Montréal serves up a surprising array of off-season delights

There’s cold, then there’s winter-in-Canada cold. The kind where I’m jamming hand-warmers into my ski gloves — yet still somehow my fingers go numb — and snowflakes keep their intricate patterns as they scatter over my clothes (back home in comparatively balmy England, they’d melt instantly). But what did I expect? I’d made it my New Year’s resolution to travel off-season. Think Rajasthan in the summer monsoon, Sicily’s midwinter citrus harvest, Portugal’s Atlantic Coast when the record-breaking waves roll in come November.

I’m not the only one with this idea. More than 58 percent of Americans now say they’re likelier to travel during off-peak season to avoid crowds, according to a survey, while inflation is further fueling the trend for taking trips at less conventional times of year. So that’s how I found myself in Montréal in early January, when temperatures average 16°F, making it one of the coldest cities in North America. The steely skies typically dump more than six feet of snow each winter and ice floes form on the St. Lawrence River.

But the hardy Québécois have found ways to keep the bleakness at bay. A mix of cockle-warming culinary culture, illuminating festivities and blood-pumping activities (plus a bit of ingenious urban planning) can make winter in the city a sleeper hit. That, after all, is the other benefit of out-of-season travel: besides bagging a bargain flight and seeing the sights, you tend to get more of an insight into the authentic culture of a place, the character of its people. In this case, Canadian wintertime survival strategies.

Go to ground

Just like an iceberg, much of Montréal lies below the surface. An entire underground city (officially called the Réseau express métropolitain, or RÉSO) was built in the 1960s to let citizens get around during harsh winter weather conditions. Some twenty miles of pedestrian passageways link hotels, universities, offices and shops. No excuses for staying in, then. Then there’s the speakeasy-style bar scene — from Cloakroom, a twenty-five-seater hidden in a high-end menswear store, to bar-within-bar L’Orangerie, tucked behind a “magic” bookcase inside Soubois, a clubby restaurant that is hard to get into in its own right. Finding your way into these venues is half the fun: #followtheduck to the Coldroom in Montréal-Vieux, puzzle out which brick will make the concealed door swing open to The Walls Have Eyes in Quartier des spectacles, while the neon pineapple points the way to Chinatown’s Le Mal Nécessaire.

Indulge your sweet tooth

Sugar rushes meet hearty gravy-lavished poutine and restorative French onion soup in winter dining, Québec-style. From late February, you can see maple sap being tapped at rustic sugar shacks a couple of hours outside the city and smell the fragrant steam as it’s boiled into syrup. Maple taffy stands start appearing around town, pouring the sweet stuff onto fresh snow in neat little rows — find it at Parc Jean-Drapeau and at the Jean Talon Market. Before then, enjoy the syrup slathered on a stack of pancakes at Arthurs Nosh Bar, in a donut double- whammy with maple glaze and candy bits at Trou de Beigne on Rue de Saint-Zotique East, or stirred into hot chocolate at bean-to-bar boutique Avanaa. Thank goodness for those forgiving layers of knitwear and down; beachwear isn’t a today problem.

Get your skates on

It’s no secret than Canadians are keen on ice skating and Montréal alone has a jaw-dropping 260 rinks to choose from. One new addition is a 2,788-foot illuminated skating trail in Sainte-Catherine, just south of downtown Montréal. There’s also a packed calendar of on-ice activities and a buzzy après-skate culture: anyone for a cardio-on-ice workout, Latin ice dancing or Valentine’s Day skate-and-date event? All three are offered at the Bonsecours Basin rink in the Old Port.

Creature comforts

If all else fails, hunker down in a swanky hotel. The city’s Golden Square Mile may lack the charming architecture of Vieux-Montréal, but it’s home to arguably the finest hotel in town, Four Seasons Montréal. Behind a black glass facade, the hotel is sensuous, labyrinthine and unashamedly scene-y. Marcus Restaurant + Terrace, helmed by Ethiopian-born Swedish-American celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, serves up regal platters of raw Princess scallops, king crab and Prince Edward Island oysters on ice, a luscious white-truffle tagliatelle and ruby-red slivers of tuna tartare, followed by a mouth-watering dessert cart. On weekend evenings, the skirts are short, the heels are high and music is loud in this marble-decked hotspot. Bedrooms are a similarly sleek, contemporary affair — a velvet chaise longue poised beside the floor-to-ceiling windows, four-poster bed and free-standing, egg-shaped bathtub, with a palette of powder pink, dove gray and chrome.

Later you can take your wind-flayed, vitamin D-deprived skin down to the Guerlain Spa, where signature “Imperial” massages involve selecting a scent from four destination-inspired aromatherapy oils (warming vanilla notes whisked me away to a Tahitian beach), before stimulating the circulation with Kneipp hydrotherapy wading pools in the relaxation zone. You could happily spend a weekend in this hotel without venturing outside at all — drifting from indoor sky-lit swimming pool to the cocktail bar (try the coffee and cardamom-laced Kapali Carsi) to the attached Holt Renfrew Ogilvy department store to peruse Canada Goose parkas and faux-fur-lined Moon Boots.

One block over, Leonard Cohen gives his Mona Lisa smile from a towering monochrome mural. Born and raised in the city, he knew its seasonal extremes well. “In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth,” he writes in the 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, describing how locals raise a special hallelujah on the thawing streets each year: “The winter has not killed us again!”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2024 World edition.