Anthony Bourdain's Montreal's Layover

Let's just say what Bourdain did in this video I did multiple times for a period of about 10 years. It also reminded me of my few trips to Paris to visit my cousins in the restaurant business. My education in all things Parisian was getting hammered, riding on motorcycles going from restaurant to restaurant (drinking and eating along)  until we ended up in a market buying fish at 5am with the owners of a Chinese restaurant.

There's something magically queer when the Calabrese are hanging out with the Chinese in the middle of the night choosing between Atlantic or Pacific salmon in the center of Paris.

Montreal is pretty cool for the sort of stuff Bourdain is doing in the clip. Lux was also an eatery (now closed) that never closed. And God bless him for exposing the insipid law against street food vendors.

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The French guys Bourdain palled around with in the back of pick up also reminded me of the sort of guys who used to show up at the outdoor rink to play hockey. Classic French-Canadian stuff. They play hard and party harder. One guy I'll never forget looked like something right out of an obscure comic book. Frizzed hair, tight old GW jeans, and a cheap fitted leather jacket he could skate like the wind but didn't have much control of his speed as he constantly crashed into the boards. We would just laugh and nod saying, "that guy is fucking nuts. St'un malade!"