Listening closely, one might hear the final touches of a contractor at work beneath Le Grand Comité during lunch. Down a flight of stairs from the dining room, a basement’s floor is cut into while plates move through the kitchen above.
The disorder is temporary as Le Petit Comité, the restaurant being built below 1445 Bishop Street expected this fall, is going black on black. While Le Grand Comité sits under a glass roof inherited from the former Garden Room—sunlight on pale wood, green velvet, and a herringbone floor—the ‘inner circle’ of LPC is where curtained arches will divide rooms designed to feel slightly disembodied with dark, spare and almost brutalist details meant to make the outside world disappear.
“We want it to feel disused, abandoned—to create a contrast between the bistro and the fine-dining restaurant,” says co-owner Alireza Zareian.
On paper, these are restaurants at opposite ends of the experience, but chef Rémi Lemieux sees one machine.
Le Grand Comité opened quietly in late June as a neighbourhood bistro (and we use that term slighltly lightly given its grandeur) in a part of Montreal that does not readily produce neighbourhood regulars. Bishop Street runs on office lunches, Concordia foot traffic, hotel guests, and people en route to somewhere else. It has restaurants, certainly, but fewer of the places where a person returns often enough for the staff to learn the shape of their week.
That is the opening Lemieux and his partners, Alireza Zareian and David Zamora, are betting on. “We’ve got neighbourhood-bistro prices downtown,” Lemieux said, pointing to how he wants people to come for the ambitious cooking, but also to return for a $15 breakfast. Ferreira, a place he calls his own kind of haunt, is his proof that downtown can sustain loyalty.
“This is the first accessible project I’ve done. Before, people had to pay to travel and pay to eat my food. I didn’t like that.”
Au menu
The menu holds on to roughly 70 per cent of its dishes year-round, leaving the rest to move with the seasons. The fixed portion gives regulars landmarks; the changing portion keeps the kitchen awake. A neighbourhood restaurant, after all, has to offer consistency.
Vegetables from La Charrette and Ferme La Rosace, Gaspor pork, cheese from La Station and Nouvelle-France, citrus from O’Citrus… Lemieux has ruled out the standard shorthand of expensive dining: “We’ll never have truffles. We’ll never have caviar. We want to work with humble products.”
The menu is recognizably bistro without being especially obedient about it. Starters run from a chicken-liver mousse with mead and radish to Kenauk trout with crème fraîche and O’Citrus lemon, while a La Station cheese soufflé comes with Miel d’Anicet honey. Three croques occupy their own section: ham with Alfred le Fermier and béarnaise; the “Big Mike,” with salmon, horseradish butter and ranch; and a Croque-Comité with radish, apricot and beurasse. The main courses move between a vegetable pie served with something described as “almost a meat jus,” pasta verde with ricotta salata, Adrien’s stuffed cabbage, roast chicken from Ferme Antoine and the steak-frites. It is a menu built from familiar forms that are quietly pulled sideways. In terms of their presentation, few places achieve as good a balance between technique and Instagrammability as this place.
Brunch follows the same logic. There are complete meat and fish breakfasts, but also thin crêpes with maple syrup and breakfast ice cream, a mushroom tartine with vin jaune and Tête de Moine, a Monte Cristo and, at the far end, a breakfast filet Rossini. Prassi’s four desserts recur across the menus: semifreddo, an Orange Julep île flottante, sticky toffee pudding crossed with pouding chômeur, and a Montreal cheesecake finished with sea buckthorn at brunch.
Behind the bar, zero-proof drinks are given as much structure as the cocktails—an anise hydrosol Pastiche and a Paloma Café sit beside drinks built from shishito, tomato leaf, beetroot and Quebec wine. Zamora’s wine description is simpler: natural bottles and established appellations, “no snobbery”, often pulled from a Vespa’s below-seat storage converted into an ice bath for bottles.
Some sleight of hand
Le Grand Comité is the polished, repeatable part of the system. Le Petit Comité, when it opens below, will be where the group permits itself to fail. “At the bistro, we’re only allowed good ideas,” Lemieux said. “Down here, we’re allowed bad ones.”
Finish “Le Grand Comité Is a Neighbourhood Bistro Upstairs (With a Secret Society Down Below)”
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