Minnibar Opens Downtown Montreal Café With Pizza Omakase

Tongue Bui’s spent the better part of a decade building nightlife destinations like STILLIFE, Jiao, and Flyjin. But somewhere between lockdowns and late nights, an idea started taking shape that broke the pattern: Somewhere to grab lunch.

"Everything I have is more leaning towards nightlife," he says. "I always wanted a cafe, somewhere to hang."

The result is Minnibar, opening on April 30 in the Finale Residences, a residential building tucked near the Moxy Hotel in a corner of downtown that doesn't get much attention (if any) from the restaurant world. For the people who live and work in that stretch between Bonaventure and the Bell Centre, a well-conceived place to eat has been conspicuously missing. Bui saw that, anyway.

Not your hotel mini bar

The name came to him when he first toured the space. The building had a hotel feel to it, and the owner had promised tenants a restaurant on-site.

"Every time you go to a hotel, they tell you the mini bar has this, the mini bar has that," he says. "So I thought, when people want something to eat, they can just say, I'm going to Minnibar."

A casual name for a casual idea: somewhere that works at noon, at three in the afternoon, and at nine at night without making a big deal of it.

The food leans into that same logic. Bui's touchstone is The Corner Store in SoHo, which doesn't commit to a single cuisine and focuses on what people want.

“Our menu is very straightforward," he says. "Everything on it, everyone knows what it is."

A lobster and caviar roll on Japanese milk bread.

Though the options aren’t ordinary; it’s less about frequent flyer grab-and-go options and more evocations of a jetsetting crowd.

Lunch runs focaccia sandwiches loaded with mortadella and burrata or sopressata and smoked caciocavallo, a chicken katsu on Japanese milk bread, and a Caesar with pecorino fondu fritters standing in for croutons. Pizzas come out of the wood oven at both services—a margherita, a four-cheese, a pepperoni with pistachio pesto—and the pasta list includes a carbonara made with guanciale and cured egg and an osso buco lasagna finished with gremolata.

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