Montreal sandwich wars

Every life has a few golden moments. I had one today, when I realised I'd eaten two of the best sandwiches in my life in the space of 24 hours.

First stop - Schwartz's Charcuterie Hebraique (3895 Boul. St Laurent), where you'll find great heaps of something called smoked meat, sliced thin and piled on white bread spread with mustard, accompanied by a slightly obscene-looking pickle, some crisp, fresh French fries, and a can of cherry cola. Smoked meat is a Montreal speciality, somewhere between pastrami and a barbecued brisket (but still entirely unlike either), and Schwartz's is where you'll find the city's finest - they've been at it since 1928, and are still in the original location. There's always a queue snaking out of the door. This is not a restaurant you'll be visiting for the decor, which reminded me of the dilapidated fish and chip shops I used to visit with my Grandma at the end of the 1970s back in England, all formica tables and framed, yellowing newspaper cuttings. You're here for the exceptional sandwiches and the meat, smoked daily and piled high in the window.

I'd been warned about unfriendly service, but we found that the staff were actually exceptionally helpful and friendly - try to sit at the bar, like we did, so you can watch the meat being prepared. Ask for your sandwich to come medium or fatty (a lean cut will carry less flavour), chomp down on your pickle to cut through the grease, and make sure that you order a cherry cola, which somehow happens to be the perfect liquid accompaniment for one of these fabulous sandwiches.

One world-beating sandwich joint isn't enough for Boulevard St Laurent. Head for Chinatown, and about twenty yards from the pagoda gates you'll find Cao Thang (1082 Boul. St Laurent - this is the same street you'll find Schwartz's on, but it's a brisk walk of about ten minutes between the two). Cao Thang is a tiny shop - really a counter and a fridge - selling Banh Mi, a baguette stuffed with a gorgeous Vietnamese concoction of roast pork and pork sausage with lightly pickled carrots and daikon, a generous sprinkling of coriander and chillies, all sauced with a garlicky, savoury mixture that smells like heaven by way of Saigon. It's only open for lunch, and there are no seats - we found ourselves sitting on cinderblocks in a carpark across the road and being shouted at by tramps, but so good was my mood once I had chunks of this transcendental (and absurdly cheap) sandwich in my mouth, they might as well have been singing light opera.

Banh Mi isn't that uncommon in North America, although you'll be hard-pressed to find one in the UK. The Cao Thang version is a fantastically good example though - crisp baguette (supplied by the excellent Patisserie Belge) moistened slightly in the middle by the filling. This is one of those dishes where you'll find every bite tasting slightly different - this one full of coriander, the next chillies, the next sweet carrot shreds. (Don't inhale sharply after a chilli-tasting bite. My friend James did and still hasn't shopped coughing.)

This is looking like a great week for food. I'm starting to like this city very, very much.

Cha gio (nems) - Vietnamese crispy spring rolls

When Mr Weasel and I were living in Paris, we spent a lot of our time in one of the city's Chinatowns, along the Avenue d'Ivry. It's more a Cambodia-town or a Vietnam-town than London's Chinatown, which is full of Chinese people and food; France is home to many more Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people than the UK is, and this is reflected in the food.

One of my favourite Vietnamese dishes is these spring rolls, which are very hard to find in restaurants in the UK. Many cultures cook things wrapped in other things - there is the burrito, the Malaysian po pia, the fajita, the crèpe and . . . I suppose the closest English equivalent is the Cornish pasty. The cha gio stands head and shoulders above all of these - it' s got texture and flavour to beat them all to a pulp in any contest of wrapped-up-things you may choose to imagine.

Cha gio get their texture, both crisp and chewy all at once, from the rice paper skins they are wrapped in. You can find these in good oriental supermarkets, and although they're a little fragile when dry, they're very easy to handle and wrap with. The finished rolls are wrapped in lettuce and herbs, making them taste fresh and light.

To make about sixty cha gio, you'll need:

Rolls
225g cellophane (bean thread) noodles
4 carrots, grated
8 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
8 water chestnuts
1 dressed crab
12 raw tiger prawns, peeled and deveined
350g minced pork
1 onion
5 spring onions
4 cloves garlic
6 shallots
4 tablespoons fish sauce (nuoc mam)
3 eggs
15 x 25cm discs of rice paper (available in oriental supermarkets)

Sugar and water for soaking
Oil for deep-frying
Lettuce and mint leaves for wrapping

Sauce
4 cloves minced garlic
½ cup nuoc mam
¼ cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon chili oil
1 diced red chili

Soak the noodles in boiling water and set aside, draining and rinsing in cold water after 15 minutes. Put the mushrooms, water chestnuts, crab, pork, prawns, onions, garlic and shallots in the food processor and pulse until chopped finely. Use your hands to stir in the fish sauce, the eggs, the carrots and the noodles.

Fill a mixing bowl half-full with warm water, and dissolve about six tablespoons of caster sugar in it - the sugar will help the rolls brown and help the sweetness of the carrots come through. Soak a rice-paper disc in this until it's soft and pliable. Cut it with scissors into quarters. Place a dessert spoonful of the filling on the curved edge, fold over the adjacent corners and roll up, as in these photographs.


Deep fry the little rolls (I use a wok, which helps save on oil) until they are golden brown.

To serve, wrap each one in a leaf of lettuce with some mint leaves. Dip in the spicy sauce and do your very best to nibble delicately. Delicious.

Those visiting Paris should run, not walk to Kim Anh (51 Av Emile Zola, 15e, 01 45 79 96), where the nems are . . . pretty much as good as these, only you don't have to do all the work. (I lie. They're even better, and they're served alongside the very best Vietnamese food I've ever eaten.)

Food Court, Oriental City, Edgware

*Update - Oriental City is threatened with closure. For more details and what you can do to help, see this post.*

Edgware. Those who know London will not be moved to thoughts of big white plates glistening with chef-ish morsels when they read that word. They'll think about the the Edgware Road in NW9 as it passes through Barnet and its artery-clogging choice of dodgy kebab shops and the now, sadly, rebranded Munchy Burger, whose logo used to be an anthropomorphic burger with sinister, rolling olive eyes and a lolling tongue made of cheese.

First impressions can be deceptive - Edgware is not all threatening burgers and ancient doner kebab. Hidden about 300m from Colindale tube station, behind a branch of Asda, two car parks and a Mercedes showroom, is a giant Malaysian mall which appears to have been transported wholesale, Star Trek style, from somewhere in deepest Kuala Lumpur. There are shops selling manga toilet paper holders, a place where you can buy an antique Chinese kang to sleep on and a porcelain monkey with LEDs in its nostrils, bonsai shops, a harshly-lit shop selling mysterious pieces of plastic with Japanese lettering, a live lobster emporium . . . and a proper Malaysian hawker centre, or food court, where you can pretend you're on holiday for the afternoon and eat accordingly.

You enter the scrimmage of tables, hang around until you can find the seats you want, and then order as many or as few dishes you like from any of the twenty-odd Malaysian, Tamil, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese stalls clustered around them. On ordering and paying, you will be given a ticket with a number on. When your number flashes, your meal is ready. We went with plenty of change in our pockets and a large appetite.

Today we decided to concentrate on Vietnamese food from a stall on the mall side of the food court, along with some Chinese favourites from the roast meats stall pictured at the top of this post. This is a good place to take children. It is important that they realise that the the undifferentiated chunk of brown stuff on their plate was at one point a duck with a hook in its neck.

About £10 a head is enough to eat yourself silly here. I got some cha gio - the Vietnamese crispy spring roll, sometimes called nems. These are, to my taste, pretty superior to the Chinese variety. Their skins are made from a kind of rice paper, and their fillings include the glass noodles I cooked with the other day, with crabmeat, pork, carrot, different mushrooms, beansprouts, shallots and nam pla, that salty, fermented fish sauce which is used in much of South East Asia instead of soy. It is savoury and salty, and not fishy. I bought some of the rice paper skins in a Vietnamese supermarket in Paris a while ago - these are time-consuming but not difficult to make at home. (Another thing to add to the list for future posts.)

The cha gio are fried in a wok until crisp, and served with lettuce and mint leaves. (The mint in the picture above is Thai mint, a tender and sweet leaf which doesn't grow very readily here in freezing England. When making these at home, I use whatever mint comes to hand from the garden.) A lettuce leaf and some mint are wrapped around the crisp little rolls, the whole ensemble is dipped into nuoc cham, a sauce made from nam pla, sugar, chili and lime. The rice paper wrappers, once fried, are crisp and chewy all at once, and the taste reminds me to ask Mr Weasel to bury me with a bottle of nam pla in order that I'm completely happy in heaven.

I needed something else to dip into this stuff - Banh Xeo, a kind of rice-flour and egg cross between an omelette and a pancake, flavoured with turmeric and filled with crisp beansprouts, prawns and marinaded pork. This too is served with lettuce and herbs to wrap and dip. The plate-sized disc (whose name, charmingly, means 'happy pancake') is fried in a hot wok until crisp, and folded gently around the filling. This one wasn't the best I've had from this stall (the best was sublime, and I'm going to keep trying until they do it again); this pancake was a little wet and more oily than usual. Perhaps the wok wasn't hot enough. It was still pretty darn good, and now nestles somewhere just to the left of my liver.

Mr Weasel opted for Bo Luc Lac (Shaking Beef), a lean, fried, steak dish served with a sweet, soy-based, garlicky sauce. This is served on a bed of Vietnamese salad which is made from mooli and carrot, in a mild, sweetened, rice vinegar, and Chinese leaves. We're always amazed at the quality of the meat here - this dish was made with a gloriously tender piece of fillet steak.

Tomorrow, I'm flying to Delhi for a family wedding, which promises to be larded with squishy, sweet Indian things. If the hotel's promised broadband turns out to work, I'll be updating on the hoof. I am equipped with a suitcase full of medication for every conceivable stomach upset - I hope I don't need any of it.