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| - There's something just so NDG about this place, you know? The exposed brick, the under-dressed but kinda bougey crowd, a lousy wine list (but a really good imported beer list?), and a sort of strange price-point. It's like if Café Orange took it up a couple notches and became a veggie restaurant. Despite the frankly strange crowd (the kind you can only find adjacent to Monkland village), the *slight* priciness, and the seriously sporadic service, I liked the place.
In terms of food, Ashley's answered to so many of my gripes about vegan food; this is a restaurant that actively features a wide-range of international flavours and veers away from the soup-salad-sandwich-burger formula that most places take. In terms of what I ordered, the crispy rice starter was a hit and I thought the burger was fantastic but my vegan partner qualified it as pretty standard.
The three stars are attributable to the vegan's take on the meal: nothing my manfriend ordered could really be described as much more than meh. The dumplings were also standard and the meatballs were wayyyyyy too soy heavy. By the end of the meal we were both in a gluten/soy-induced coma attributable to only a certain kind of vegan food.
At the end of the day, I love that Ashley's is breaking the current Montreal mould for vegan flavours and dishes. That being said, I also look forward to seeing them evolve into a place that challenges the gluten and soy base to everything and takes their service up a notch. I'll definitely be back!
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