Picture it: a beautiful and historical venue, dozens of round tables, every guest randomly seated. In one of the chairs sits the mayor of Montreal — no one at the head of a table, and no diner has say in who's sitting beside them. It could be a teacher. It could be a titan of industry. It could be you.
The beefsteak, gentrified
The Beefsteak resurfaced in Los Angeles in 2011, when chef Neal Fraser revived it from its Tammany Hall roots at Redbird on a shoestring budget without so much as a walk-in fridge. Fifteen years later, it's a $300-to-$450-a-ticket affair for Hollywood writers, studio executives, and entertainment insiders where the concept has been gentrified along with everything else.
Gentrification isn't always inherently a bad thing. But the whole point of the Beefsteak at the time was for people normally segregated by class to be in the same room. LA's version answers that the same way most gentrified concepts eventually do: what was once a mix of the high and the low is now, essentially, a networking mixer with better food.
The velvet rope and the sugar shack
Montreal already has both halves of this idea, but it's never put them in the same room today. The exclusivity problem isn't hypothetical, or imported from LA, but already home-grown: La Table Ronde runs invite-only industry events here with the same logic as Beefsteak LA's guest list, just with a French accent. But Montreal also already has the historical and current context to solve for scale. The cabane à sucre proved long ago that scale isn’t the obstacle with its communal meal of excess and no pretension, where everyone eats the same menu—even if it's calcified since into something closer to tourist ritual than social leveler.
23 years of seating strangers together
Mélissa Simard is the owner and founder of 'Round Table Tours, which has conducted food tours of the city since 2012. Aside from her work there, she has run a monthly dinner club for the last 23 years that deliberately seats strangers across income, background, and profession with no prerequisite industry affiliation or velvet rope. But even she admits it isn't frictionless.
"You really have to want it," Simard says, since showing up regularly and pulling your own weight at the table is its own kind of barrier, just not one measured in dollars. What a Montreal Beefsteak would really be is those three things, finally in the same room: the cabane's scale married to Simard's social mix.
The lottery, the auction, and the mayor's chair
The bench of talent to actually execute something at this scale is deep. When Canada's 100 Best Restaurants released its 2026 rankings, 28 restaurants on the list were in Montreal, more than any other city in the country, including Toronto (23) and Vancouver (14). And some of these places, including Toqué!, Au Pied de Cochon, and Joe Beef, have been doing this for decades, not seasons. This city's food scene is officially a powerhouse.
So there's the obvious follow-up question: how would this work? Here's how: a general lottery, open to anyone, at a nominal price. Win or lose, the odds are the same for everyone. Separately, a patron auction: the wealthy don't buy a seat; they bid for a chance at one, competing against each other for a finite number of spots. The proceeds fund the room—the fine dining, the venue, the whole production—with whatever's left over going towards civic improvements, for example. Winners can't rebid the following year, so the room doesn't calcify into the same families showing up every time. The only seat reserved by right, not by luck or money, belongs to the mayor of Montreal for civic legitimacy made literal. And once everyone's through the door, no guest controls the room: seating is assigned at round tables, mixed regardless of how you got there. The ticket gets you into the room. It doesn't give you a say in who's sitting next to you.
Finish “Montreal Deserves a Feast Without a Velvet Rope”
The Main is Montreal's city magazine. We write the stories about this city nobody else is telling.
We're independent and reader-supported. Your support keeps us going.
Your email costs you nothing and opens the rest of this story now. It also means the next one reaches you on a Thursday, instead of disappearing into a feed.
No password. No payment. Opens instantly.
Already a member? Sign in
Comments
Welcome to The Main's comments section!
Share your thoughts and join the conversation. Please be respectful and constructive.
No comments yet. Be the first!