Jardin Tiki, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (restaurant)

Name:Jardin Tiki
Type:restaurant
Street:5300 Sherbrooke E.
City:Montreal, Quebec
State:
Zip:
country:Canada
Phone:514 254-4173
Status:operational

Description:
http://www.tikifish.com/jardintiki.html

For a review and photos of my trip to the Jardin Tiki, click the above link!

Also, here is the link for the Jardin Tiki (and other Montreal hotspots) at the Tiki Bar Review Pages:

http://home.earthlink.net/~tikibars/tiki/tikimont.html

[Edited by hanford to add the type to the subject]

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-07-27 18:05 ]

we drove from vermont into canada to check out Jardin Tiki and the Coconut Inn (which we didn't find, because TRT listed Montreal instead of Trois Rivieres ~ both have Notre Dame Streets.. i had programmed my GPS, but was having difficulties keeping satillite reception..) we very much enjoyed driving around anyways!

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really friendly hosts, knowing we were tourists asked where we were from.. "Seattle" to which he replied "Ah, Fraizer!" The restaurant decor is amazing. lamps of all sorts hang from a grid.

Looks good? Looks are deceiving!
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the onion ring was the extruded onion-paste sort. The chicken strips and chicken skewers were quite good, as were the sauteed vegetables. None of the soups were consumable. the desserts were cute and also inedible.

Our dinner conversation sounded like an episode of CSI Quebec
Todd: "Watch for the bones in this dish" pokes thin pieces of short bones into a pile along the edge of his plate
elicia: squinting "i didn't get any of that, are you sure those are bones? there's so many"
T: "looks like fingers" turns over a bigger, thorax-y shaped piece
e: "could it be a crab?"
T: "crabs don't have bones"
e: "squab? looks like poultry bones"
T: "too small for chicken feet"
e: "what did the sign say? i thought most things were chicken/poultry/poulet"
T: "i didn't see signs"
e: "there's twice as many feet than.. omygod, i bet it's frog."
T: "frog is ok with me. want some?"
e: "yeah, tastes like chicken, right?"
e: "hell no."

i did ask to buy a coffee mug and saucer with the Jardin Tiki logo on it ~ six dollars canadian. its a pity that they don't offer cooked-to-order food, but it is certainly worth the price of the buffet to just sit in a place with such a high TIPSY factor!

elicia

ps: the word for frog is grenouille.

My wife and some friends braved US Customs and some rotten traffic for a long weekend in Montreal. All I insisted on doing was the Jardin Tiki. After an enjoyable day at the Botanical Gardens, it's a short walk down the street to this Tiki Mecca. The restaurant next door was abandoned and falling apart which gave us a fright 'til we went a little further and saw the sign.

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"SOUPER DANSANT SEMEDI" being French for "We can't believe you eat here either".
Enough has already been said about the food here from tikifish and dogbytes for me to say any more than this: There IS a level of cooking below which even all-you-can-eat fans will avoid. They're descending that level now. I was sad to see the outdoor patio looks like it's been permanently abandoned with leaves and debris starting to collect where no doubt happy diners once did. The decor inside is super duper. We arrived right at sundown and I was able to get some great shots. The waitress let me go upstairs to the forbidden (abandoned?) dining room to snap some pictures. She could have cared less!
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This handsome devil was up there too.
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A half dozen tikis like this are put into service as fenceposts.
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This one's wallpaper size. I just got my digital camera and still learning how to use it. This one came out the best of the night shots.

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I could't buy a tiki mug for any price; there were none. Here's my mini review:
Staff: 8
Food: 3
Drinks 5.5 (Mai Tai: 7 Zombie: 4)
Tiki 9

Glad we went but the food was possibly the worst in Montreal where my friend, Chris just the day before had said he'd never had a bad meal.

[ Edited by pappythesailor on 2024-07-29 06:52:02 ]

I wish people stopped bashing the jardin tiki.

I live in Montreal and it is my guilty pleasure to go there. I don't do it in a pretentious way and I take it for what it is, it's been there for a long time, it would need to fresh up a bit. But the food is one from a regular north american chinese food. The mussels are very nice and I enjoy it. Who goes somewhere to critic onion rings anyways?

Samedi souper dansant actually means that people are dancing and enjoying themselves on Saturday night and that's exactly where I will go tomorrow instead of going in flashy places downtown. I like it's simplicity it reminds me of simpler happy days. We don't have other similar ambiances in the area which is sad.

I totally agree with Marika on this one. Beeing from Montreal, I have come to appreciate the Jardins Tiki. Nowhere else in Montreal can you get this kind of atmosphere and even though the food is certainy not the main attraction, It always cheers me up.

By the way they have this fried coconut rice cakes that are absolutely delicious and I've never seen them anywhere else.

Anyway it fels like home...

On a sad note, a friend of mine told me that they are trying to sell the place. As to this date, There is no visible real estate signs yet, no news as to what is gonna happen now...

I live in Montreal too. I remember the real tiki, the Kon Tiki which used to be in the Sheraton Hotel, in it's heyday...I used to almost live there!!! I remember well the various drinks, I used to love the "Volcano", I have several mugs from those days. I loved the Won Ton soup, it was FABULOUS!, and all the food was excellent actually! The ambiance, with hanging boats, waterfalls, and that crazy bar! The bar had a watertank full of fish instead of a padded cushion, all around the whole bar!!! I'll never forget that! OMG! That place started me on this whole Tiki Craze!!! I've been totally nutso over Tiki since I first went there on my 16th birthday! I even got engaged at the Kon Tiki (It temporarily reopened in the New Sheraton Centre, in downtown Montreal, as a very ordinary restaurant-sans all the fun decor- but with the same menu. My hubby knew my passion for the place and all things tiki and proposed to me there, what a lovely memory!)

IMHO, the "Jardin Tiki" is a very sad reminder of the glory days of the Kon Tiki. They may have some of the decor, but there is no comparison to the glory days of the Sheraton Kon Tiki. If I was rich, I'd set it up again, properly, like it was in the 70s yes, I'm dating myself! but who cares! The Jardin Tiki has some of the decorations, but the food really, really sucks. Totally inedible. I've been, we had a few drinks. There was one sad guy playing the accordion (badly) as "entertainment". sigh. As Betty DAvis said..."vat a dump!'. If the owner ever sells, I hope a) I find out about it in time b) I have cash to buy stuff.

Will the glory days of the Tiki Restaurant in Montreal ever come back?

signed, TikiPearlsofTahiti (and here are my Tahitian pearls___
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This girl just wants to be in the tropics!

[ Edited by: TikiPearlsOfTahiti 2007-01-04 11:44 ]

We made a trip to Jardin Tiki in 2005.

They had this ?Steve Crane? fantastic bowl - only 3 left at that point in the restaurant and they hovered each time we got close to finishing the drink!

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I've had this forever. I just realized that I've also owned a scanner for about 9 months. Oy.

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I had a friend living in Montreal for a couple of months and he picked up a few things for my birthday:
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The bowl (which arrived smashed - I glued it back together as well as I could) is Orchids of Hawaii and was apparently no longer in use. They do apparently use the Libbey bamboo mugs. He also picked up a few business cards and a bunch of little, carved toothpicks. I would have asked him to snoop around after those Steve Crane bowls (which obviously came from the Kon Tiki when it closed) but he doesn't know anything about this stuff, and I thought he went over and above on the thoughtful gift as it was! He and his girlfriend liked the decor but didn't say much about the food...

it looks like many of the image links in this thread got lost, so the following are my pictorial offerings. i don't have much more to offer in terms of descriptions, aside from that this place is certainly more of a visual feast than a food and drink feast - although we found the food consistent with what appears to be a canadian strain of chinese food. oh, one more thing - it was a minor hassle to use a credit card here, so consider bringing cash. enjoy!

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Soooo cool!
:cry:
Gracias Johnny $ !
:)

¡de nada!

Great Photos. Mahalo for posting them.

Holy Crap! Nice decor. I'm gonna have to talk the rest of the team into playing another tournament in Montreal.

Wow, what splendor of Tiki detail! I am amazed that it took this long for it to appear on TC, so far I had only seen glimpses of it, I had no idea of the extent of it. Thank you for the thorough documentation and uploading of it, J.D.!

It gives one an idea what a treasure trove of Tiki art the original Montreal Kon-Tiki must have been! But that the Jardin owners kept it all here until now is just as amazing. I mean nobody (except for maybe the Alibi and the Munich Trader Vic's) has kept all those lamps! And the quality Tikis they have! Those original Cannibal carving posts - what relics! I can only compare this place to my discovery of the then intact Islands Restaurant and Hanalei Hotel artifacts from the Luau: A royal tomb of historic Tiki artifacts

The photos also really show how unusual it is to see all this in broad daylight, in a hall-like place, instead of a dark Tiki cave. It proves that open spaces are problematic for Tiki style.

And this makes me wonder if there are any of the owners still around that took over the Kon Tiki decor, to maybe shed some light on the unsolved mystery of the "Sacrificial Altar":
http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=33940&forum=5&vpost=501463

And last, now that I did the Tiki Ti mug in the classic Montreal Kon Tiki "God of the Cocktail" menu Tiki design, I really want one of those menu covers and condiment dishes! :D

very cool Johnny. I've always wanted to visit this place. It's great that they still have the same plates, menus... it looks really old (even the food !!) but yeah, I wonder how it is at night (or in the daytime in winter !) with the lamps working.

Thanks for the pics, JD.

Now maybe people will stop poo-poo (platter)-ing me when I expound on Jardin Tiki's virtues!

Ever since I first posted pics of the it (similar to Johnny's but fewer and smaller) to my old web site in 1997, I've been a cheerleader for this place.

I have always considered it a trans-continental cousin to the Tonga Room: amazing to behold, but tread carefully when considering their food and drink offerings.

Glad to see that it hasn't devolved too much since my visit there over a decade ago. Now I am itching to go back!

glad to share, everybody. i recommend everybody who can, to visit - there is even more to see that is not included in the posted photos. john t., we will let you know if we can make it back up that way in the near future. a night visit is in order.

Thanks for the photos, Johnny$. Amazing place. I'm thinking of visiting Montreal in September (as well as Toronto and Ottawa). It's at the top of my To-Do list.

Managed to stumble across this place last week. Didn't have my Tiki Road Trip book with me and didn't remember it in there. What a cool find! Very nice people, great environment. The kids loved seeing the turtles.

Le Jardin Tiki may be closed/demo'd (to become a home for the elderly):
http://affaires.lapresse.ca/economie/immobilier/201408/19/01-4792750-eddy-savoie-convoite-le-jardin-tiki.php

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Not much time left for the Jardin Tiki. Here is a link to an article in the Montreal Eater with some nice photos Jardin Tiki.

I clipped a few lest the link goes away.

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DC

That last shot is the best one. A wide angle does not make good architectural photography alone.

Man that auction is going to be a madhouse!

:'(

On 2015-03-03 07:23, Dustycajun wrote:
….Here is a link to an article in the Montreal Eater with some nice photos Jardin Tiki.

Oh, and how grand that they got the word "kitschy" into the headline - I would have been worried if otherwise!