Breaking for coffee: Café Santé Veritas

This is Anthony. He's the barista at Café Santé Veritas, and yes it's true, this bar serves no wine. Anthony makes a mean macchiato, which is my drink of choice when I'm working at my day job.


This is the kind of cappuccino you can expect at Café Santé Veritas. It's got latte art. Anthony is a great latte artist but the shots taste as good as they look because they're made with 49th Parellel coffee beans.


At Café Veritas, Anthony works with a very expensive machine that has three groupers. See... 1, 2, 3. He says this means a lot to him and to the coffees he makes. He mentioned something about temperature, and how important regulating heat is to a good espresso shot. I'm not a coffee geek, but clearly machines like these are hard to come by. It's the only one in Montreal so no wonder he likes it. Plus, it's shiny.


As a wino, I find it hard to believe that Anthony never drinks what he is most surrounded by. Or at least, he has coffee very rarely and almost never while he is on the job. Here he is, with his steady uncaffeinated hand, pouring the milk into the espresso shot in order to make latte art. (Café Santé Veritas will soon be able to tout their bar for something more: next week Anthony will be entered in a stakes-is-high barista competition. Good luck Anthony!)


It's always a luxury if your favourite café serves a solid food menu. (Having come back from New York last month I can tell you that it doesn't happen very often so Montreal is lucky.) That the menu at Café Santé Veritas is solid AND healthy -- none of the dishes containing meat are cooked using any oil, for example -- is another big plus. But the thing I like most about the café is its devotion to doing more than just one meal right, serving up nutritious fresh breakfasts as much as delicious lunches or desserts and snacks.


Always fresh chick-pea salad, with a tofu wrap on the side. Salads Waldorf (below) and grilled chicken with blueberries (above) are two of my favourites.



Open Now

CAFÉ SANTÉ VERITAS 480 Blvd Saint-Laurent (corner Notre-Dame), (514) 510-7775.

Wine-friendly veggies on demand

The theme has been summer nostalgia and letting go post-Labour Day weekend. Yesterday, when I admitted that every season has an end, I also came to terms with a too-aged bottle of wine designed to drink young. It was heavy and cloying and a lack of freshness suggested that it had oxidized.

It was one of those sunny and versatile summertime wines, namely the Frescobaldi Albizzia Chardonnay Toscana 2005, and it showed that its limits were as clear and well-defined as summer -- Montreal's shortest and most sudden season. (It turns out that the Albizzia cuvée is very appropriately named for "usually small trees or shrubs with a short lifespan"... just check Wikipedia for the proof.)

That was then, this is now. This post is about the food I often served at wine-curated picnics over the last three months, and it's entirely true that the picnic pictured here featured those Albizzias, so sunny and versatile then, as well as that rosé you see.

What I served is a simple dish, so versatile with wine and yummy on its own, that's been plenty on demand around my place. I've received requests for the recipe in person and on Facebook. So it's about time I quite stalling and fess up: It's roasted vegetables, people. The most amazingly good and amazingly simple food fixing known to man.

Roasted vegetables, antipasto-style

- Choose 1 (or 2) of: cauliflower or broccoli florets, fennel, onion, tomato, mushroom
- Add a generous splash of olive oil and mix to generally coat everything
- Roast in the oven uncovered at 450 F for 20 minutes, stirring once
- Let cool momentarily in mixture of butter, capers and garlic, or instead, fresh mint and salt and pepper
- Serve! And save leftovers for an enjoyable cold lunch

(Note: Cauliflower takes 25 minutes; tomato and mushrooms take 10.)

I hinted in my last post that this kind of recipe would fade in the weeks to come but I don't believe it now. For one thing, I would drink pretty much any wine with this other than your most delicate whites and most tannic reds. On top of that, hardy vegetables continue to be plentiful into the fall and the heat your oven gives off to make this dish only becomes more pleasing as the days shorten. Plus, as I look ahead to the short-term weather forecast, I see that the first Thursday, Friday and Saturday of September are scheduled to be summer's most formidable heat wave. It's summertime again. Get picnicking.

TASTY MORSELS

My Italian wine over-consumption two weeks ago when I was a tasting panelist has paid lovely dividends. I figure nicely in Bill Zacharkiw's latest column on the (Montreal) Gazette's Wine with Bill Zacharkiw website. Check out the site -- it's growing rapidly as Bill's tenure takes off since replacing veteran critic at the newspaper Malcolm Anderson -- but also note this direct link to the goods I helped sample: Valpolicella Classico, Ripasso, and Amarone wines.

It's been said about Bill before but let me say it again: no one has the know-how and the knack for identifying a wine's key attributes and instantly matching them up in appropriate food pairings. His writing readily conveys this, so it is a joy to read his reviews, which are totally mouthwatering and score-free to boot.