Cafe Bistro McCord Museum

Musée de l’histoire canadienne. Concrètement, il s’agit de la juxtaposition d’expositions issues des collections permanentes, ou temporaires. Cet été 2012, l’art inuit contemporain, la fin du monde en caricatures, Mary Pickford Naissance du star system, et une expo un peu fourre tout sur Montréal. Ca a l’air un peu disparate, mais la qualité générale des expos est bonne. Un peu déçu de né pas voir en expo le fonds photographique paraît-​il remarquable.
Gratuit le 1er samedi du mois!

I wanted to review the café at the museum, not the museum itself, so I started a separate file in the restaurant category. Someone else reviewed the café on the museum file, but it was from about a year ago, and I believe the kitchen has since changed hands.
So, my review… this is an elegant café only open for lunch. If you’re looking for a delicious, substantial, and classy place to have lunch while you’re wandering around downtown (or if you work downtown and you’re on your lunch break), this is a really great option. For the summer they have both an indoor dining room and a beautiful outdoor terrace. the museum has a purple ‘urban forest’ display set up outside, so if you eat on the terrace you’ll be surrounded by purple trees.
Seeing as it was quite hot the day we went, my lunchtime companion and I decided to dine indoors in the AC. My lunch date (my brother) was here in Montréal on vacation, so we started off our lunch with some delicious white wine by the glass. They have quite a nice little selection of both red and white by the glass, if you are in the mood to go back to the office a little happier than you left. As an appetizer we each had a cold soup. I had the pea and my brother had the cucumber. Both very nice and refreshing and cutely served in mason jars. We then had the polenta with cod and the duck. The polenta was fluffy and the cod was light but creamy. The duck was deliciously rich and well portioned for lunch. And to top it all off, we had a chocolate crème brûlée and a lemon tart. The crème brûlée was a bit sweet for my brother, but I found it went well with our espressos, and the lemon tart was a nice combination of sweet and sour.
Overall, a really great lunch experience. The prices seem a bit much for lunch, but for the quality of food that we ate, I really didn’t mind splurging! We left pleasantly full.

A museum of Canadian history in downtown Montréal. It has an interesting mix stretching back to the First Nations and forward to modern Canadian culture (including a table hockey game), with interesting exhibits on immigration and the language divisions in Montréal. It’s not a massive museum, the sort of thing you could pack in on a lazy morning before lunch or over a couple of hours in the afternoon.
Its closest competition is the Pointe-​à-​Callière museum in the Old Port. The McCord doesn’t have the same impressive building or setting as the latter, but it’s cosier and the collections are just as interesting. I think the distinction is that Pointe-​à-​Callière focuses on the history of the region, whereas McCord’s remit includes the whole of Canada.
Free admission on Wednesday evenings!