Montreal, Canada: Goodbye Lunch at Le H4C (a Former Post Office)

On my last day in Canada I had a lunch appointment with long time friend from Cebu, Pat and her family in Montreal.

On this particular day I was coming from the Eastern Townships where I stayed at North Hatley, a charming small village on Lake Massawippi. The drive is not very long to Montreal, approximately an hour and a half non-stop, however I planned on passing by the towns of Magog, Saint-Benoit-du-Lac and Knowlton in the morning. I was on schedule until I reached Knowlton, where I had an unplanned detour. They closed the road from Knowlton to highway 10 and my GPS keeps sending me back to the closed road so I was exasperatingly driving around in circles.

Having left with no choice, I drove back to Saint-Benoit-du-Lac and before reaching the town, I then took the first exit that I saw going up to highway 10. The whole detour cost me half an hour. Then when I arrived in Montreal, I did not expect that traffic would be bad as well. Lots of roadworks going on!

Helaas, I came very, very late for our lunch at Le H4C on Place St-Henri. Bummer.

Pat chose this restaurant because itâ€™s a mixture of modern cuisine, architecture and history. The restaurant is housed inside a former old post office of the Saint-Henri neighbourhood. Pat has architectural studies background while I interior design, so we share the same interests and we quite agree on this.

When I arrived, Pat and the family already finished their lunch. The thing with this restaurant is that the kitchen has a closing time, so they really had no choice but to eat ahead of me. I am only very thankful that they were very patient to wait for me! Oh, her girls were adorable by the way.

They managed to order for me ahead of time, some Ricotta Gnudi with vegetables and topped with an egg. I cannot really put a finger on this dish though. It tasted good but quite unusual. The flavours were some kind of cuisine experiment to me. It felt like the ingredients of the dish were searching for the correct combination, and that the recipe is just not quite there yet. Something like that.

The restaurant gave us a special extension so we shared some cronut (because I havenâ€™t tasted this croissant-donut fusion yet) for dessert, which came with some butter cream that tasted like egg yolk.

Then Patâ€™s hubby took out his special weapon for the afternoon — a selfie stick! Oh dear, I have not used a selfie stick before and I have promised myself not to buy one as well, haha. This prompted us to take a lot of photo sessions that extended outside the restaurant all the way to the parking lot. We shared lots of laughs in the process, as well as plenty of hugs that afternoon.

It is not always nice to say goodbye but who knows when the next meet will be? Thank you Pat for the wonderful lunch and time. I appreciate it very much.