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Sometimes You Just Want A Pizza

Where: 39 rue Notre-Dame ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada
December 18, 2008 at 4:35 PM | by | Comment (1)

It may be a little chilly right now, but Quebec offers as much culture as Europe for way less cash. And thanks to the resurgence of the dollar, there's never been a better time to head to Canada. Dana McMahan just got back and is dishing on the province's eats all this week.

Over the first few days of my visit to Quebec, I consumed large quantities of overly rich (and overly French) food. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But sometimes, even when you’re visiting another country--or maybe especially when you’re visiting another country--you just have to have a pizza.

But not just any pizza. Part of my obsession with food means that I have to find the most interesting local pizza joint. I kept hearing about Pizzédélic, and Frommer’s described it like this:

Pizza here runs the gamut from traditional to wildly imaginative, with toppings such as your basic tomato sauce, fresh basil and mozzarella to more startling concoctions involving Black Tiger shrimp and pickled ginger or seafood in a cream sauce.

I dig a basic pie and a frou-frou pizza equally, so this sounded like a place to fit the bill no matter what mood struck me.

Pizzédélic is evidently a chain in this part of Canada; I saw them in Quebec City before my husband and I arrived in Montreal. We stopped in their Old Montreal location on a cold, bleak weeknight, picking it so we could stroll around the corner afterward for a peek at the Christmas lights at Notre Dame.

It wasn’t exactly hopping, but that was the case at several restaurants we’d hit that week. Blame the economy, the cold or the off-season, but it made it easy to get a table.

Our bubbly waitress reminded me yet again that we weren’t in France when she complimented me on my pitiful French. She demonstrated the two sizes of available pizza with the clever square menu cover: The smaller size matched the inner border, the larger was the size of the menu itself.

From the nearly three dozen varieties--including one named Teen Spirit--we chose a comparatively ordinary grilled portobello with garlic and a Mediterranean with feta and olives. The square, thin-crust pizzas arrived quickly, and I immediately regretted the garlic decision. I’m usually a fan, but whew! The Mediterranean was better, but I’d made my choice and didn’t want to sucker my husband into trading.

It was cozy in our round banquette, and we could’ve lingered over some sugar pie, but we had some lights to go see. Pizzédélic fit the bill just fine: No pretentious food or service, a reasonable tab and a hot, filling pizza.

Related Stories:
· Pizzédélic [Official Site]
· Eating Quebec Map [Jaunted]

[Photo: Dana McMahan]

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"we weren't in France"

I don't mean to be prickly at all here, just genuinely curious about outsiders' views of Quebec. But I find all the comparisons to France in these posts a little puzzling -- would you make similar comparisons in Senegal or Tunisia? The Quebecois and the French would be the first to tell you how very different they are. I realize there's a lot of French food on offer, but Gordon Ramsay serves a lot of French food in London, too -- doesn't make it Paris.
deva on December 18, 2008 at 10:19 PM #Permalink

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