Tel.: 844-5114.
 There’s a two-block section of rue Prince-Arthur that has four restaurants with virtually identical names: La Caverne Grecque, La Cabane Grecque, Le Gourmet Grecque, and Casa Grecque. Other than the fact that they would all apparently serve Greek food, what distinguishes them? On this part of Prince-Arthur where the street is closed to traffic and the terraces spread out in all directions, you can take your pick of restaurants: some with lobster, some with two-for-one specials, and all of the Greek ones have Apportez Votre Vin signs (bring your own wine).
I pick La Caverne Grecque – not because of its blue vinyl tablecloths or the cafeteria-style dishware (it would seem that all the restaurants buy their glassware from the same supplier, and for a second I wonder if they’re all owned by the same person … probably not) – I pick it because the waiters are older, all male, and more serious than the tight-pink-shirted girl at the one next door.
This restaurant is located in a busy part of the city where the waiter tells me the “bring your own wine” concept was first born. Apparently there only two kinds of liquor licenses in Montreal: either they sell alcohol or they don’t. Mine was the latter, but being unfamiliar with all of the idiosyncrasies (since I’m “That Girl From Vancouver”), I sit down, open the menu, and promptly order a glass of house red. No alcohol? I have to go where? I order my meal and head to the dépanneur in the same block, expecting that my soup will arrive and grow cold while I’m away. Happily, I return with a half-bottle of Italian Rizzoli for $6.75 plus tax (which improves as the night goes on and I consume more of it) and my appetizer has not yet arrived.
I order from the Table d’Hôte menu (all inclusive), and have a very average bagged salad, a less-than-lovely mushroom soup, and a dinner of Loukaniko (sausage), two lamb chops, and one pork and one chicken souvlaki (kebabs), with rice and potatoes. There is a ton of food, all marinated with the same sauce. The chicken is crispy and fabulous, the pork chewy, the sausage a bit greasy, and the lamb scant. It’s missing a side of Greek salad, or tzatsiki and pita, or maybe a hot pepper – something to break up the flavours.
 Other items on the menu include an appetizer plate with taramosalata, tzatsiki, spanakopita, dolmadakia, feta cheese, black olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, and hot peppers ($8.25 for 2 people); from the dinner menu I could have had chicken fillet oregano ($11.95), a 16 oz sirloin steak ($17.95), or 4 lobster tails ($26.95).
La Caverne Grecque is a restaurant where you can enjoy the street life, the terrace, the young guy playing steel guitar, the teenager with green hair. While I’m eating my dinner, a juggler (who isn’t very engaging and who needs a haircut) does a short performance. Later in the evening a panhandler walks up to one of the tables on the edge of the terrace and cracks a joke, gets the whole table laughing with him. My waiter scoots over and asks him to move on. But the man has lifted their spirits and they continue to laugh and joke amongst themselves long after he’s left.
By 8 pm on this Wednesday night the terrace has filled up and by now my waiter and I have bonded. I ask him about Apportez Votre Vin, how does it work, don’t you make lots of money selling alcohol especially if you mark it up 200%? He says it’s all about volume. And while I ponder that the food may also be all about volume, he says that the average table stays 1.5 to 2 hours. He thinks that the success of the restaurants in this neighbourhood – the boom of diners showing up, well-dressed couples carrying paper bags from SAQ, sometimes two bottles for two couples – has led to the nearby section of St. Laurent coming back to life. And that anyone who owned a “bring your own wine” restaurant when the rage first started is now a millionaire.
He suggests with some confidence that it’d be a good time for me to buy a condo in the neighbourhood. --Shelley MacDonald
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