As Montreal braces for its outdoor mid-winter festival, much of the US East Coast braces itself for the kind of weather that Montrealers see everyday. We went back to Montreal last summer, returning as parents to a city we had greatly enjoyed as single folk to see if our first family vacation would enhance or ruin our fond memories. On our first visit, we recorded a podcast of our reflections from our hotel room in Montreal. This time we also recorded a podcast, except that it took us more than five months to get around to this one, so our reflections are, ahem, a little more reflective, and almost definitely more rose-tinted as we recall happy times eating delicious food in warm weather while contemplating what shoveling ten inches of snow in biting Arctic winds feels like.

They say that returning to somewhere you have been happy is a mistake, but in this case, viewing it through the eyes of our adventurous three year-old, it was a real joy and revealed layers of the city that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. 

If you're planning to visit Montreal, we'd recommend the summertime when the city comes alive outside and the local produce is in full riot. If you have small children, the city's parks are magnificent and numerous, and seemingly all unique. As upon our first visit, the natives are both friendly and polite, and you need to know no French to feel comfortable, although outside the city it can certainly be useful.

Some readers may remember back in the early fall when we posted about Bandeja Paisa, the gut-busting combination platter that has (inaccurately) been called the national dish of Colombia. Embarrasingly, though we had done plenty of online research about the many constituent parts of this dish, we had not eaten it at what can honestly be described as an authentic Colombian restaurant. So, on a freezing afternoon in January, in the esteemed company of our friend and guide Juan Camilo Osorio - a native Colombian from Bogota, now living in Queens, and three other friends, we set out to make amends.

Cositas Ricas
79-19 Roosevelt Avenue,
Queens, NY 11372
at 80th Street

Fergus Henderson of St. John Restaurant near Smithfield Market is most famous for his widely-copied dish of roasted veal marrow-bones and parsley salad which we had eaten and loved at both Gabrielle Hamilton's fabulous Prune, in NYC, and more recently at L'Express in Montreal. Now we wanted to try the original.

To see pictures of our lunch and read more about the restaurant, visit our website WeAreNeverFull.com.

It’s the Thursday after Easter and most people out there are still picking the candy and chocolate out of their teeth having just gorged themselves on all manner of Easter Bunny-shaped confectionery. Ever the destroyers of convention, we have been doing something altogether more real and, some may say, sinister. Yes, friends, cover your children’s ears, for over the weekend, we — like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction — put the Easter Bunny in the pot.

Like many national holidays around the world, in spite of the ostensible patriotism of the day, good food, amazing fireworks and fun, drunk times are the thing that most people focus on on Bastille Day. So, to line our stomachs before a night of drinking wine out of the bottle on the street (like everyone else), we, almost like Moses in the wilderness, followed the pillar of smoke towards the heady smell of grilled meat. There we found a lined, toothless, Algerian man, squinting against the smoke and spitting fat of his blackened grill, cooking huge merguez sausages (a spicy North African sausage made with beef or lamb) over hot coals. In exchange for a couple of euros, he nestled a couple of these sausages snugly into a crusty baguette alongside a load of salty, golden french fries, and smeared the whole thing with dijon mustard and ketchup. That's what I call street food!