La Belle Patate

One of my guilty pleasures is the great Quebecois invention, poutine. I believe it was first made when a customer wanted fries and cheese curds in a bag to go and the restaurant owner said "ca va faire une maudite poutine" which translates to "that's going to make a damn mess!" The addition of a gravy came afterwards and since then, Canadians have been enjoying this delicious mess of just three simple components of fries, cheese curds, and gravy. There's really just a few key things I look for when eating poutine; crispy fries, a well flavoured gravy, and a good amount of cheese curds. I remember as a child eating poutine with my grandmother every Saturday at the mall as a snack before we went home for dinner. Good times, good times.

I managed to purchase a coupon which allows me $20 worth of food for only $10, pretty sweet deal! La Belle Patate serves an array of authentic traditional and specialty poutines. They also serve Montreal smoked meat sandwiches, hotdogs, burgers and more. There's also an all you can eat option for $19.50 which sounds awesome, but I'm not sure if I'd spend that much on fries, gravy, and cheese.

Traditional Poutine (Large) $10

I got the large Traditional Poutine. It was piping hot with tons of delicious, squeaky cheese curds. The gravy was not overly salted (which I do find in lots of poutines). I should have ordered the small or medium size because the large can feed two in my opinion (and I came here on an empty stomach!).

The one thing that did bother me was the crispiness of the fries. I know that the gravy does make the fries soggy, but there was no crispiness whatsoever. I love finding the few fries that are untouched by the sauce and eat those first before digging into the fries that are smothered in gravy and cheese. I personally don't like using russet potatoes for deep-frying. I prefer kennebec potatoes which produce a crispier fry. It looked like the potatoes that were used had too much sugar and over browned without getting a proper crisp to them. I've tried cooking deep fried potato wedges at school and even though you go through the process of double frying them, by the time you get a crisp on them, they get too dark and a bit unappealing.

BBQ Chicken Poutine (Medium) $9.50

The BBQ Chicken Poutine was good too. The BBQ gravy went well with the fries and cheese curds. Again, the fries were the only concern.

The poutines at La Belle Patate are very good. I really enjoyed the fresh cheese curds and gravy and the portions were good. The staff was very friendly and I'm pretty sure I'll be back one day to try their other specialty poutines.