Plume Was Built the Old-Fashioned Way

Raphaël Leclerc-Gileau and Brigitte Emond Serret didn't set out to make a statement with Plume. Not even with the name.

There were pigeons on the roof when Raphaël Leclerc-Gileau and Brigitte Emond Serret first walked through the space on Fairmount Ouest. Feathers on the doorstep every morning, then finding a collection of taxidermied birds in the basement a few months into the build, left behind by the Greek landlord who'd ran a commercial bakery called Kamenitsa out of the same address since the 1960s.

They'd already settled on the name by then, but sometimes a place just tells you what it wants to be called.

The two met at Bouillon Bilk about a decade ago—Raphaël sliding pieces of cheese and shiitake mushrooms across the pass to Brigitte—and spent years moving through known kitchens in the city before the conversation about doing something together got serious.

That was about three years ago. The search for a space took another year: good bones, good landlord, right neighbourhood. When they walked into the old Kamenitsa space in Mile End, the landlord and Raphaël bonded over pastry. He lives upstairs now.

Raphaël trained in both cooking and pastry at ITHQ, started as a dishwasher at 17, and worked his way through Bouillon Bilk before taking the kitchen at Bar George at the Mount Stephen. From there he moved into private chef work, and a stint as chef at Verdun Beach followed. Brigitte's path ran through sommellerie, with years at Candide and Panacée shaping an approach to wine she describes as being less about tasting notes and more about who made it and where it came from.