The nice part about Manhattan is you can always find something and somewhere to eat, no matter where you are in the city. On this brisk, cold night, my partner was running errands in Soho, so I was tasked with looking up something. Of course, it takes me about 30 minutes to find something, and Osteria Morini is what we ended up on. Even though they had restaurant week menus, we decided to just order off the regular menu.

It’s been difficult to find decent Vietnamese restaurants in general in NYC. A lot of them just don’t get the broth in pho right. This one seemed like a more upscale version of general Vietnamese cuisine, and I saw it open less than a year ago on Yelp. It was tough at first to walk in a few times, so fortunately the hype subsided, and I was able to get an easy reservation on Friday at 5:30 PM for 2 people.

For our final dinner of our trip on this very frigid New Year’s Eve in Montreal, I made a reservation at Monarque. Monarque is ranked 16 on Canada’s Best in 2023. They have 2 sides of the restaurant: one is a brasserie and the other is a more formal dining room. We sat in the dining room, which offered a 4 course menu for the night. Our area was a corner spot, where we had plenty of room to also place our jackets and bags without having it coat checked.

We found this coffee shop near our hotel, and it received high ratings from all sorts of traveler sites. We decided to wake up early and give this a try to see how it could be different than Au Pain Dore that we visited a few days ago. We walked in at 8:30 AM, and there was no line but it was full of individuals sitting down sipping coffee.

Due to a last minute cancellation from Ile Flottante because they decided to shut down to give holiday break for their staff, I had to scramble to look for a reservation to book for our trip to Montreal. I had created a verbose document describing fallback plans on which day should there be problems. Montreal Plaza was one of the few for this day. It was ranked 21 on Canada’s 100 Best.

Despite our hotel offering complimentary breakfast, there is no shortage of delicious coffee shops around the area. Over the next few days, we had some ideas of coffee shops to try out. This particular bakery is located within some fashion store, but it’s opened pretty early. We were able to walk in around 8:30 AM on a Saturday without any foot traffic. This small bakery boutique chain was first born in 1956, and it has continued to expand locations over time.

I stumbled onto this restaurant as I was looking for a special Montreal restaurant for my partner’s birthday. This came up as I was looking into gastronomy. The ingredients and menu looked interesting in that it had some whimsical tones to it, but also being a restaurant that had stood the test of time for at least a decade. In 2018 right before the pandemic, it was voted as the best Canadian restaurant.

My partner has lusted for Portuguese chicken for some time for some reason. Essentially, it’s just wood fire-cooked chicken. You can expect lots of woodsy flavors, and supposedly a lot of juicy flavors as well since you’re sweating the chicken. We saw Phil Rosenthal from “Somebody Feed Phil” on Netflix come here and have a fantastic time. The real big question though for me is his palette similar to mine (or ours).

This was the primary reason for us to come to Toronto. My partner saw this restaurant somewhere, and has been yearning for this for a few years. Don Alfonso 1890 is located near the top of the Westin hotel that lies next to the water. We have not been to a Michelin Star Italian based restaurant, so this was something for us to be excited about. In addition, Canada has a “100 best” restaurant list, and in 2023, they rated this restaurant 35 out of 100.

We planned to stay in Toronto for only 3 nights. On night 2, we decided to try this restaurant since it also had baked alaskas which are my favorite dessert. As mentioned previously, Toronto was a fairly dead city on December 25 and 26. We wanted to make reservations at Michelin Star restaurants, but they either were unavailable or they canceled my reservation because they wanted to give staff a break for the holidays.