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Food

The Tommy Kruise Guide to Late-Night Montreal

In Montreal, I'm hitting up dive bars, eating souvlaki, and chilling outside with my friends when the weather's nice. Too bad the food truck scene is still totally whack here.
Photo via Wiki Commons

Here in Montreal, we're right next to water so the weather can get crazy. In winter, it means we gotta hide ourselves for eight months in a cabin. Like, some of your friends will disappear in September with a new girlfriend and you won't hear from them, then next April they show up, like, "Yo what's going on dude? Naaaah I don't have that girlfriend anymore," and they chill with you every day. We get some really strong personalities or some really weak personalities here—you never have people in the middle. Do we cope with the winter by drinking? Nah, but yeah. I love going outside and dressing for the weather, playing football outside in the snow at night with beer. I drink in public in the winter like I would in the summer. I love winter.

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I drink beer, but I don't necessarily like drinking a lot of it because it fills you up. I prefer mixing hard alcohol because it'll get me going faster. I've been getting to shows lately—you get an hour before you go to play—and I'm like, Okay, I'm sober. Give me fifteen minutes.

I've been going out, too. Now that it's summer, we're all about parks. Or, you'll hear about a fire on the train tracks—it's like a bonfire, and people make sure it doesn't get out of hand. I'll get a bunch of people who will text or Facebook me, "There's a fire on the train tracks. Come meet us this afternoon."

Usually, my first bar of the night would be in the 'hood. I love my neighborhood, but it's kind of outside of where the action happens. Like, I'm not in the plateau; I'm in the southwest part of downtown, so it's more English. I've been going out to grimy bars, you know, the cheap bars with juke boxes where you just get in, put in $10, and it becomes your night right away. I really love entering a bar, putting money in a jukebox, and making sure that the next 30 minutes is gonna be a hard 30 minutes. This is my kind of bar. I go everywhere, though… I just don't know where I've been going. I'll go to Blue Dog or La SAT, though.

I don't know if there's a typical quebecois drink… I may have to ask a friend about that. I'm asking myself a lot of questions in my head. But I have noticed that there's a lot of cider out here that's being made. I love cider.

The problem is finding food after you've been drinking. The food truck game in Montreal and Quebec are still super whack. Super whack. They just don't understand how it works. They're trying to bring some fucking $20 tacos to people. Food trucks shouldn't be like that—it should be dirty-ass food that you can get for a little money at any time. Like, you go to Toronto and New York and there's a food truck every two corners selling you those pretzels or a giant hot dog. There's none of that in Montreal because there's regulations about food. They need to step it up. I'm not fucking with this idea of having $20 fried food out of a food truck—I can hit up some fucking restaurant if I want! If I want food made out of a truck, I want fries, a quick souvlaki, honey chicken, anything. I would maybe get poutine. I'm not the biggest poutine fan, but late at night it's good.

Right now, my favorite burger place, A.A. Restaurant, is closed for renovations, so I go to this place in my 'hood called New System for late-night food. They deliver it and it's super fast, which is great because I've been staying up a lot, making music, and watching anime. Like, it's 2:13 in the afternoon, but I just woke up, like, 20 minutes ago and got a delivery of underwear. I'm getting ready for my tour in Canada's west coast next month; I'm starting in Toronto and ending up near Vancouver. I've been working on this EP on and off for a year and a half, so it's going to be fun.

As told to Kirsten Stamn