How far would you travel for a plate?

Me hitting every street food vendor at a fair on 7th ave in NYC

We all have these crazy stories. Cross the city for a sandwich, road trip for a slice of pizza, whatever it may be. I've sat at Portugalia (on Rachel st near St-Laurent) which is a hole in the wall portugese chicken place and heard orders coming in by phone. People placing orders 3-4 hours in advance and coming in from Ottawa! Can you imagine driving 90 mins after work to come get a chicken to then drive it back another 90 mins and serve it to your family? That's pretty hard core and I love it! I drive back to my old neighborhood to get cold tomato pizza from the bakery I grew up next to. I thought this was common, but when I moved a little west of the city, I couldn't find anything as good as the tomato `za I grew up on. in high school we used to drive out east to Milano's cafe on Jarry to get a sausage sang'wich. It had to be from Milano's. Don't bother today, I think even the most hard core Italian in the city will admit it's just not the same as it used to be. For me it's the bread that isn't as good.

Then, with the same friends, we heard there was a Taco Bell opening in Brockville Ontario. That's 2 hours away. We didn't care. My friend borrowed his mother's truck and off we went in search of bad (bad bad bad) mexican food with Nirvana tapes blasting on the radio. We must've done this at least half a dozen times actually. It truly was a sad day for us when we got there and noticed that the TB had been replaced with a Tim Horton's. We drove around the town looking for it, in case it moved. It looked like two guys searching the streets for a lost dog.



Now, i'll drive back to the east end on some weekends to shop at the Jean-Talon Market. I don't like the Atwater market, there's no deals, and very few things that are worth going there even though it's much closer to me. We lunch at El Rey Del taco which is my new favourite mexican joint in the city, probably doesn't say much since I just admitted to road tripping for Taco Bell but I swear I know good mexican food! At the end of summer I go buy a bushel of tomatoes to make some sauce, huge bunches of basil for $2, fresh corn on the cob that was picked the day before and whatever else I can find that's local. It's heaven!

Last year my girlfriend and I were in Paris for a week and had a craving for a specific crepe that we had a couple of days earlier, so we took the metro and went all the way back there because I really wanted a buckwheat crepe with ham, cheese and egg. Sounds dumb right now but it made SO much sense then.


Food has definetely become a destination these days, we follow celebrity chefs, blogger reviews, and any other reason to go to one specific spot. Obviously it's not always worth spending time & effort for a specific dish but sometimes the voyage is part of the actual experience.The anticipation and excitement can make a simple dish feel like the most special thing in the world.