Friendly B&Bs; of Montreal

Since 1980, Montreal’s hotel rooms have tripled in price to $180 Canadian for a double room in a first-class, downtown hotel. So scores of Montrealers have gotten into the city’s newest cottage industry.

These Montrealers have opened bed-and-breakfast accommodations in their homes. Prices range from $25 to $70 Canadian a night. Most rooms cost $35 to $55, usually without private bathrooms.

(All prices here are in Canadian dollars, worth about 25% less than U.S. currency.)

Some B&Bs; have only one guest room available; one B&B; has 12 rooms to rent, tantamount to a small hotel. B&B; owners usually do all the work in their establishments, taking reservations and greeting guests at the door with friendly smiles, as if tourists were dinner guests.

The owners explain quirks of room door locks, offer front door keys for people coming home late at night, provide extra towels, bars of soap, cups of tea and a few free local phone calls.

All the B&Bs; serve full breakfasts. The minimum spread consists of eggs, croissants, jam, butter, coffee, tea and juice. Some B&B; owners add bacon, ham, spiced meats, peanut butter, cheese, even pancakes and French toast with maple syrup. Breakfasts are served in communal rooms.

Friendly Hosts

B&B; owners often sit down during breakfast hours to chat with the guests, advise them about tours and walks or even air political views. Guests get a chance to become acquainted with each other, too. And the friendliness of the B&B; owners heightens the human element of Montreal.

By 1980 Marian Kahn decided to open Montreal’s first B&B;, when she saw how popular the concept had become in Toronto and Ottawa. She called her venture Montreal Bed and Breakfast. Now she accommodates six people in her home.

Over the years she has acquired a network of other B&Bs; who use her as an agent. She refers guests whom she can’t accommodate herself to her network, other Montrealers who have one or two rooms to rent in their homes and notify the public through Kahn.

She lists her B&Bs; with the Montreal tourist bureau. She can supply about 80 rooms in all parts of town.

Montreal’s tourist bureau tries to maintain an up-to-date list of the city’s B&Bs;, most of them belong to networks, with rooms on or near the beaten paths. From nearly every B&B; you can either walk to mid-town in 15 minutes or ride public buses or metro trains in 20 minutes or less.

It takes 10 minutes to ride by train from Kahn’s house to mid-town. And her house is convenient for visiting St. Joseph’s Oratory, a Catholic shrine. Devout pilgrims, some on their knees, climb a long flight of steps there, believing that miraculous cures occur at the site. And there’s a beautiful view of Montreal from the top of the shrine.

This year Montreal’s newest B&B;, an independent, listed itself directly with the city’s tourist bureau. Welcome B&B; is in a section called Plateau Mont Royal, about a 15-minute walk east of mid-town. A Montreal couple, Allard Cote and Carole Sirols, who opened Welcome B&B;, spent a year preparing their charming, three-story house--on a quiet, tree-lined, residential street--to receive guests.

Reasonably Priced Rooms

Welcome B&B; has space for 12 people in small, clean rooms with firm mattresses, quilts, fluffy towels, TV sets, washbasins and communal toilets and shower/bathrooms, for $35 to $45.

Not far from Welcome B&B;, Bob Finkelstein, a former jewelry maker from New York City, runs Downtown B&B; Network at 3458 Laval Ave., at the corner of Sherbrooke, a major shopping street.

“I knew it would work,” says Finkelstein, who started his service five years ago, “because B&Bs; are the way that I like to travel. Hotels are so expensive. And I enjoy working with tourists.”

In his home he has two guest rooms. His network of other B&B; operators, who rely upon him for referrals, has 72 rooms ranging from $25 for a single to $55 double. (Only Marian Kahn’s network has a few double rooms costing as much as $70.)

Finkelstein’s house is a few blocks south of Welcome B&B;, also on Laval Avenue. And both B&Bs; have the good fortune to be close to Rue Duluth East, a flat-stone, tree- and flower-lined street that has become a glamorous restaurant row in recent years.

Rue Duluth, which crosses Laval Avenue, has a dozen restaurants serving Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Vietnamese cuisines. Hanging plants, mirrors and glass walls decorate all the restaurants, ranging from provincial to ultra-modern in ambiance. Some have outdoor terraces. Alight at night, the restaurants cast a pretty glow into the quiet street between Laval Avenue and St. Hubert Avenue, about a seven-block span.

Economical Feasts

Close to Laval you find the candlelit La Terrace at No. 263, which serves frog legs for $7.95 and two lobsters weighing slightly less than two pounds together for $10.95, more economical prices than you find in Old Montreal’s well-known tourist spots.

At the other end of the Duluth restaurant strip, near St. Hubert, La P’tit Bouffe at No. 536 specializes in some classic French recipes as well as Spanish-Antilles dishes, which are rare in Montreal, rabbit cooked with white wine and chicken broth, seafood stew and paella, ranging from $10 to $14 a person.

Most Duluth-area restaurants open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday and on weekends serve dinner only. But a few vary from that schedule, and so there are always a couple of restaurants open. Some Greek and Italian restaurants serve complimentary Caesar salads as dinner appetizers. Main courses every place run from $5.50 for pasta to $15 for a few intricate recipes, with an average charge of $10-$12.

Also close to Welcome and Downtown B&Bs; is the tourist magnet of Prince Arthur, an intersection of four streets a short walk west from Sherbrooke Metro Station and Square St. Louis, a little park. Prince Arthur’s intersection, a pedestrian mall, has a cluster of restaurants similar to Rue Duluth’s, plus outdoor entertainment such as mimes, dancers, magicians and musicians of all types: country fiddlers, Latin American percus sionists, lilting Canadian baritones.

And Welcome and Downtown B&Bs; are a minute’s walk west of Rue St. Denis, a major street parallel to Laval and crossing Duluth and Sherbrooke. Outdoor cafes, made striking by their trendy customers--casual-looking young Canadians with peaceful appearances--stud Rue St. Denis from Duluth all the way to Old Montreal.

Tourist Mecca

The old part of town became established long ago as a tourist mecca filled with architectural treasures and restaurants. Wall-to-wall boutiques sell everything from Indian handicrafts to fur coats, artwork, jewelry and clothes. It’s a peaceful, half-hour walk from the B&Bs; along St. Denis, past the cheerful cafes to Place Jacques Cartier, a popular pedestrian mall for street entertainers, restaurant terraces and flower displays.

On the other side of town, in Western Montreal, you’ll find two more notable B&Bs.;

Jacqueline Boulanger, owner of Chez Nous, once operated within the Montreal B&B; network but now runs her own. She can house six guests in her home and refers other people to 20 houses with one or two guest rooms apiece. Her house is in a residential area near a metro stop, three miles from downtown Montreal’s shopping and three miles from the University of Montreal. Prices are $35-$40 for singles, $50 for doubles.

In Western Montreal, too, about a 15-minute walk from Sherbrooke shopping, Ginette Houle studies psychology at the University of Quebec and runs Mont Royal B&B; with three rooms for guests and a network of 40 rooms. They range from $35-$45 for singles and $45-$60 for doubles.

Another B&B; listed with Montreal’s tourist bureau is AH Accommodations as at Home. It’s a 45-minute ride by bus or metro from downtown Montreal. So the owner, 62-year-old Portuguese-born engineer Antonio Costa, advertises his three-guest room B&B; as a good place for families with cars. He charges $35 for a double room or rents all of his rooms to a family for $95 a night.

“I tell singles to stay in places downtown. But family-oriented tourists in Montreal love my house and write me thank-you letters saying how much they enjoyed their stay with my family,” he says.

AH and Welcome operate independently of the networks. Welcome B&B;’s owner Allard Cote is trying to interest his neighbors in making a few rooms available to help fill requests for rooms at busy times. If he succeeds, he’ll have a network, too.

On Labor Day weekend he managed to find a small apartment on his street for a couple who had arrived by car from Woodstock, N.Y. As summer ended with bright, warm, sunny weather, Allard and his partner, Carole, sat on a narrow stairway leading up to their front door, a characteristic stairway in many middle-class Montreal neighborhoods, and waved goodby to a few guests while greeting new arrivals.

It’s best to reserve a room at Montreal’s B&Bs;, although sometimes you can find a room at the last minute even on a holiday weekend. Call early in the mornings. If you can reserve, B&B; owners usually prefer one night’s rent as deposit in the mail by check and will take payment in American or Canadian dollars and American Express checks.

Here is a list of Montreal bed-and-breakfast houses and networks:

Welcome Bed and Breakfast, “Le Palois,” 3950 Laval Ave., Montreal H2W 2J2, phone (514) 844-5897. Downtown Bed and Breakfast, 3458 Laval Ave., Montreal H2X 3C8, phone (514) 289-9749. Montreal Bed and Breakfast, 4912 Victoria Ave., Montreal H3W 2N1, phone (514) 738-9410.

Bed and Breakfast Chez Nous, 5386 Ave. Brodeur, Montreal H4A 1J3, phone (514) 485-1252 and (514) 488-3149. Bed and Breakfast Mont Royal, 5151 Cote St. Antoine, Montreal H4A 1P1, phone (514) 484-7802. AH Accommodations as at Home, 101 Northview, Montreal West H4X 1C9, phones (514) 486-6910 and (514) 656-4317.

All have brochures, which they will send you upon request. All are listed with the Montreal Bureau of Tourism Office, P.O. Box 889, Place Bonaventure, Montreal, Quebec H5A 1E6, Canada, phone (514) 871-1129. You can also try the Visitors Information Number, although it is usually busy: (514) 871-1595. Canada now has B&Bs; from coast to coast, which the tourist bureau lists for your information.