CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR'S MENUS

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Stay and Eat over the holidays in these elegant downtown hotel -restaurants

Old Montreal is gussied up to its finest, with snowy streets and twinkling lights and all the romance you could ever want. So hunker down in one of the city’s glam hotels and check out the holiday menus at some of the city’s best restaurants, that you can slip into without weathering the wind outside…

If I were coming to Montreal for the holidays, I would want to stay at the Hotel St-James, and I would want to eat Christmas dinner at XO, one of Montreal’s top-rated restaurants. The St-James is old-world elegant at any time of year, but over the holidays, the soaring 19th-century roo is in its element.

XO offer a special set menu, called a Table d’Hote, for the holidays–over-the-top brunches and dinners to mark the specialness of the holidays.
A quick scan of XO’s holiday menus, which are posted here, tells me they’re pulling out all the stops: A main course of seared venison and squash preceded by a foie gras parfait (on the Christmas menu) or Chestnut Agnolotti (on the New Year’s menu). XO also offers a bunch over Christmas and on Boxing Day, and over the New Year’s holiday.

In keeping with the Old Montreal theme, another rhotel-resto favourite is Aix Cuisine du Terroir, in the Place d’Armes hotel.

Aix also has special set menus for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, that accentuate fresh, local Quebec specialty cuisine in their glamourous underground setting, that sometimes feels liek you’re eating your dinner in a secret private wine cellar…
Their New Years set menu begins with deer tataki, and goes on to include braised beef cheeks with boletus and a verrine of young goat. And to sweeten the pot, their New Year’s Eve reveillon is accompanied by a jazz band.

Up the hill at Beaver Club at the Fairmount Queen Elizabeth, they’ve themed their Christmas event around the cuisine of the French/Germanic region of Alsace—which means sauerkraut, sausage, meatpies and Riesling. There’s also an opportunity to shop for Alsatian-themed gifts in their Boutique Gourmandise, so you can take the deliciousness of your holiday Montreal weekend back to loved ones in far-flung places…

Guest blogger: Melora Koepke

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