by MARK SLUTSKY

If you want to eat well in this city, eat lunch. Not everyone can afford to splurge on dinner at Montreal’s finest restaurants, but many of them offer surprisingly affordable mid-day specials. It’s a great practice, allowing more people to experience high-dining delights without breaking the bank. (Similarly, there are always restaurants like Leméac, where you can eat beautifully for cheap if you show up after 10 p.m.).

La Montée de Lait opened up not long ago on the Plateau, and although it bills itself as a wine and cheese bar (which, in all fairness, it was when it first opened before a renovation and restructuring), the focus now is just as much on the main course as the cheese course. Go in the evening and get four plates for $40—if you want three mains and a dessert, or two appetizers and two desserts, or any other such combination, well, you can just go crazy with it. A recent lunch, however, saw a beautiful three-course meal running under $20. If we’d skipped the cheese course (which we never would have done), the meal would have run about $14 each, before tax and tip.

That’s quite a deal, especially for the meal we had. The lunch menu tends to change daily at Montée de Lait, but what we had should give you a good idea of what you might be in for. For the entrée course, we had a choice between a green bean salad and gnocchi, and both were delicious. The salad was prepared with roasted almonds and hazelnuts, thin strips of Abitibi chèvre and a light, refreshing dressing. It was the perfect appetizer on a warm, sunny day. The gnocchi arrived at the table piping hot, drenched in a cheesy sauce (made with gran padano parmigiano), and covered in parsley, chives and bread crumbs. Every mouthful was a rich, soft, buttery delight, and when the gnocchi was finished, the clean-up job, with the help of some nice warm baguette, was almost as good as the main attraction.

There were three choices for the main course—beef cheek, salmon and ravioli, and each had its own subtle and overt charms. A hearty chunk of meat, the braised beef cheek was served with chunks of bacon—lardons, pretty much—atop a cheesy potato purée, topped with wild mushrooms and fried strings of onion. As you might expect, this was an incredibly rich dish, a mini-riot of flavour. As for the meat itself, it was beautifully tender, almost creamy, really.

One of my lunchmates called the salmon “a perfect spring dish,” and his description couldn’t be more apt. It was cooked sous-vide, or “cryopacked” for the futuristically inclined, which basically meant it was sealed in an airtight plastic bag and cooked in hot, but not boiling water, allowing the fish to keep its juices, flavours and texture intact. The salmon was served with arugula and polenta, as well as one perfect breaded scallop. An invigorating mix of flavours. The ravioli was just as toothsome in its own way—stuffed with wild roast suckling pig and morel mushrooms, it was sweet and earthy.

Of course we had to try the cheese plate. With a menu of 22 cheeses, fromage is one of la Montée’s specialties. The waiter/owner selected four for us, a creamy pizy, a tasty pied de vent from Île-Madeleine, a luscious triple-cream Riopelle and a sheep’s milk Manchego with personality to spare (it actually tasted faintly of butterscotch or maybe caramel, a welcome change from the bland Manchegos you can end up spending too much money on). We forsook dessert for this perfect meal-ender, served with fig compote and a handful of almonds.

TIPS? QUESTIONS? COMPLIMENTS TO THE CHEF? E-mail eattothebeat@gmail.com

La Montée de Lait
ADDRESS: 371 Villeneuve E. (one block west of St-Denis)
PHONE: 289-9921
HOURS: Wed-Fri noon–2 p.m., 5:30–11 p.m., Sat–Tue 5:30–11 p.m.
BEST FEATURES: Have to go with the obvious and say the
selection of cheeses, as well as the way the
dishes incorporate the cheese
ALCOHOL: Yes
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS: Yes
VEGETARIAN FRIENDLY: Yes
CREDIT CARDS: Yes
NO-SMOKING SECTION: Yes
PRICE: $15–$30 per person for lunch,
$40–$60 for dinner, before tax and tip
RATING: *** and a 1/2 out of ****