I’ve never been to Montreal but I don’t see anyway that the food could compare to NO. I was there for a conference last year and on the big screens they had a PowerPoint presentation showing and one of the slides said that, according to the “travel industry”, NO ranks third in the world for restaurants, behind NYC and Paris. I ate there for a week and never had a bad or even mediocre meal.
We were there in September and it was oppressively hot.
Man this is HARD.
My friend veers towards Montreal, simply because she has been to NO before. But that was 12 years ago and she wouldn’t mind going again either.
I tend towards NO, simply because the average European hears so much more about it. I have heard Montreal is very cool from a lot of people, but it just hasn’t gotten as much press in books/films/songs etc to entice one in. I probably have some wildly overromantised notions about the place, but still.
HEAT is a major one when thinking about NO. For complicated reasons, any dates outside of Summer are going to be tricky, at least in the short to medium term. I live in Ireland and extreme heat is emphatically NOT something we deal with often out here. I wouldn’t mind catching some, but this trip might mean too much of a good thing. I did go to Thailand once in Summer and coped well with it then. I’m also the kind of tourist who doesn’t like to run around like crazy in an dazed effort to see everything. One hour of seeing, three hours of lunch is more like it. But I can see the weather factor diminishing the enjoyment significantly.
A difficult one… 
Because it’s not in the U.S., that’s why.
No, your notions are probably right. 