Restaurants Montreal needs to revive

  What's the big deal in this burg? Not sports. Not theatre. We're talking restaurants.
   Restaurants are a huge deal in Montreal and I propose that we formally promote our identity as a restaurant capital.
    How? With a restaurant museum. The museum would feature some of the great lost Montreal restaurants and try to recapture their ambiance. So here, are my suggestions of our lost restaurants that should be recaptured at Montreal's restaurant museum.
Desjardins: This joint on Mackay above Dorch started life as an oyster stand on Peel and St. Antoine, then moved ot Guy and Dorch and then to Mackay in 1950. It's the only downtown building built specifically as a restaurant but for the last several years (anybody know the exact date of its closing?) it still sits as a pathetic empty shell. Albert Desjardins was the big daddy of the joint but he died in 1980 and sold it to Barry Kaufman who built a big glass atrium on the front, it was considered pretentious and overpriced. Noriko Ishii, who owned another Japanese restaurant on Mountain purchased it in 1994 and turned it into a sushi joint but it did not last. I'd love to see it brought back to life in its earliest form, a small oyster stand.

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Eaton's Ninth Floor Cafeteria: Supposedly this gym-sized Art Deco showplace modelled after the opulent Ile-de- France ocean liner has been preserved as a heritage site. I seem to recall it closed sometime prior to the store closing in 1999. (In fact, this might be the ideal spot for the restaurant museum, with part of it preserved and the rest given over to imitations of other joints).

Drury's Restaurant: this old-fashioned British chop shop sat at the SW corner of whats now Dominion Square. If featured a number of small rooms and reasonably-priced meals and the Habs owner Leo Dandurand was the proprietor after buying it off the eponymous prior owners. It was a laid-back, comfy slow-dining place popular with bigshots from out of town and sportsmen. Dreapeau ordered Osborne St. (the continuation of La Gauch east of Peel) demolished but made plans to save the building but his brief-successor Sarto Fournier had it demolished in 1959.

Bens Delicatessan: Best-known as the original place for smoked meat in Montreal and for being open pretty much the entire night. The location was also useful as it kept an office-canyon area alive. The framed 8x10 glossies and old time counters and white-and-black clad waiters also brought a certain style to the joint.

Joe Beef closed down in the spring of 1962, which makes this the 50th anniversary of its closure, something that somebody might think of marking. Of course in its later days on Common, the owner had long since died and the informal zoo long gone but the legend certainly lives to this day.

Au Lutin Qui Bouffe: This joint just up there east of St. Denis had the gimmick of letting you take your photo with a little piglet and it also was the scene of a dramatic robbery in which the owner was killed and the murdered tracked down months later in Texas. I think one of Conrad Black's close associates was involved in the ownership at one time too.

The Kon Tiki: Montreal hasn't had a good tiki bar since this joint closed and everybody should enjoy travelling to the Pacific within their own city at least once in a lifetime.







Others: Ogilvy's basement cafeteria (a personal favourite) which closed in the late 1980s, Cordner's, The Traymore, Roncarelli's, The Bonfire.
   I also have a vague recollection of a cafeteria-type restaurant somewhere near Simpson's where the gimmick was that countless plates sat behind glass doors and you just slid the door and grabbed the one you wanted.
  Please add you suggestions for restaurants that should be considered for this list.