Bistrot À Franky Gives Francis Blais a Dining Room of His Own

Fresh cream from the dairy, buttermilk, room temperature, sits out for five days before it becomes a sauce. It then thickens into a crème fraîche that Francis Blais asserts cannot be bought in Quebec. Then five peppers, one African, one Indian, one Quebecois, balanced so that one brings heat, one brings mint, one numbs the tongue. A filet aged on the bone gets crusted in them and roasted. Armagnac in the pan. The crème fraîche goes in last, in quantity, and cooks down until it caramelizes.

"I understand it's just beef and sauce," Blais says at the end of his explanation of his recipe, “but I could easily talk about it for ten minutes."`

Filet au poivre’s a dish that, in its modern form, has been on French menus for a century and change. It is also a decent preview of what Bistrot à Franky is going to be when it throws open its doors to the public at 112 Bernard Ouest in the Mile End on October 12: Familiar food taken apart and rebuilt by a chef who has spent the last six years doing the opposite.

Blais cooked at Le Mousso, became the first Québécois chef to win Top Chef Canada when he took the title in season eight in 2020, and co-founded Menu Extra, the roving dinner company he built with sommelier Alexis Demers. Today, Menu Extra is firing on all cylinders with as many as 300 to 400 events a year, a different menu every time, often with brand work that Blais describes as creative scenography that also happens to feed people. Some of those deals run to seven figures. It has been expanding into Toronto.

So why would a man who built that sign for a building? Part of the answer is that he did not want to make Menu Extra sit still. "I find myself sometimes, even in really long tasting restaurants, bored at one point," Blais admits. Reproducing the same tasting menu every night would have bored him faster. The creative load already lives at Menu Extra, where things change with every booking.

Bistrot à Franky is simpler. "This place is Franky's house," he says. "I'm welcoming you and you're a guest at my place, and I'm spending the night with you."

He wanted somewhere his family could come, where people could turn up three times in a week, where he could see himself staying put. Bistros are, by his account, where he likes to spend his own evenings, so the first restaurant he has ever opened under his own name is the kind he would choose as a customer.

Two years in the making

The building took about eight months to buy. Blais has had the keys for roughly a year and a half, and construction was still wrapping up when we spoke.

Zébulon Perron drew the plans for the room, and then Blais spent another eight months not quite recognizing himself in it. Not a criticism of Perron, he is careful to say. He just could not translate what he wanted into the language a designer works in. So he brought in a longtime friend, the director Xavier Dolan, to do the translating as art director on the project.

Blais frames Dolan’s work on the bistro as the framing of a film. A director builds the world the story lives in, then goes corner by corner through the materials, the artwork, the feeling of walking through a space. Dolan wrote the brief that Perron could draw from, then stayed to supply details.

What they landed on is 80 seats in a 2,000 square foot dining room, and it is almost entirely white. Metal, beige, pale walls, and brightness aside from pops of red that make up the seating.

This is deliberate. Today, the job requires him to talk about his food and his companies constantly, but this isn’t in keeping with who the chef feels he really is. As a teenager he had no idea who he was or what he liked, and figuring out food, with help from people generous enough to share what they loved, is what got him out of it.

"The true Franky, the real Franky, is an introverted person that loves others to take place and make the night what it is," he says.

So the room is pale because the guests are the colour. Tables are set pieces. On the walls are original pieces he and Dolan bought together, including work by Rebecca Munce and Delphine Hennelly, with photography by Fred Gervais. Music stays low and the room is insulated so as to amplify the natural soundscape of the restaurant. "The goal is to hear the voices," he says—not conversations, but voices.

The theatre from Menu Extra survives, but it changes character. "There's going to be a lot of theatre," he says, "but the essence is to feel like home. So you need a lot of realness." At an event, service is choreographed to the second. In the bistro it is closer to reading a table. "It's about understanding people, talking with people, making them feel special," he says. "Make them feel that they're at the right place at the right moment, that we understand their needs, and that they're having fun."