Three Lunches

Duc de Lorraine

 I generally frequent the Dairy Queen with my sisters when I am in Alberta and B.C. The meal is cheap: a hamburger, fries, a drink and a sundae, all for $6. The drinks are refillable. There is no pressure to get out of the restaurant before the next sitting.

We haven't been going to the Dairy Queen here in Montreal. Catherine, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and I went to the Duc de Lorraine after we had seen St. Joseph’s Oratory.

I had an interesting salmon quiche and a Strawberry Mousse Tart. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it, but I shall always call that place, the House of Fruit Flies. Really, the bugs in the air could only have been rivalled by the heat of the summer and the presence of lots of fruit in my own house in the summer. Yesterday, it was hard to duck the flies so that I only got a bit of quiche or a taste of the mousse.

That waiters were dressed immaculately. The accent was Parisienne.  But the flies were horrendous. The best I can say is that the presence of so many bugs could only signal that everything was made with real fruit, and that it was 2 in the afternoon, time for yet another batch of fruit flies to be born.

I have a special affinity to fruit flies. In my first year of university, in a Zoology class, we had to produce our own fruit flies and then count the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed bugs to figure out some principle of Mendellian law.

Feast Number two occured in the evening.  The 3 of us plus Eric and two more couples went to The Raj downtown.  Some in our party were looking for a vegetarian feast, which we found.

A bronze burning candle stick was to my left and across the table from me, Jay Glowa born and raised in Vulcan, Alberta. I don’t know why I am mentioning the candlestick. Perhaps because the flame was just a little too close for my comfort. I asked Jay why he had settled in Montreal, since his beginnings were on the Alberta prairie. Anyone who has grown up on the prairie will know about the dusty smell of the dry earth and the sound of the gophers. He too could remember these things and said that going to Montreal on a mission had opened up a whole new urban world for him, so here he was, 30 years later, happy in Montreal.

The third restaurant was the next day, the Ferrari – an Italian restaurant with traditional dishes and daily made pastas, plus an ivy-and brick-trimmed patio. The salmon was great. The conversation with Candice Wendt lots of fun. Nothing like talking to someone who has just moved to Montreal and still surprised by the wonderful Frenchness of it all.

If I were 30 years younger I think I would throw myself into a French speaking class with a vengeance.

Arta