Our latest city spotlight turns north to Montréal, where French-Québécois comfort food meets cosmopolitan nose-to-tail dining, innovative microbreweries, and old-school Jewish classics.

The flower market outside Marché Atwater

Montréal, just 330 miles north of New York City, is an increasingly exciting place to be, whether it’s live music, cultural festivals, contemporary art, boutique shopping, or food and drink you’re after. We are predisposed to favor the latter, naturally, and Canada’s second-largest city, with its ethnic diversity and rich (if tumultuous) Franco- and Anglophone history, does not disappoint. Start by exploring the most regional of Québécois foods—the meat...

In a new series of city spotlights, we’ll sum up in quick bloggy format the essential dishes of destinations we cover in full elsewhere. Think of them as teasers, or perhaps appetizers for more! First up is one of our more recently covered cities, New Haven, Connecticut, an iconic pizza town with some hidden gems to boot.

The New Haven Green

New Haven has an affinity for the old. This is, after all, a nearly 375-year-old New England city, with all the usual hallmarks: an Ivy League university (Yale); ­a spacious Puritan-constructed downtown “green,” or grassy town square; graceful if peeling Victorian architecture; even a nickname after trees (Elm City). Fortunately, that respect...

“Beer and spirits were an essential part of everyday life for the first European settlers of our country. Malting barley was brought over on the first ships with other essentials, like wool and wheat. Records show it was first planted on Martha’s Vineyard in 1604. I would like to eventually grow and malt the original variety of barley that was grown in New England.”—Andrea Stanley, Valley Malt

Tell us about your job.
I am a maltster: I malt grains for brewing and distilling. The process
of malting starts with soaking grain, sprouting it, and drying it. It takes one full week to malt a batch of grain, and we malt in 2,000-pound (one-ton) batches. We started in 2010 with one malting...

The New York City craft beer scene has exploded in recent years, but with a grand total of five breweries/brewpubs within city limits, we’re still a bit behind on the production front when compared to other U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Portland, Denver, and Austin, where it seems a new brewery opens every other week. (Fortunately, NYC fares better with craft beer bars.) But I have new hope for the future of New York beers after attending Brooklyn Wort, a biannual home-brew competition that packed 30 local brewers into the Gowanus Studio Space yesterday.

Scott and I were there primarily to support friends and event sponsors Valley Malt, a small Massachusetts-based start-up changing...