I had a sense that Montreal was going to be different the moment I picked up my newspaper. Having arrived in the dead of night in a standard North American limo and driven around very North-American-style streets, I had not glimpsed much of what makes the city so different from its US and Canadian peers. Yet any city in which a daily newspaper supplement of jazz edges out the sports section and the pull-out on autos deserves a closer look.
Montreal was Canada's largest city until the pro-French language laws of the 1970s helped already-burgeoning Toronto take top honours. But Montreal continues to be considered the country's cultural capital. Foreign tourists to Montreal flock to the patchwork of seventeenth-century French buildings in the charming vieux quartier. But savvier visitors from neighbouring provinces and US states converge on the city every weekend to sample its vibrant arts, fine dining and eclectic fashion scenes.
Montreal is, in short, very different from the Canada of picture postcards. Sure, there are Mounted Police but here, they are called gendarmes; there is a mountain but, at 233 metres, Mount Royal is hardly the Rockies; and while ice hockey is still a local preoccupation, festivals celebrating comedy, fireworks, and of course jazz, draw bigger crowds.
Much of the city's difference lies in the history of Quebec, the province in which Montreal sits. Settled by the French 400 years ago, it has a population of seven million people, who have stubbornly held onto a distinctly European way of life despite being located within a Commonwealth country. Today, half of all the wine sold in Canada is bought in Quebec - naturellement, as it's the perfect accompaniment to unpasteurised cheeses in which Quebec excels, despite their being banned almost everywhere in North America. The province's farms also produce foie gras in defiance of US-inspired food laws.
Just as is the case in its big brother, New York, taking a walk around Montreal is the best way to appreciate its bold contrasts. Like New York, the city has a significant Jewish heritage and a multicultural mix that few other big cities can rival, and that has resulted in a metropolis comprising a series of village-like neighbourhoods rather than a sprawl of soulless suburbs.
And just as New York, in the island of Manhattan, has a neat geographical tool with which to divide its residents into two camps, Montreal has a clear-cut dividing line in Saint Lawrence Boulevard. The innocuous street, officially le boulevard Saint-Laurent, separates not only east from west but new money from old, the creative arts from industry and, most importantly, French from English residents.
As I stroll around one village, Le Plateau de Montréal, I am easily taken by its charm. Independent designer boutiques jostle for space on Saint Laurent with cafés, bookshops and specialty stores. The main street could have been transported here from any trendy suburb in Australia. But as I walked further away from The Main, as Montrealers call Saint Laurent Boulevard, I get a sense that Le Plateau is more than just another Prahran or Darlinghurst. In fact, Wallpaper magazine - the Bible for design, architecture and fashion aficionados around the globe - recently declared Le Plateau one of the hippest 'hoods in the world.
Le Plateau has the highest population density in Canada and it's the sheer dint of numbers, often, that makes the area so vibrant. The former working-class suburb still has exterior staircases on its terraced, Victorian-era houses between upper-level units and ground-floor flats, giving the area a distinctive architectural twist.
It is not only the vernacular architecture that reminds me I'm in an historic part of town. Settling in for lunch at one of Le Plateau's - and Montreal's - best-loved cafés, St Viateur Bagel, I am engaged in an argument most locals hold dear to their hearts. "Have you had bagels before?" I'm asked by Ruby, a typical Montrealer of mixed Caribbean, Arab and Scottish ancestry. Talk of Greenwich Village bagels or even of Warsaw beigels is quickly scotched as a great Montreal obsession takes hold.
Montreal, not New York, is the home of bagels, I am told repeatedly and by many patrons. Bagels are hoicked out of the wood-fired oven 24 hours a day at St Viateur, and the café is a great spot from which to watch locals come and go. The dough here is boiled in honey-water before baking to make the dough less chewy, or so they tell me. Served with smoked salmon, cream cheese and lemon, it is indeed sublime.
The Mile End part of Le Plateau is also home to Schwartz Charcuterie Hebraïque. Over 80 years, Schwartz's deli has welcomed pretty much anyone who's anyone in Montreal, from Leonard Cohen to Céline Dion.
More upmarket culinary experiences can be had in the city, too, in the form of the specialised Olive & Olives and glorious Maison Cakao, where Canada's youngest female master chocolatier, Edith Gagnon, works her magic, her little shop reminiscent of Juliette Binoche's in Chocolat.
Le Plateau is home to the bulk of Montreal's animation, film studio and computer-game technicians, who now make up a hefty proportion of the city's workforce. Once, it was the financial hub of Canada: today, the stock exchange's former home on Rue Saint-Jacques (once known as Saint James Street) is now more likely to be deployed as a film set for Hollywood movies. Due to strict city planning rules, five percent of any new development's budget must be spent on public art, and the streets of Montreal contain perfect examples of architecture from almost every period of North American modern history. Those rules, combined with favourable tax laws, mean blockbusters are in production most weeks, somewhere in this city, which has doubled on celluloid for Boston, Chicago and New York - though Robert de Niro let Montreal play itself in The Score.
The workers on these films are a new kind of Montrealer: French-speaking, but equally at ease in English. The city's language battles of the past are now relegated to the past, it seems. Road signs, still, are written only in French but in stores, nowadays, there is translation where, a decade ago, there was none.
The fall of the Berlin Wall made that city's eastern neighbourhoods "cooler" than those of the richer, established suburbs in the west. Likewise, the rise of a new French élite in the 1980s made the western, English-speaking half of Montreal deeply unfashionable. But in recent years, there has been a swing back. The Golden Square Mile, once home to half of all of Canada's wealth, was chosen by Formula One race-car driver Jacques Villeneuve as the location for his ultra-hip eatery Newtown (a translation of his family name) and the achingly cool Crystal de la Montagne hotel is one of a brace of design-led establishments to have opened its doors in the city's west in recent times.
Both sides of a once-bitter linguistic divide get together over summer to party as only Montreal does. Starting with the Grand Prix in June, the city's events calendar bristles with outdoor festivals, held most weekends in summer. In the past, loyalties were divided between celebrating Quebec's national day, Jour St Baptiste, and commemorating Canada Day, which falls a week later.
But truly, both are just a warm-up to the biggest ticket in town: the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. The world's biggest jazz festival, it attracts more than two million attendees annually. In 2008, local boy Leonard Cohen performed for the first time in 15 years and Woody Allen showed off his clarinet skills - but 2009 is the festival's 30th anniversary and people are talking about the prospect of getting Prince, Norah Jones and Aretha Franklin together on one free stage.
As I bobbed back and forth with 100,000 others to the beats of 14-piece a capella group Naturally Seven, recreating the lush studio sounds of today's R'n'B singers, I couldn't help thinking that any city that does jazz this well has a perfect right to devote an entire section to it.
I'd give it a whole newspaper.
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