5245 St. Laurent, Montreal | Tel: (514) 276-0249
ow it pays to drive an extra mile up St. Laurent from the BMW parking lot near Sherbrooke Street! Huddled in the middle of the Mile End district is Bu, an Italian paradiso where all I could say at the end of the evening was mamma mia!
Catering to young people, cool cats and relaxed but upwardly mobile Montrealers, it opened in October 2003 in the style of the best European wine bars. Borrowing a phrase from Bu's web site, the orders are translated and fed to two pure tomato mamas who delight the clientele with authentic Italian home cooking, different from one day to the next, but always delightful.
Bu's formula is simple. One can taste various themed trios of wines. These threesomes change often. For stubborn bottle lovers, there is an extensive wine list that scrolls all the way down to Palermo. Bu also sells yummy Italian products like chocolate, olives, rice and coffee. But make no mistake, Bu is about buuz.
Casanova, our waiter, recommended a white Cambrugiano 2001, a smooth intensely-colored wine made near Belisario on the Adriatic Sea side of Italy. I had just finished John Grisham's The Broker, a spy thriller set in Bologna, a city with funny street names like Via Zamboni, where spies and everyone else spend at least six hours per day in sidewalk cafes sipping macchiatos. After the happy spy-gets-woman ending I had to celebrate. Of all places in Montreal, Bu is by far the most appropriate for this kind of rejoicing. So I invited two belle ragazze.
The Cambrugiano did its celebratory job very well, although it was a bit overpriced at 53 dollars a pop: in Italy, the prezzo in cantina is 8.85 Euros.
An absolute must at Bu are the bruschettas, pieces of toasted bread covered with delicacies. The crostone ai funghi (mushroom bruschetta, $7) for example, was excellent. My own private bruschetta went orgasmic under a heap of succulent funghi. The other small appetizers on the menu are all roughly priced from $5 to $15. These include classics such as prosciutto and melon ($10), salmon gravlax ($11), and beef carpaccio ($11).
crostone ai funghi (mushroom bruschetta)
For the main dish, one selects from one or two pastas. Many diners never have a main dish here. No one cares, really. In true Via Zamboni style, my two ragazze opted for the spaghetti con bottarga ($14). Delicioso! Bottarga is the dried roe of the Mediterranean tuna or grey mullet. Sometimes called Sardinian caviar, bottarga is salted and air-dried into tongue-like shapes. It is either grated like Grana Padano or chopped into small cubes. The grated bottarga flakes add a salty caviarish taste to the spaghetti aglio e olio. Often, it is simply served as an antipasto in strips with oil and lemon. To have this stragavanza in Montreal on a cold winter night should be illegal.
The other main course was Sicilian, a vitello (veal) in marsala wine sauce ($15). It is rare that I can say that I tried all the main dishes of a restaurant during a single visit! Marsala is at the Western tip of Sicily, an olive pit spit from North Africa. Its name is derived from Marsa Allah, or port of Allah. I am happy to report that Allah and the Duce del Bu cooperated very nicely to bring me a perfectly juicy vitello.
Sadly, at this point, the Cambrugiano was finito, so we ordered a Tiramisu ($6) and asked for the grappa menu. I am sure that John Grisham's spy has never ogled a grappa menu like Bu's. It is aglow with a long list of Redoux ($5-$18) and eaux-de-vie ($7-$18), enough grappas to make the tower of Pisa permanently limp, goodies like Louis Roque, Vieille Prune, and Souillac ($12), and at the top end, a 30-year old Roger Groult Calvados du Pays d'Auge ($18).
The Duce approved of my choice of Grappa di Bassano, which is grappified in a city in the Veneto region called Bassano del Grappa, named after its famous grappa. Shouldn't their grappa be called Grappa di Bassano del Grappa? No! Bassano is famous for the Grappa di Bassano, so its grappa should be renamed Grappa di Bassano del Grappa di Bassano del Grappa.
Well, enough grappolo and grappola. I paid $147 for the two ragazze and myself, but only half of that was for food. -- Reviewed by RestoSpy
