Cafe Harvard Gourmet

Café Harvard Gourmet
5688 avenue Monkland
Montreal, QC
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7 1/2 out of 10

This neighbourhood is picking up. What used to be a strip of quaint but over-priced, mediocre restaurants now has at least 3 gourmet chocolate shops, 2 vegetarian joints, a mikado sushi restaurant, a Ten Thousand Villages, a Petits Gateaux cupcake shop, and more stores opening all the time. Doesn’t hurt that it’s very liveable, scenic and safe. Not that Montreal is a city of crazies, but sunny sidewalks, people smiling, and a whole lot of clean and green make this a place you want to be.
What I stumbled into in Monkland Village, after a lot of window shopping, was the second of the two vegetarian cafés, Café Harvard Gourmet. I had quickly left the first one when the cook told me that the eye-popping vegan cakes in the cooler display were all made with soy, because, well, you can’t avoid that if you don’t use real milk. Sorry, but I have a whole lot of eating experience that tells me otherwise. I will not be frequenting a vegetarian place that doesn’t explore, and even denies, all its options, which is where Harvard Café Gourmet comes in. Less soy, completely dairy-free (parve), vegetarian, and kosher to boot. Not vegan, though. There are lots and lots of eggs, but you can definitely find some egg-free options. The whole concept of the restaurant is healthy, delicious food, since the owner and Chef, Gigi Cohen, has written several cookbooks on low-sugar cooking, and general healthy cooking.
So I’m excited. Shops that are so proud of the ingredients they use that they sell them in containers make me happy; freshly ground spices and vegetarian staples like nutritional yeast.

The menu is small and changes daily according to the whim of the chef, and probably what’s being made for whatever catering engagement is going on at the time. Choose from just a few entrée options, a soup, and some salads. The beautiful kitchen in the back is used for cooking demos and the catering business, which seems to be where a lot of the business comes from. A staff of kitchen workers are kept busy cooking dried black beans, chopping mounds of onions, and assembling platters. If you don’t want to sit at one of the café’s small tables, you can get your food to go, and grab some raw energy bars (bars that are made from raw, unprocessed ingredients, not balls that are filled with “raw energy”…).
The soup was spicy black bean. With all the vegetables being chopped in that kitchen I figured the broth would be homemade, but it wasn’t. The powder the Chef proudly uses is organic, but the first ingredient is corn starch, which is what makes the soup sweet. I was told the broth is in a lot of the dishes and it’s what makes everything taste so good. When you add a lot of sugar things get magically better…Still, the soup was fresh. The spinach was barely wilted, the chunks of potato were just softened, the yellow peppers were crisp, and the green onions sang. The beans were perfectly cooked and so much better than beans from a can.
The quiche was a tower of eggs, sliced potato, onions, tomatoes and sesame seeds. The tomatoes were a bit bland (since it’s not tomato season, I’m okay with that), but were just tasty enough to help out the accompanying salad, whose dressing had disappeared in the water probably used to wash the greens or the bean sprouts, and there were a whole lot of bean sprouts. The quiche itself was sweet (from the corn syrup organic broth, since no milk, regular or soy, was used), so it kind of tasted like sweet omelet that you find in sushi that’s sweetened with mirin (which also often includes corn syrup, and not the organic kind, if that makes any difference to you).
The counter in the front of the restaurant was piled high with patties. I’ve eaten a whole lot of bad vegetarian patties, but there were no other soy-free entrées available that day, and I didn’t want to fill up on corn syrup soup, even if it was delicious. The patty came sadly bun-less, but with the same fresh but watery salad, and the highlight of the entire meal: a sweet chili paste. I probably don’t want to know how it was sweetened, but I’ll cross my fingers it was made in-house, because it was so good.

The patty was a little soft and mushy, even though it was pan-browned on the outside. The sesame seeds got a little bit of a toasted taste from the browning, but somehow the outside of the patty gave a strange metallic aftertaste. So I stopped eating the crust (do patties have crusts?) and picked out the filling, and dipped. On its own the filling was fine and simple, but pretty bland. I was dreaming of Crudessence’s dehydrated or sundried tomatoes while trying both the patty and the quiche, since both would have benefited from them.

So on any given day you could walk into this café and have a great meal, but you’ll never have less than a pretty good meal made with the best of intentions and care. You’ll leave feeling good about yourself and walk out onto the gorgeous strip of street that is the growing Monkland Village.

Hours (following the Sabbath – early Friday closing, closed all day Saturday. I like to call it Outremont hours): Mon-Thurs, Sun 10am-7pm, Fri 10am-2pm
Expect to Pay: $13-$15 for an entré, $14-$22 to add soup or a drink, including taxes and tip
514-483-9494