You can rely on Nili's Moroccan-French café in Montreal's Mile End

Restaurants are subject to following a predictable arc: They’ll open with ambitions and chasing acclaim, and exact a price for the restaurant and the client climb the ladder, to be the ‘it’ spot.

Mikey Levy went the other way, setting out to build an old reliable and all that comes with that.

When the lights go out at his decade-old lunch counter Banh Mi Banh Yiu on Saint-Viateur, they’ll flip on for the evening next door at Nili, a Moroccan-French ‘café sans café’ (there's literally no room for an espresso machine in the tiny kitchen), and costs half what you'd spend anywhere else doing something similar.

"Right now with nice restaurants, with everything being so expensive? They're probably amazing, but you're spending hundreds of dollars a pop, easy," Levy says. "To me, there has to be somewhere else to eat."

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