Day 2:

11:00 AM – The next morning, we walked over to the Mile-End neighborhood to see how it earned its reputation of being the hipsters hangout. A local attraction there is the Fairmount Bagel Bakery. In the words of a local shop-keeper in the area, a true Montreal moment is biting into a sesame bagel, served hot right from a brick oven at the Fairmount Bagel Bakery on a beautiful morning along with a good cup of coffee. Enticed by his description, ML and I decided to hunt down this place and see for ourselves how a Montreal bagel compared to its New York brethren. Upon getting there, I took the shopkeeper’s advice and ordered hot sesame bagel while ML ordered a cinnamon raisin. The bagels were noticeably skinnier and less doughy than your bagels at H&H. While I did enjoy the sesame bagel (though not as satisfying), ML’s cinnamon raisin bagel was hard as a rock and watching her face as she tried to bite it was priceless. She had half an intention of beating some sense into the shop-keeper’s head with her bagel.

12:00 PM – After the bagel debacle, we walked down Boulevard St. Laurent to St. Catherine Street. This is another great stretch of the city to walk through. You find shop after shop of local designer boutiques (much to ML’s delight its mostly women’s clothing) as well as, interestingly enough, a lot of Portugese restaurants and shops. Veer of St. Laurent a little and you’ll find a row of restaurants on Rue. Prince Arthur with sidewalk seating. Still hungry from the from the unsatisfying breakfast, we stopped into a Greek restaurant for a quick bite. While these restaurants are more for their location and scenery than the food, its worth grabbing a cup of coffee or a small bite and people watching.

2:00 PM – Montreal is a very bike friendly city and walking around you will find many bicyclists on the streets. The city even has a bicycle rental service much like the zip-car concept where you can pick up a bike from anywhere and drop it off anywhere else you’d like. This is geared more towards locals than tourists as renting these bikes on an hourly basis can quickly get expensive. Since the weather was holding up well, we walked back down to Old Montreal (following Blvd St. Laurent all the way) and rented bikes at a small bike shop on St. Laurent and Rue De La Commune. Being recommended a 20-mile bike trail along the St. Laurent River, we picked up our bikes and head down the trail which turned out to be a very pleasant bike ride through the old industrial parts of town, into Ile Saint Helene where you can catch a glimpse of the massive Biosphere and then into Ile Notre Dame. Once you cross the river back into the city, you can head over a very European style farmers market by the Lechine Canal and treat yourself to a cone of ice-cold gelato.

8:00 PM – Head back into Old Montreal for dinner at an excellent French restaurant within an auberge called Bonaparte. If you’re lucky, you can get a table by the window overlooking the cobblestone streets of this part of town and people-watch as the street lamps light up. I recommend trying the fois-gras and the tuna as they were excellent.

If you have time the next morning before your flight, checking out the underground city on St. Catherine street is worth a visit. Its block after block of inter-connected multi-level malls usually packed with locals and tourists that makes you forget for a second that we are in a global recession. A word of caution though, it’s very easy to lose your sense of direction and wallet in this labyrinth of retail stores.

Gone also are the pedestrians scrambling frantically around at break-neck speeds on the very narrow pavements willing to mow you down if by some misfortune you happen to come in their way.  And instead, I’ve found less crowded pavements, sometimes as wide as the streets they border, with people strolling at a more leisurely pace.

Gay sex stores & bars like Rawhide have been replaced by more family friendly restaurants with unusually large amounts of space between the tables. My nearby & overcrowded Whole Foods has given way to quieter more community oriented grocery stores with enough aisle space to let me to think about what I need while I’m shopping (imagine that!). Bars nearby are less packed and offer a large selection of beers on tap and plenty of live music.

The tiny little stoop in front of my building used to be the only place within reasonable walking distance I could sit outside on a good day and now I have a rather large (and well maintained) backyard with more space than I know what to do with it.

As I begin to adjust to these changes I must admit that all in all, I am pretty pleased with my new neighborhood and I’m looking forward to learning more about it.

Bagels: I know there are a few places people swear by when it comes to bagels such as H&H Bagels, 2nd Avenue Deli, Murray’s Bagels, but I’ve yet to come across a better tasting bagel than the ones at Absolute Bagels (on 107th and Broadway). I did a taste test once comparing a cinnamon raisin from H&H and Absolute and the Absolute cinnamon raisin bagel blew H&H’s out of the water in terms of freshness, taste and texture.

Tacos: While there are a number of taquerias and fast food mexican joints all over the city, I’ve yet to try a better taco than the one served at Taqueria Y Fonda (on 109th and Amsterdam). This hole-in-the-wall place serves up awesome authentic tacos much cheaper than their less tasteful cousins at Chipotle or Qdoba, with real mexican cheese!

Falafels: Taim. I recently checked out this little falafel joint in the west village after a hearing good things from a number of different people. No regrets. They serve three different types of falafels in a fresh fluffy pita with a variety of ingredients and sauces.

Pizza: Despite being a tourist attraction and usually having a considerable line at the door, I still love Grimaldi‘s.  Pizza the way I like it – thin crust, fresh cheese and great sauce. Theres nothing like walking over the Brooklyn Bridge on a nice spring day, stopping by Grimaldi’s for lunch and enjoying an ice cream from the Brooklyn Ice Cream factory afterwards while taking in a spectacular view of lower Manhattan.

Burgers: Ok, the best burger I have had so far, was at a restaurant in Bucaramanga, Colombia. It’s actually a Colombian steakhouse chain and the burger was fantastic. Beat the hell out of anything I’ve had here so far.

There’s the list… I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.

The most predominant theme I’ve noticed so far is the growing emphasis on display/content advertising. This seems to be the result of two trends: 1. Because search is just 5% of a web users activity and a very mature market, it becomes obvious to start looking at other options as this area starts to become hyper competitive. With the mind numbing rate at which content is being produced on the web and introduction of self service tools, it’s also becoming cheaper and easier to do display advertising. 2. Google, Yahoo, MSN are all working on adding more media and content to their search pages (try doing a search on “Rihanna” on the three to see what I mean) and the search page is essentially evolving into a content rich page as opposed to just a collection of links. These all lead to the need to create more interesting ads and innovative targeting technologies for this type of advertising. Two companies that are doing some really neat things in this space are Lookery and Dapper. They both have a common theme of breaking the silos of information that exist on different sites and making them accessible elsewhere. Very fascinating stuff and would be cool to see how this all shakes out.

ML and I tried finally tried out a belgian restaurant in Chelsea, Markt. We ordered a beef tartar dish and I had to share what came out of the kitchen. The tartar was literally a half pound of ground beef uncooked, served over a bed of chopped onions, tomatoes and capers… This is taking carnivore to an entirely new level.

The NY Botanical gardens has a pretty extensive collection of south american orchids on display at their conservatory right now. It’s amazing to see the vastly different types there are ranging from several inches in diameter  to literally microscopic, fragrant to non-fragrant. Here are a few of the ones ML & I saw today (to see the rest, click here). The exhibit is on until April 12th and is worth a sunny warm weekend afternoon.

A few weeks ago we tried out Megu for dinner, a popular Japanese restaurant in TriBeCa. Having had to wait an extra 25 minutes before being seated despite having reservations was the first thing that went wrong. The restaurant has a pretty cool layout, the upstairs part is a bar with a clash of japanese pop culture and traditional culture (bright graffiti contrasting with a wall covered with silk tapestries). The downstairs is the dining room with a more traditional Japanese vibe to it. In the center sits a giant glass Buddha (over 20ft all) statue. Our meal started with a couple pieces of sushi, compliments of the chef. This was by far the best part of the meal. The sushi was extremely fresh and just melted in your mouth. We both ordered the Kobe beef for entrees which albeit tasting great was disappointingly small in its portion. We also tried out a flight of sake pairings with our food which was neat. The sakes went from dry to sweet as the meals progressed. All in all, we were a bit dissapointed by the portions and there was nothing to write home about.

A couple weeks later, on receiving great reviews from ML’s mom, we ventured out to try Aquavit (of celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson). The first thing that hits you about the place when you walk in is how quiet it is. We could literally hear our footsteps as we were shown to our table by the host. To start, I decided to try out a flight of Aquavits. The menu had a long list of various flavors you could order ranging from mango lime chillis to coconut espresso that made it too tempting to pass up. Coconut espresso was surpsingly good. The appetizer ordered was a herring sampler (not my flickr set) that was quite good. An assoortment of herrings cooked in 4 different ways. As entrees ML ordered the salmon and I got the meatballs – both extremely well cooked at satisfying. I was pleasantly surprised to taste how good the meatballs were (half-joking expecting them to taste just like the ones you get at the IKEA cafe… I mean, how much could you improve on meatballs?). For dessert, we ordered the goat cheese which was literally a block of goat cheese in a sweet sauce… absolutely delicious. I never thought goat cheese to be dessert in and of itself. Great meal and fantastic restaurant. Would recommend giving it a shot if you are still looking for a place to try during restaurant week.