Bryan Rajarison has been cooking since he was eight years old. By fourteen, he was working in elder care centre kitchens. At twenty-three, while still studying design and architecture, he opened a small, warm room on the edge of the Plateau: 325 F. There are personal projects aplenty in Montreal from chefs who leave one life behind for another, but 325 F happens to be the only authentic Malagasy restaurant in North America (not counting the Malagasy food truck Ralibera in NYC). He’ll tell you this without much fanfare, only confidence.
"There's a lot of Malagasy people I'm meeting for the first time (through the restaurant,” Bryan says. “It's really nice to gather the community in Montreal."
The name 325 F carries the whole story: 325 is the number of his childhood home. F is for Florencio, his middle name, which is also his father's name. There’s Fahrenheit as well, the temperature register of a working kitchen.
It's a family restaurant in the most literal sense: his parents helped out nearly every day when it first opened, and his dad still comes in on weekends. "It's great to learn from my dad at this age," Bryan says. "It's a blessing, I think, to have them both."
His parents arrived from Madagascar in the 1990s. Bryan was born in Montreal, raised between two worlds, and fed on recipes that stretch back further than either. His grandfather, who was of Indian origin, rarely went to restaurants and opted to cook at home, and those dishes passed to Bryan's father, and then to Bryan.
Ninety percent of the menu at 325F traces directly to that lineage. The remaining ten percent is where Montreal sneaks in, mostly in presentation: the plating, the visual language of the dishes, signalling the influence of a city Bryan grew up watching cook.
Across oceans
Malagasy cuisine is harder to categorize than most. The island sits in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, and its food reflects centuries of migration and trade from East African, Indian, Chinese, French colonial, and Arabic spice routes.
325 F’s menu speaks to it all if you know where to look and taste: The Tamatave soup, for instance, named after a port city on Madagascar's east coast with a large Chinese immigrant population, arrives as a fragrant broth with wontons, thin noodles, smoked pork, and sliced omelette. It's a breakfast dish in Tamatave, Bryan explains, every restaurant there serves it. Here, it functions as one of the menu's anchors.
Terminez « Le seul restaurant malgache d'Amérique du Nord est une salle de 20 places dans le Plateau »
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