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If you’re looking for a great way to get to know a city, or even just a neighborhood (like Mile End in Montreal), taking a food tour is an excellent place to start!
A food tour is more than just consuming the tasty goods of the local shops and restaurants. You’re learning the history of the neighborhoods; the cities; the people who live there and the establishments they run. You’re also often keeping locals employed – people who have a passion for sharing their city and the things it keeps. Or if not a local, someone who loves the city as much as any local could.
We took the Mile End Food Tour with Local Montreal and I want to do one in every new city from now on. We’ve done plenty of self-guided food tours (like at St. Lawrence Market and Kensington Market in Toronto), but having a guide with you along the way definitely adds a much-needed element to the mix.
Getting Started with the Tour
Our first order of business on the Mile End Food Tour was to meet up with our guide (Caroline) at our first restaurant stop (La Panthere Verte), as well as the rest of the group.
As soon as we were all checked in, we did a little ice breaker exercise to introduce ourselves to each of those humans we’d be walking with and consuming delicious foods with over the next three hours.
We were asked to describe our first impressions of Montreal in one word (I chose eclectic because the city really is such a mix of culture – old world and funky modern). My husband’s word was hipster – because we really were in the hipster neighborhood of Mile End – a lovely artsy pocket of Montreal!
Some Tour Notes
- Restaurants Change: Food tours often change up restaurants that they feature. Sadly, this is also because some places close (but this does pave the way for a fresh spot for a new restaurant to thrive!). Some of the places we visited that I cover below have, indeed, closed since we visited.
- Dietary Requirements: Our tour was primarily vegetarian, with only one stop that included a meat product. If you’re interested in booking with Local Montreal, you can specify your dietary requirements or let your guide know at the start of the tour. Caroline did ask the group if there were any allergies or aversions to particular products (like meat) and we did have a few vegetarians in our group.
- Shopping: To keep the tour moving along smoothly, shopping is not allowed at any of the shops during the tour. So, take good notes on which shops you’d like to return to later.
Here we go!
Stop 1: La Panthère Verte
Our tour started off at a small rustic vegan restaurant chain called La Panthère Verte (The Green Panther) where we had a little falafel pita.
Vegan Falafel Pitas
Falafel is one of my favorite vegetarian foods, and I am always on the hunt for some good fried chickpea balls. Accompanying the delicious falafel was an array of cabbage, carrots, pickles, sauerkraut, sprouts, and tahini stuffed into a whole wheat pita for our enjoyment.
Success at the first stop! I was actually surprised that a few in our group were unfamiliar with it. If you’ve never had falafel before, this is definitely a great place to start.
Tour Guide Highlight: Learning about the ethical and sustainable mission of the restaurant.
*La Panthère Verte has closed since we visited, so this would not be a stop included on a future tour.
Stop 2: Chocolats Geneviève Grandbois
After our delicious falafel, we made our way over to get a little something sweet from Chocolats Geneviève Grandbois.
Maple Chocolates & Drinking Chocolate
At the chocolate shop, we sampled a maple (érable) chocolate, as well as the hot drinking chocolate – both delicious! I only wish I could have gotten some of their maple caramel sauce (pictured in the jars below) but our suitcase was already heavy enough.
*Chocolats Geneviève Grandbois has closed since we visited, so this would not be a stop included on a future tour.
Stop 3: St-Viateur Bagel
If you’ve read some of my previous Canada posts, you might know that we had a Montreal-style bagel at the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. That was just preparing us for the real thing in Montreal! Montreal-style bagels are more dense and chewy than our American bagels, and are flavored with sugar instead of salt. Quite interesting but delicious!
Sesame Montreal-Style Bagels
We visited St-Viateur, one of the OGs of the Montreal bagel scene (serving up bagels since 1957!). We got to taste the sesame bagel, warm and fresh out of the oven (your choice of with/without cream cheese), but they do have a variety of flavors to choose from.
Tour Guide Highlights: Learning about the history of the St-Viateur shop, what makes a Montreal-style bagel unique, and just how many sesame seeds are on one bagel (hint: it’s A LOT!).
Stop 4: The Rialto Theater
What? This isn’t food! But hey – that’s okay. This cool little stop gave us a reprieve from eating so we could let some of the food settle while we learned a little bit of history of the theater and listened to some fun stories from Caroline (also, this was a chance for a bathroom break!).
Stop 5: Drogheria Fine
Drogheria Fine was one of my favorite stops on the tour – a little carton of gnocchi in the tangiest tomato sauce there ever was, topped with a sprinkling of salty parmesan. Simple and tasty Italian street food!
Gnocchi better than your Nonna’s!
Drogheria Fine is actually a small pasta sauce shop – really, that’s all they sell! They started selling gnocchi from their window so you could get a taste of all that saucy goodness. Takeaway containers are $5 CAD and worth every cent!
Tour Guide Highlights: Watching our guide Caroline interact with the business employees/owners. Seeing that relationship she has developed with them from being a local tour guide really shows you the sense of community in the Mile End Neighborhood!
Stop 6: Boucherie Lawrence
After our delicious gnocchi, we walked over to Boucherie Lawrence for a taste of charcuterie.
Sustainable Local Charcuterie
Boucherie Lawrence works exclusively with whole animals sourced from small local farms. It’s definitely refreshing when you find a place that supports responsible agriculture!
On our board was a variety of meats and cheeses, including pork rillettes, prosciutto, sausage, and some very tasty cheese. At this point in my travels, I told myself to try all the meat stuff and not refuse anything so I could fully immerse myself in each experience, and also to be able to better describe what we eat to people who read this blog. So, I took a dive and got a little adventurous here.
The pork rillettes was our favorite thing here! Tasty and salty, and a true example of a butcher shop using all the parts of the animal (no waste). We even went back to the shop after the tour was over so that we could pick some up to go for our hotel room.
Tour Guide Highlights: Playing a little Quebec trivia with Caroline (they have a giant map on one of the walls in here!).
Stop 7: Kem Coba
Alas, our foodie tour had to come to an end, but my, my did we end with one the best! We ended our tour at Kem Coba with some incredibly delicious chocolate and raspberry soft serve ice cream!
Chocolate & Raspberry Soft Serve
This ice cream was so good that I had a hard time deciding between the ice cream and the gnocchi as my favorite item on the tour. Ultimately, the ice cream won me over. I only wished that I had a larger portion to dig into.
Tour Guide Highlights: Learning the history of the Kem Coba shop (and the story behind its name). Also, since it was the end of the tour, Caroline asked us all what our favorite items on the tour were and it was cool to see the different responses from everyone (it was varied!).
The Mile End neighborhood reminded me of one of my favorite U.S. cities – Portland, Oregon. It has a funky, artsy vibe (and is the home to many an artist, many of whom hang on the streets and Caroline knew by name).
There are a ton of restaurants and shops everywhere and the neighborhood even houses a corporate building for Ubisoft – the video game developer.
You’ll also find no shortage of street art and our guide Caroline was happy to tell us the history behind some of it. We even made a little stop at the church where the band Arcade Fire used to practice at in their basement!
Final Tour Thoughts
We were very happy with the Mile End Food Tour we took with Local Montreal. In fact, it was our favorite thing we did when visiting this interesting city!
If you would like to take the tour yourselves, I suggest doing it towards the beginning of your stay in Montreal so you have a few favorites to return to. Local Montreal also has a few other tours to choose from in the city as well.
Pro Tip: Walk over to Dieu du Ciel for some post-tour beers!
Booking with Local Food Tours
Local Food Tours website: https://localfoodtours.com/montreal
Book via Viator
Tour Duration: 3 Hours
Happy eating!
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