The best thing about dining in Montreal is the BYOW (bring your own wine). That is a distinctive trait in Montreal, those restaurants where you can bring your best bottle of wine and you don't have to pay taxes and tip on top of it! Elsewhere in other big cities, they charge a corkage fee to open your bottle. In Montreal, the restaurateurs do not do that..or only a few do but those who try to abandon those fees really quickly.

Some people think that those restaurants are on the low range of the spectrum when it comes to food quality, but not at all! Some of the best restaurants in Montreal nowadays are BYOW. You tend to find them in the residential areas of town: plateau Mont-Royal and Rosemont for example. We went last Saturday to one of my favorites on Masson street, Le zeste de folie, and it cost me 60$ without the wine. I always have a great meal when I go there. The quality of the food is incredible! Foodies just love that restaurant. We brought a couple of Spanish wines to go with our dessert and we were disappointed because we had forgotten to bring dessert wine to go with our half-cooked chocolate cake. I was already all filled up, but the cake was too tempting!

If you ever come to Montreal, stay away from the big and expensive restaurants like Toque and the ones on St-Laurent and in Old Montreal instead go on the Plateau Mont-Royal/Rosemont/Ahuntsic and go where we all go for the food and not for being seen in a trendy place!

Learn more about this author, Cristy Hebert.
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