Take the cheapest pasta you can find. The five pound bag of spaghetti marked down to 99 cents. Take the cheapest, commercially prepared sauce you can find. The extra large can of “tomato sauce” that looks worse than dog food, even on the artfully designed label. Cook the pasta in salted water, heat and add the sauce, and you still have a higher quality product than you usually buy frozen in the supermarket. On top of that, you could freeze that into dozens of portions and save yourself a fortune.
Your Money’s Worth…

Spend enough time in this town and someone’s bound to ask if you’ve been to La Paryse yet. The restaurant has been around long enough to be classified in the “institution” eateries of Montreal, such as Schwartz’s, Moishe’s and so on and so forth. I’ve been told it was located just off St. Denis on Ontario, but no one ever told me in what direction, so when I decided to go there for lunch today I walked halfway into the village in the freezing rain before realizing I was hardly “just off” St. Denis anymore and turned around to trudge back.

I eventually found it (WEST of St. Denis, by the way) sharing a plot with a neighboring micro-brewery in an unassumingly modest location. I felt at home the minute we set foot inside, hung up my jacket and asked aimlessly over the counter if we should seat ourselves. “No! Wait,” I was told, as if I were the first and only to have asked, and waited patiently before being directed to a previously unnoticed back room.
La Paryse…