October 5, 2006 Archives
I was walking on St-Viateur after missing the 55, and stopped at Chocolaterie Geneviève Grandbois. There was an undecisive chocolate newbie in front of me in the two-people queue up. I was however already sold on the hot chocolate drink offering.
Judging from the sign at the door (a recto-verso "hot chocolate is served / hot chocolate is out") and from the small coffee thermos they serve it from, I think that only small quantities are made on a daily basis.
Surely, hot chocolate sold by a chocolate shop must be great - and it was. Not the syrupy sort of richness or sweetness, but rather what fine chocolate made into a drink would taste as. Sipping it on my way to the stop for the 80 Du Parc was heaven. And I don't know what it was, but by the time the bus reached the Georges-Etienne Cartier statue, I was almost in trance, admiring the usual unperceivable slope before Avenue des Pins that gives the Plateau Mont-Royal its appelation of "plateau". I think it must've been the single best hot chocolate I had in my life until now.
I kept the flyer for their collection of chocolate by the piece, which includes exotic choices that contain fleur de sel, hot pepper, and lemon.
$2.75 + tx for the tiny (4 to 6 oz) of chocopleasure.
Went to eat at the Uighur Restaurant in Chinatown with Wee tonight. The yan rou chuan (lamb skewers) are best spicy, and their usual self, which is very excellent (especially the fat pieces), but the other dish was sort of, well, bloating. It was a large dish of a chicken stew with potatoes, red peppers and a mix of spicy sauce reminiscent of the curry prepared in the southeast, quite a bit further away from the steppes of Central Asia.
Speaking of Southeast, it appeared that I once asked him what Malaysian cuisine was (other than the laksa noodles, which I first recognized in HK, at a restaurant between Wan Chai and Admiralty). And this would be a link to vast amounts of food pics.
Some of it reminds me of that festive evening at that special hawker centre on the Esplanade in S'pore, b/c it is after all in the same geographical area. I have yet to find anything Malaysian or Indonesian at a reasonable price in Mtl (the only place is trendy Nonya), but I have not looked very hard, nor asked a lot of people. You find elements of these regional cuisines in Indian, Sri Lankan (I know there are quite a few in Mtl - C-d-N and Parc-Extension, especially), or Indochinese, or Chinese cuisine. Hmm.