On a Tuesday evening in early April, Bistrot Fortune opened without announcement, and unless you knew to look, you would have walked right past it. That wasn’t by design, it just happened that way, but Phong Thach knew the address.
He had opened his first restaurant there in 2007, cooked for years, and eventually moved on. When the space came available again, he came back—his time with Tony To as chef de cuisine and Carlos Ortiz, his longtime collaborator from Red Tiger, running the floor and the wine. Thirty seats, dinner only from Tuesday through Saturday with a back patio on a plot of asphalt that housed coming-soon parties for friends ahead of the big reveal.
Long time coming
Tony in particular has been thinking about this restaurant for a long time. He and Carlos first crossed paths at Red Tiger around 2016, and even then the idea of building something together was already there.
Tony went on to work at Orange Rouge, then helped open Pichai after COVID. Carlos, who trained as an accountant before deciding that wasn't the life for him, stayed at Red Tiger long enough to become a co-owner of its second location. By the time Bistrot Fortune came together, neither of them was in a hurry to explain themselves.
"It was now or never," Tony says. "You’re never going to get young again."
The result would be food described as modern Vietnamese with Latin American influence, in a space only Montrealers like Phong, Tony, and Carlos could put together.
Tony, for example, grew up in Montreal. He has never lived in Vietnam. There's a concept in Vietnamese—Việt kiều—for the overseas diaspora, and the implication is that if you go back, you're not quite from there either. Tony doesn't frame it as a crisis, but as clarification: he cooks what he knows, and what he knows is this stretch of Jean-Talon Est. There are two established Vietnamese restaurants on either side of them, the Spanish neighbourhood joint Marisol is across the street, and there are taco spots nearby.
As for how it take shapes: The hamachi crudo, already circulating on social media after a few weeks, sitting in a Peruvian aji verde base that Tony built with ginger and lemongrass that ends up tasting, unintentionally, like Thai green curry. The pork salad draws on Chinese barbecue roasting techniques and lands somewhere between Cambodian and Vietnamese in its bones, with herbs and fish sauce doing the heavy lifting. The cucumber salad was an accident—a version kept evolving through tests until someone added black beans, and now it's on the menu. The chicken, sourced from a local farm, gets a lemongrass brine, a long rest, a low oven, and then a fryer.
Keep reading “Bistrot Fortune Cooks Straight Out of Montreal’s Cultural Crossroads”
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