generated using a command-line php script, using the extremely versatile JpGraph - PHP Graph Creating Library.

dd-wrt is third-party firmware that can be loaded on many routers and it makes available many additional features such as advanced routing as well as a keep alive mechanism. It is maintained by BrainSlayer.

In the few days of using it, some advantages of dd-wrt are evident. It has been far easier to configure on my network of Linux and Windows computers, which use both static and DHCP IP addressing. The bundled Linksys software on the new WRT54G V8 device had long DNS lookup times on the Linux computers (probably needed to use the remote DNS resolvers instead of pointing to the Linksys box), for all lookups, at all times. But instead of re-configuring the Linux boxes, in the same amount of time, it was quite easy to install dd-wrt micro-edition using these instructions: How to Flash Linksys wrt54g

Here's yet another URL Link Filter for Drupal, latest version can be downloaded from: linkfilter-4.x-5.x-1.1.zip

Drupal 6.x version is available here: linkfilter-6.x-1.2.zip.

The goal for this filter is to be somewhat like the URL filter included with Drupal, with the additional requirement to be Drupal installation directory independent as well as domain independent so that the URLs in Drupal nodes don't have to be re-edited when a Drupal site is moved to a different sub-directory or a different domain. Additionally, it allows for link text to be specified for the URL, and it preserves the input characters as much as possible, performing no or minimal HTML entity conversions of the input characters. Finally - it distinguishes various links with classes, which can be used to display link icons for specific links. If the link filter tag points to internal Drupal node, then a class containing the type of the node is generated, for example, class="linkfilter-drupal-node-image", which can be used to show distinguishing icons based on Drupal node type. This site uses this filter, and the link icons are displayed based on the class generated by the filter: for external links (linkfilter-urlfull class), images (linkfilter-drupal-node-acidfree or linkfilter-drupal-node-image class), mailto links (linkfilter-mailto class).

Link filter tags [l:URL text] in the input text will be replaced with a link to the given URL, which can be a Drupal link, an external web link, or a local non-Drupal link. Prefixes representing the site url and the Drupal directory are added, as appropriate:
1) Site url is prefixed if URL begins with a / character
2) No prefix is added if the URL has a : in it, as in http: or ftp: etc
3) Site url with Drupal base directory is prefixed in all other cases, this is handled by calling the Drupal l() function.

acelga - swiss chard, for example in a tarta de acelga

achuras a la parrilla - internal organs, grilled. Study up on your Spanish terms for internal organs!

alfajores - cookies - corn-flower biscuits sandwich filled with dulce-de-leche, and coated in powdered sugar, or chocolate or meringue

al punto - medium - as in level to which to cook steak

asado - grilled

asado de tira - grilled short-ribs

bife de chorizo - strip steak, considered the most popular cut here

bife de costilla - ribs

bife de lomo - tenderloin, filet mignon

bondiola, bondiola de cerdo - pork shoulder. Bondiola sandwiches are quite popular, available at every street food stall, especially on the Costanera Sur and Norte

budin de pan - bread pudding

carne de ternera - veal

candilejas - small round empanadas, found them at a chain named Gourmet, their tag line: Empanadas Caseras, La empanada rellena. They had candilejas with muzzarella, chorizo colorado, y rodajas de ají en vinagre.

carne de ternera - veal

casero - home-made

chimichurri - sauce for grilling, and using as a condiment, available in multiple variations. Provenzal, agreen chimichurri tastes really good and contains parsley and garlic. Most places though seem to have a a mixture of dry oregano, olive oil, some garlic and red pepper flakes, and this reddish mixture does not taste that good though it may work well as a grilling paste. Pictures: Salas and Provenzal on a plate.

chinchulin - intestine

chivito - goat meat. but in neighboring Uruguay, this is a name for the steak sandwich, completo

chocolate amargo - bitter chocolate

chopp - draft beer

For nice looking and always reasonably tasting food, the easiest choice is a restaurant in the Palermo area. Palermo is huge, start with Palermo Viejo. The four-five blocks-square area around Plaza Serrano (Cortázar) is a culinary hot-spot, many good places to eat, along with lot of local designer-fashion clothing stores.

The food is all designer food, all too similar in tastes, just like any fancy (or pretentious) restaurants in the US. But similar dinners in the US at fancy restaurants will be far more than the US$15-25 per person that they cost here. This is still expensive, but worth it to try something more than just grilled meat day-in and day-out when in Buenos Aires. Most places are good, most food is the same, so drop into a place that you like the look of, plenty of information with pictures on the web.

Palermo has numerous restaurants, there is one good one you could try every day for a month. In fact the Restaurantes en Palermo at Guía Oleo guide had information and customer comments on 731 restuarants in March 2008. Some may have closed and information not updated, but still a very large list to work with. Or, just walk around the Plaza Serrano (Cortázar) area, or one of the restaurants listed abthough that too is a large area to work with, it is a good place to start.

To detail my experiences in two - major thumbs-up for Cluny, and a somewhat-minor thumbs-down for Social Paraiso.

No question about the ice cream in Buenos Aires - unlike the food which can be a not-so-good proposition even at the many written about places, the ice cream is exellent. There are a huge number of flavors, but it is the texture and taste that rules - nice, soft right from the start, so no need to microwave the ice-cream for a bit as is necessary to get a good texture for ice-cream in the US!

Freddo is a chain that is all over the city, and it has really good ice cream in a large number of flavors. Great tasting, rich ice cream. Many other people swear by Persicco or other local spots, there are numereous helado artesanal restaurants in Buenos Aires. The phrase artisanal gelato is used to distinguish these small makers of ice-cream from their industrial competitors, and they are certainly winning in terms of taste, quality, and the number of flavors available.

At Freddo, which was the most often place I visited the flavors include nine different varieties for Chocolate! Other interesting flavors available:
almendras - almonds, crushed
mousse de arándanos - blueberries
banana split - with dulce de leche and granizado - chocolate bits
maracuyá - passion fruit
mascarpone - rich creamy cheese
sambayon - (alcohol-flavored, usually wine, sometimes rum. Also known as Sabayon?)
tramontana - dulce de leche and chocolate cookies

At Volta, there are similar and additional flavors, for example:
banana volta - light green color, faint banana flavor, with bits of chocolate

Persicco is another place, they have 2-3 restaurants (but like others, the deliver anywhere in a large part of Buenos Aires). A good branch to visit is near the Juramento subte station and it is a good area to visit out in the Belgrano neighborhood, the address is Vuelta de Obligado 2092, corner of Juramento 2360, near the major Cabildo Avenue. This Persicco is large, two levels and includes an outdoor sitting area near a small park area.

There are many choices for learning Spanish in Buenos Aires. It is not the Spanish that is spoken in Mexico, the key differences being the use of vos, no vosotros, and the pronunciation of ll and in some cases y is like "ch" instead of "y". Given that there is a lot more to learning Spanish, even if you want to end up needing to speak Mexican Spanish, there is no harm is learning the Spanish as spoken in the Río de la Plata region. Especially given the numerous other attractions in Buenos Aires, it is a great way to spend time vacationing and learning Spanish if you have a month or two or more to spare. Just be prepared to hear the sound "ch" a lot, and hear rapid delivery of words, speakers here tend to roll on from one word to another without pausing!

Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas "Juan R. Fernández"
A web search for Spanish in Buenos Aires will result in many hits, but no results page includes the school that locals hold in high regard. [Such is the world of automated search, poorly linked web sites are considered of low importance!] Locals speak highly of IES Lenguas Vivas "J. R Fernández", which is at at Av. Carlos Pellegrini 1515 (corner Arroyo), in the Retiro section of Buenos Aires. The phone number is +54-11-4322-3992. They teach many languages here, including Español para Extranjeros. They have a rudimentary web site that does not work on Firefox but works on Internet Explorer - non-working IES Home Page, and anyway it does not contain information on the Spanish programs.

In the few months running upto March 2008, and I am sure to-be-continued for a while longer if not for a long time, travel magazines including the New York Times travel section have been running a number of articles on the pleasures of Buenos Aires. Especially the food and the great deal for the those who hold their assets denominated in the plummeting US Dollar. On both counts - food as well great deals, a caution is in order simply because of the excessive press Buenos Aires is getting, and these articles do not provide any caveats, so this posting is on the caveats. Other postings on this web site describe all the good stuff, so here are all the warnings.

There was a time, probably until 2005, when expats found that their US$ went quite far in Buenos Aires. But alas, good things have to come to an end, inflation is quite high in Argentina. By 2008, while things are still good when converting between US$ and AR$, it is no longer such a slam-dunk as it was earlier. In fact, in just 1 year, from March of 2007 to 2008, prices seem to have gone up drastically.

Anecdotal evidence: a AR$3 fresh orange juice glass at the San Telmo fair is now AR$5. All prices in even recent guide books can be 50-100% lower than actual prices. Real estate in nice areas is comparable to US cities with much less of a difference in costs. And the prognostication seems to be for continued high inflation. Ugi's is a inexpensive pizza-chain in Buenos Aires and they have every need to have the best price so it is instructive to see how the price of the Ugi's pizza has changed:
Feb 2008: AR$9.20p for a 30cm mozaralla pizza.
2007: AR$6.80
2006: AR$4.80. Thus, in 2 years, price has gone up nearly 100%! Still a good price in US$, which went from around US$1.50 to US$3. Note that this is Ugi's pizza, if you want pizza at Filo on San Martin, that will put you back around US$15 for a large.