The Best New Restaurants in Montreal [October 2026]

Bistrot à Franky is Francis Blais's first restaurant under his own name, on Bernard in the Mile End, and it puts the Top Chef Canada winner and Menu Extra co-founder behind bistro classics instead of tasting menus. Half the menu holds to the canon, including œufs mayo, os à moelle, sole meunière and a pâté en croûte carved at the table, while the other half moves with the kitchen. The cellar runs to 3,000 bottles, mostly Burgundy with depth in Jura, Loire and Quebec, overseen by sommelier Alexis Demers. The 80-seat room was designed by Zébulon Perron with Xavier Dolan art directing.

Riposte took over the old Nozy room in Saint-Henri, with Julien Betancourt and Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano behind the project and chef Matthew Finn, who cooked in British Columbia and Berlin, in the kitchen. The food is modern European with a Spanish accent, running from pintxos and gildas to raw beef with ras el hanout hollandaise and a Berkshire pork platter with two-year-old membrillo, most of it built on Finn's library of ferments and cures. The bar keeps about 18 bottles, mostly fruit distillates, and the wine list skips the usual French defaults.

Frango's is the Little Burgundy rotisserie in the room that used to hold HENI, run by Soufian Mamlouk with Arjang Sadighi, HENI's former chef, on the grill. The piri-piri recipe and technique came from Bocado Grill on the South Shore, whose family advised on the project. Birds marinate overnight in paprika and a house spice mix, go on a gas rotisserie, then finish over charcoal basted with a reduction of the day's chicken fat and bones cut with butter and miso. Ribs, a chorizo and chicken club and a piri-piri poutine fill out the rest.

Cu Lắc sells bánh mì through a window onto the Bernard sidewalk, the second counter from Wendy Tran after her Bishop location. She grew up in Vietnam and found Vietnamese restaurants here stuck on older recipes, so hers borrow freely, from jerk-spiced oyster mushrooms with mango chutney and Quebec corn to lapsang-infused chicken with chipotle mayo, with a classic of slow-roasted pork belly, chả lụa and pâté holding the line. Most of the menu turns over every couple of months, and the baguettes are baked to their own recipe by Joe la Croûte.

Vivant makes sourdough al taglio on a quiet Plateau block, run by siblings Idir and Nadia Saïdani with help that punches above the format: chef Stelio Perombelon shaped the vegetable side of the menu and Naples-born pizzaiolo Vladimiro Barbato settled the dough. The crust is light and well fermented, the caprese with bufala mozzarella is the one to order, and the salads and crudités get as much attention as the pizza. Wine is private import and mostly natural, and there are about 20 seats with no reservations.

Mayo 28 is a smash burger counter on Parc between Saint-Viateur and Bernard, set up in a former jewellery shop with eight seats and most of the business going out the door. It comes from the group behind Tordu, 30 Février and Café Grace, including Daniel Safi, Khaled Abdelfattah and Khalil Harb. Beef is ground fresh daily and served on Martin's potato rolls, with three house mayos, signature, chipotle and truffle, doing much of the work across the N°28, the Classic and the Truff. Shoestring fries and poutine on the side, plus house iced tea, lavender lemonade and carlota for dessert.

The Mano Cornuto team spent six years trying to find a home for the late-night bar they actually wanted to run, and the old AYLA room on Richmond is it. Small plates across Italy, Portugal, Spain and France, pasta portioned so you order two or three, pizza finally coming out of the oven AYLA never used. The bar is forty per cent longer than the one it replaced and built for talking to strangers, nearly half the room is held for walk-ins, and the kitchen runs until two.

Charles Dumais spent six years in the Toqué! group before concluding that what he wanted to cook was a burger. Croquette is the result, a modern diner in the merged rooms of Bonheur d'occasion and its old deli: charcoal-grilled patty, pepper onion compote, Charlevoix emmental, horseradish mayo, house bun. Around it, a baloney club sandwich, guinea fowl in gravy, triple-cooked fries, beef tartare with bone marrow. A poultry dry-aging room sits in view of the tables and you can pick your own bird. Cocktails stay cheap, including an eleven-dollar martini.

Fifteen seats, two owners, one blackboard. Maxime Latapie and Baptiste Boyer met in the kitchen and dining room of Portus 360 and built the smallest version of a restaurant they could run alone: he cooks whatever Jean-Talon Market has that morning, a few starters and a couple of mains deep, while Boyer pours the wine, by the glass or in quarter and half-litres. The room is second-hand French bistro, assembled by Boyer himself. Book online for four or fewer, call for more, or take a bar seat and skip the question entirely.

Pizzeria Nonnina is the second act from Massimo Cappellano, whose sandwich and pastry shop has anchored the other end of the same Lachine building since 2023. Different format here: a counter with no seats, 20-inch New York pies sold whole or by the slice, and slices that hang off the plate. Eight options, from a margherita finished with basil pesto straight out of the oven to a vodka-sauce NYC with bacon and caramelized onion. Bomba, ranch and hot honey for customizing. Thursday to Saturday only, with the waterfront a short walk away.

The bao are the point: pork-filled, crisp-bottomed, thick-skinned where the steamed version is delicate, and loaded with enough broth that the first bite is a hazard. John Xue built the Toronto original in 2018 around a 400-square-foot kitchen, and that discipline shows in a menu that stays short. Order the scallion oil noodles and the wonton soup alongside. It's the chain's first address outside Ontario, it's on Bishop, it takes no reservations, and the line has already found it.

Rémi Lemieux cooked at Osteria Francescana and Le Bernardin before setting up on rue Bishop, and it shows in the details: a soufflé built on Miel d'Anicet honey, morue with soufflé stuffing and saffron, an île flottante that tastes like the Orange Julep. The Michelin guide noticed in its first Montreal year. But this is a bistro at heart, with croques, steak frites, a burger that sells out nightly, and Quebec farms all over the menu. The wine list splits the difference between natural juice and serious appellations, minus the attitude.

The Knuckles team's Park-Ex pizzeria honours co-owner Matthew Shefler's grandfather, a Bari-born pilot who slung pies in the Congo, and the room channels that memory with his paintings on the walls and pews from a dwindling Sainte-Claire congregation. Chef Vincent Lévesque-Lepage works his dough Neapolitan-style, bakes it New York: a three-day cold ferment, then a seven-minute ride to a shattering bottom and chewy crumb. Skip the mortadella playbook for the loaded-potato white pie or the underdog marinara, and note the house rule: whole pies stay under $40.

Elliot Latendresse cooks Chinese food that doesn't answer to a region: cumin lamb skewers off the charcoal, marinated cucumbers, you tiao with soy cream, and dough worked by hand into noodles, wontons, pancakes and fritters. Quebec produce turns up wherever the season allows. The room on Marie-Anne belongs to Thé Jinjin during the day, the tea counter run by his partner Wenhui Zhang, and to him at night, with a playful wine list and Chinese spirits alongside. Small, and walk-in only unless you're six or more.

Crosta has been selling out of pizza since its June 2026 debut on Saint-Viateur, and the crust explains the lineups: a long-fermented sourdough that chef Josh Michael describes as a Montreal-New York hybrid, airy and nearly hollow inside, crisp underneath. Michael runs the open kitchen for longtime friends Shawn Giannone and Andrew Hanna, who dreamed the place up after a New York pizzeria crawl, and nothing comes from a can: the hot honey hides ten spices, the house ranch starts with crème fraîche made on site. Order the potato pizza with bacon jam.

Eight seats, one counter, and a sixteen-course evening menu: Maison An Omakase, opened on Avenue du Parc in 2026, is as intimate as dining gets in Montreal. Chef An Doan, among the first women to helm an omakase in the city, spent two years training in Japan before folding her Vietnamese heritage into the form, most memorably in a pho chawanmushi that steeps the Japanese egg custard in the broth's signature aromatics. Every course comes with a story from the chef herself, which is precisely the point of sitting this close.

Beyt means house in Arabic, and the cave à manger that Anthony Gebrayel and Angélique Custeau opened on Saint-Laurent in 2026 lives up to the name: a 34-seat room of exposed stone, glass block and Lebanese-inspired arches where you can drop in for a coffee, a glass of wine or a long apéro. Custeau's list leans on private imports and small-batch artisan wines, while the kitchen nods to Gebrayel's Lebanese roots with lamb skewers with za'atar yogurt and stuffed eggplant on labneh. Bottles to go seal the neighbourhood-fixture status.

Phong Thach (born in Vietnam to Cambodian parents, raised in Quebec) and Carlos Ortiz (Montreal, Salvadoran roots) run Villeray's Bistrot Fortune, where Southeast Asian technique flirts openly with Latin American flavour. A hamachi crudo in aji verde that reads like Thai green curry, a crispy pork salad built on Cambodian bones, a bò kho reframed as a bistro plate. Twenty-five seats, mains under thirty dollars, a short menu that shifts when the right ingredient walks in.

Camilo Lapointe-Nascimento won Les Chefs! in 2020 at 23, the competition's youngest-ever winner, and spent the years since running Menu Extra, a pop-up dining experience he co-founded. Cam's Déjeuner on the Plateau is his first permanent address, and the format is deliberately tight: four breakfast sandwiches on fresh spelt and poppy seed bread, each built around egg, smoked cheese, and pickled jalapeños, with bacon, smash sausage, or vegetable variations. Tater tots, filter coffee, espresso standards through chai. A focused debut from someone who clearly knows what he's doing.

The second outpost of Yann Levy's retro-futuristic Japanese universe lands on Saint-Viateur East as a looser, more convivial proposition than the downtown ramen bar that started it all. Named for Kisho Kurokawa's 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, the room channels that same Metabolism-meets-cyberpunk spirit into something built for lingering: shareable izakaya plates, serious sashimi, sake, and wine. Levy, who has traveled to Japan annually since 2012, designed the concrete-and-green-leather space himself. Seasonal specials and a konbini-inspired lunch card round it out.

Twelve years as executive chef at Maison Boulud, then eight more in planning: Riccardo Bertolino and sommelier Isabel Bordeleau took their time with Osteria Berto, and it shows. The 70-seat room on Henri-Julien, designed by Mise à jour studio, moves through finger food, starters, pasta, and mains: vitello tonnato, stracci alla finanziera with white ragù and guinea fowl liver, tortelli verdi with ricotta di bufala. Bordeleau's wine list leads with Italian producers. The house also holds the only aceto balsamico tradizionale aging batteria in Canada.

The team behind Myers has returned with something more ambitious: a gastronomic address on Van Horne built around chef Grégoire Routy, who trained in Michelin-starred kitchens in France and England before spending time at Raele in Copenhagen. The menu is short and precise, four mains anchored in local, seasonal product with Mediterranean and Provençal inflections: snow crab, asparagus, sea bream, duck, rhubarb, herbes de Provence. Designer Kyle Adams Goforth has given the former Boxermans space a warm, considered makeover, and the wine list holds its own alongside the kitchen. The kind of room you book when it matters.

Bous brings Persian cuisine to a contemporary downtown room where geometric elements, muted tones, and references to Iranian architecture and ceramics do as much work as the kitchen. Chef Hamed Masoumi drew on travels through Iran to build a menu spanning regions and techniques: Golden Tahchin (layered saffron rice cake), Kashk-o-Bademjoon (smoked eggplant with cured yogurt), and a pomegranate and walnut Fesenjoon with duck leg confit. Fragrant, meant for sharing, and more considered than most.

The Old Port's newest Italian table calls itself a cucina sociale, and Gioia De, opened in 2026, plays the part: shared plates, an easy-flowing room, and head chef Jamie Lee Gerosa (roots in Campobasso and Morbegno, years in Montreal kitchens) cooking with generosity as the organizing principle. Puglian burrata comes classic, salty or sweet, the mafaldine carries a white boar ragù, and the pepperoni pizza gets crisped edges and hot honey. Oysters with negroni mignonette set the tone: familiar Italian pleasures, served with a wink.

Opened in 2026 for Hôtel William Gray's tenth anniversary, Freddi takes the classic hotel bar as its starting point, running from breakfast through late night beneath a glass roof. Chef Konstantin Chakhnov, who also helms Maggie Oakes next door, built the menu around Japanese inflections: wagyu tartare with bone marrow, miso-glazed black cod, yakitori duck, signature temaki. Cocktails lean on sake, shōchū, and Japanese whisky, with Quebec spirits alongside.