Tel. 864-5115. Hours: Mon - Wed 11:30 AM - 2:15 PM, 5:30 PM - 10:00 PM; Thu 11:30 AM - 2:15 PM, 5:30 PM - 10:30 PM; Fri 11:30 AM - 2:15 PM, 5:30 PM - 11:00 PM; Sat 5:30 PM to 11:00 PM. Licensed, all major cards.
 f you are accustomed to paying restaurant bills with fives or tens or even twenties, then this is not a place for you. Lunch for three, not including tip, was $383.
It was my third visit in this past year, so I can almost consider myself a "sotofessional". In fact, my friend, who picked up the tab three times in a row, should be a Soto shareholder, were it not that he already holds the position of sotommelier, and he has the belly to prove it.
The third guy in our party spends every free moment he has in Japan or on his boat in Longueuil, so I will just call him the boat guy, because resto spies never reveal real names.
The three of us went incognito—we were the only three guys in the place not wearing a suit.
Soto's web page reveals a rich and very original menu, which is almost entirely centered around seafood.
The sotommelier ordered a cold sake, and the alert waiter, sensing an opportunity for rapid promotion, suggested a special sake from the Morimoto restaurants that arrived just a few days earlier. This was the key decision of the day, because so much Morimoto flowed to our table that the dreaded walk back up the steep Beaver Hall Hill to downtown after lunch felt like a victory lap. The sotommelier promised to call his first child Morimoto. Soto's sake list is extensive and unique in Montreal. More and more diners are discovering and enjoying cold sake, so please read these instructions from the Kunizakari Sake Museum:
"Approximately 5 ml of sake is taken into the mouth, and held for 2-5 seconds to judge its flavor. The sake is rolled on the tongue and judged as being heavy, thin, sweet, salty, clean, or dirty." The sake museum does not explain what to do in case the sake is judged to be "dirty".
We started with a wild yellow tail (hamachi) appetizer, delicious thin carpaccio-style slices of raw fish in a spicy slightly sweet sauce. This was followed by more appetizers: Gratin Alaska (half shell king crab legs gratin topped with enoki mushrooms and miso), Shiitake Ebi Tempura (a dung-style ball with mushrooms and shrimp inside, and a dash of a what is announced as a caviar cream sauce), and Uni Hotate (a pyramid of fresh scallops covered with a sea urchin and salmon roe in sake sauce). On an earlier visit, I had TaruTaru, an unforgettable tartare of tuna or salmon.
 We ended our lunch with sushi à la carte. The boat guy, one of the main sushi connoisseurs north of Longueuil, mumbled something about how good the "uni" were, and quickly returned to Morimoto for more inspiration. The unagi (eels) were excellent, just the right lukewarm temperature and black-brown-beige color and texture. There were also superb crunchy salmon skin rolls, and various kinds of clams, all of uniform quality.
And of course, the extras make the meal—generous portions of ginger and heaps of wasabi, a very potent aphrodisiac. I suspect that this is a secret plan on the part of Soto's owner, who is renting out rooms upstairs by the hour.
The thought of spending quality time in a room just with the boat guy and the sotommelier made me lose my appetite towards the end of the lunch. No, I am making this up of course: Soto does not have rooms upstairs for apres-wasabi encounters. They will deliver the wasabi with a waiter or waitress directly to your hotel room downtown.
No, that's not true either. The only thing I remember is the victory lap.— Reviewed by RestoSpy
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