Can Montreal’s Korean Food Scene Move Beyond the Familiar?

Whenever non-Koreans ask a Korean where to find the best Korean restaurants in Montreal, a handful of names come up. But the conversation almost always leads to one of two answers: come to my mom’s house, or go to Toronto.

Why is that? Montreal has good Korean restaurants, but its scene still lives in the shadow of Toronto’s.

Korean restaurateurs Hanhak Kim, Joon Pyo Chun and Jin Pyo Chun have played a significant role in the growth of Montreal’s Korean restaurant scene. Joon Pyo and his brother Jin Pyo owned Ganadara Bar and are now behind their latest project at Royalmount, Ile Jeju. Hanhak is behind restaurants like Pony BBQ, 9 Tail Fox, and Hana Steakhouse.

All three watched Korean culture and cuisine grow in popularity in Montreal. Now, they are helping determine where the city’s Korean food scene goes next.

Different pastures

Language is a tricky subject in Quebec. Conversations can quickly veer into either an attack on French or a demonization of English. For minorities, the tension created by language politics is part of daily life.

“French is a big thing here. If you’re a talented entrepreneur but you don’t speak French, you can’t open a business here—but you can go to Toronto and start one,” Joon Pyo says.

Koreans often arrive in Montreal with some English proficiency, but learning a third language can be daunting. Many come as university students, only to move to another Canadian city after finishing their degrees.

“Back then, during the Ganadara Bar days, there were so many Koreans. But when they finished school, they left,” Hanhak recalls.

“Look at all of our friends, they moved to Toronto,” Joon Pyo adds.

According to Joon Pyo and Hanhak, Toronto is simply more appealing when it comes to employment and language. For Koreans who already speak some English, moving there can seem like a more pragmatic next step than learning French.

Toronto also has a much larger Korean population, making the move more attractive.

Montreal may be multilingual, but French takes precedence in public life and business. That gives Korean chefs and restaurateurs who can communicate in both French and English a distinct advantage.

Ingredients, innovation, and culinary diversity

You can do more with more.

Toronto has a much larger Korean community than Montreal. According to the federal government’s 2021 Census of Population, an estimated 74,210 people in the Toronto census metropolitan area were counted in the Korean visible-minority category, compared with 9,150 in the Montreal census metropolitan area.

More people can mean more ideas, more specialized tastes and a larger audience for new kinds of restaurants. A bigger Korean community creates room for chefs to move beyond the familiar.

“Most Korean restaurants in Montreal have the same menu,” Hanhak states.

He points to Japanese restaurants, which span everything from ramen and katsu to yakitori and sushi. While Montreal has more Korean restaurants than it once did, he argues that many of their menus remain difficult to distinguish from one another.

With smaller Korean and Asian populations than Toronto, Montreal has less demand for a broad range of Korean cooking.

“In Montreal, we need more [Korean] restaurants with specialized menus, but we need a bigger population,” Joon Pyo explains.

For him, restaurants also need to resist copying whatever concept is already working.

After Ganadara Bar closed in 2025, Joon Pyo noticed a pattern in Montreal’s Korean restaurant scene.

“After us, everyone opened the same restaurant. They just copied. If they did something else, we could hype each other up. But there was nothing new.”

Ganadara Bar had tapped into an appetite for pocha—shorthand for pojangmacha, the small street tents and casual stalls found in Korea. It also brought something distinctly Montreal to the format: tteokbokki poutine.

Joon Pyo describes the dish as “something delicious that we thought would work well.” It was a moment of creativity rooted in Montreal’s Korean culture. One dish, however, was not enough to keep the business afloat.

In Toronto, Joon Pyo argues, Korean restaurants can draw from a larger base of Korean and other Asian diners already familiar with the cuisine’s regional and stylistic variety. That makes them less dependent on customers encountering those dishes for the first time.

Access to ingredients creates another limit. Restaurateurs have a harder time experimenting when the ingredients they need are difficult to source, especially when demand for the resulting dishes is uncertain.

Jeju Island-style Korean barbecue featuring heukdwaeji, or black pork, has become popular in Korea and Toronto. In Montreal, Joon Pyo says, obtaining the ingredients required for dishes like it remains difficult.

If Montreal had a larger Korean population—or simply greater demand for Korean products—would importing those ingredients become easier?

“I think so,” Hanhak says. “We’d have more volume and a louder voice [for demand].”

“I think it’s a government thing. It’s not bad. [Quebec is] just conservative, that's it. I respect it, and I live with it,” Joon Pyo says.

Marketing and awareness

Korean food still has fewer widely recognizable public champions in Canada than it does in the United States. For many people, their first exposure to Korean culture and food comes through K-pop or K-dramas. That opens a door, but it also offers a limited view.

Across English Canada, much of the media conversation around Korean food arrives through influential American chefs such as Roy Choi, David Chang and Edward Lee. In Quebec, and particularly in Montreal, Hanhak and Joon Pyo see no equivalent figure capable of presenting Korean cuisine in both French and English.

In other words, Montreal’s Korean community has not had someone comparable to Paul Toussaint for Haitian food or Hiroshi Kitano for Japanese cuisine.

“Jin Pyo is a very good chef; he’s shy in front of the camera,” Hanhak says.

“People still don’t know Korean cuisine [when] compared to Japanese or Chinese. People know about Korean food nowadays, especially the younger generation, but people our age [Millennials] don’t really know,” Hanhak says.

Even when people are familiar with Korean food, their knowledge often stops at dishes such as bibimbap and bulgogi.

While working on the floor and grilling for customers at Hana Korean Steakhouse, Hanhak noticed that many were eating Korean food for the first time.

Community support

So who is dining at Korean restaurants in Montreal?

“People who watch K-pop or K-drama… But for them, it [can be] hard to go out and eat. Let’s say my daughter is 16 or 17, watches Netflix, and wants to go out to eat. She can only go out once a month. Most people in Montreal don’t watch K-dramas. You cannot do business with only Asians,” Hanhak speculates.