Four days in Montreal: the best eating in Canada, and all of it in French

Start at the bottom of the city, in the twenty or so blocks of grey limestone between rue Saint-Antoine and the water. The street plan here is the French one, laid out before anybody thought of a grid, and the buildings are mostly nineteenth century warehouses and banks put up when this was the financial capital of the country.

Notre-Dame is the reason to come down here first. From outside it is a competent piece of Gothic Revival and nothing more. Inside it is deep blue, gilded, carved out of walnut, and lit like a stage set, which is what its designer intended, having been a set designer. It was finished in 1829, when it was the largest church in North America. Go in the late afternoon when the tour groups thin out. There is a charge to visit and a free service at five.

Then walk uphill to Place Jacques-Cartier, the sloping cobbled square that is the middle of the old town, and let the evening happen. It is full of buskers and portrait artists and priced accordingly, but the view down to the port is the one everybody remembers.

The mountain first, while your legs are fresh. Mount Royal is a two hundred metre lump of intrusive rock left in the middle of the island, and the park on it was laid out in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmsted, who had just finished Central Park and who deliberately made the paths curve so that the climb feels gentler than it is. The lookout on the south side gives you the whole downtown, the river and, on a clear day, the mountains in Vermont.

Come down the eastern side into the Plateau, which is the part of Montreal that people picture: three-storey terraces in brick and greystone, each flat reached by its own iron staircase spiralling up from the pavement. They exist because of a nineteenth century bylaw about setbacks and a shortage of interior space, and they are lethal in an ice storm.

Lunch is smoked meat, and the argument about where is one you will not settle. Schwartz's has been curing brisket on Saint-Laurent since 1928, there is always a queue, the tables are shared, and the correct order is medium fat on rye with a pickle. Walk it off north through Mile End and pick up bagels straight from the oven, then carry on to Little Italy for the market.

Jean-Talon is the biggest open-air market in North America and the one that tells you what Quebec actually grows: strawberries in June, corn in August, squash and cider and maple everything from September. It runs year round, shrinking to a covered core in winter.

Today is the two things that are too big to walk to, at opposite ends of the metro, and the metro handles both easily.

Saint Joseph's Oratory is the largest church in Canada, on the northwest flank of the mountain, and it is a strange building: a stark Art Deco interior under an enormous dome, put up in stages through the first half of the twentieth century around the shrine of a lay brother who was believed to heal people. The crutches left behind by those who walked away are still hanging in the votive chapel, which is either moving or unsettling depending on the day. The middle flight of the outdoor stair is wooden, and pilgrims climb it on their knees.

Then east on the green line to Pie-IX, where the 1976 Olympics left a stadium that took thirty years to pay off and never quite worked. Its leaning tower is the tallest of its kind anywhere and there is a funicular up the outside of it. Next door is the Botanical Garden, which is the better half of the afternoon by some distance: seventy-five hectares, with a Chinese garden and a Japanese garden that are the real thing rather than a gesture, and an Indigenous garden about the plants of the northern forest.

Eat well tonight. Quebec cooking at its most unrepentant is duck, pork, foie gras and maple, and nobody does it harder than the Plateau restaurant that made its name on it.

Keep the last morning short. Breakfast in Old Montreal at the bakery everybody in the neighbourhood queues at, then spend an hour underground.

Pointe-a-Calliere is built directly over the excavated foundations of Ville-Marie, the 1642 mission that became the city, and you walk through the actual archaeology: the first Catholic cemetery, a stone sewer that was the river the town was founded beside, the footings of the customs house. It is the one museum here that changes how the streets outside look on the way to the station.

Gare Centrale and the metro to the airport bus are both a short taxi or a twenty minute walk from the old town.