Since 2008, Plein Sud has been bringing the cuisine of southern France, from Corsica to Nice and Provence, to life on the Plateau without ever resorting to tacky clichés. The restaurant focuses on sharing platters: homemade charcuterie, pissaladière, aubergine à la bonifacienne, veal sauté with green olives, bacon and gnocchi, and a solid ricotta and lemon fiadone.

The spirit of the house is as much about the food as it is about the drink, with a privately imported wine cellar focused on the regions of origin and a cocktail menu featuring myrtle, citron and pastis. It’s less a picture postcard and more like a proper family meal from sunny Southern France flown over to our neck of the woods.

Bryan Rajarison was eight years old when he started cooking, and the recipes he grew up on form the backbone of 325F, the only authentic Malagasy restaurant in North America. Opened on rue Masson in Rosemont when Bryan was twenty-three, the room is small by design: natural wood, warm tones, maybe twenty seats. Madagascar's cuisine carries centuries of migration in it, East African, Indian, Chinese, French, Arabic, and the menu reflects all of it without making a fuss. The Soupe Tamatave is a fragrant broth with wontons and smoked pork. The ravitoto, cassava leaves slow-cooked with pork belly and coconut milk, stops first-timers cold.

Routy occupies the Van Horne Avenue address that longtime regulars will recognize as the former Boxermans, now reimagined by the team behind Myers with a sharper, more gastronomic focus. Chef Grégoire Routy, whose résumé spans Michelin-starred kitchens in France and England and a stint at Raele in Copenhagen, brings a menu that is deliberately concise: a handful of starters, four mains, three desserts, all shaped by Mediterranean and Provençal influences and grounded in local, seasonal product.

The room, designed by Kyle Adams Goforth, is warm and unfussy, with wood surfaces, softly dressed tables, and black-and-white family photographs on the walls. A central cabinet displays the glassware for the wine service, and the bar counter and cabinetry are the work of maker George Papas. The wine list is well-matched to the kitchen, with a strong selection of bottles and options by the glass.

Plume occupies a former commercial bakery on Fairmount Ouest that dates to 1967, and the Mile End address suits the project well. Behind it are Raphaël Leclerc-Gileau and Brigitte Emond Serret, who met at Bouillon Bilk a decade ago and spent years there before going their separate ways through the city's better kitchens. Raphaël, trained in both cooking and pastry, was sous chef at Bar George before moving into private chef work; Brigitte built her sommellerie practice at Candide and Panacée. Together they've built a room of 48 seats, including a 12-seat bar, around an à la carte format, with a tasting menu in the works. The cooking is seasonal and locally minded, the wine list leans toward small producers, and the dessert section gets serious attention.

Daniel Jobin named his bakery after a joke between friends, opened it steps from Marché Jean-Talon in 2012, and eventually handed it off to two former employees, Jean-Baptiste Gil and Thibault Delouis, in 2021. The bread is made with organic flour, slow-kneaded at low temperature for an open, moist crumb, and sold by weight. The lineup shifts by day of the week, with weekend specials alongside the weekday staples. Signature loaves include the Castagne, made with chestnut, walnut, and apple, and the Popeye, with goat cheese and sea spinach. The croissants, credited to Delouis, are among the better ones in the city. Unsold product goes to local organizations each week.

Matthieu Virloget trained at Ferrandi Paris before moving to Montreal with a straightforward ambition: to make a proper French croissant. He opened Croissant Croissant on Avenue Mont-Royal in 2016, and Aurélie Baravian joined shortly after to handle operations. The menu is built around the croissant in its many forms: sweet options run from raspberry to chestnut to almond-hazelnut praline, while savory and seasonal variations rotate alongside. Dough is made with long fermentation times and ingredients sourced from Quebec producers where possible. The name is not a typo.

Seventeen years in, Bungalow has settled comfortably into its Mont-Royal address without losing the neighbourhood-joint ease that made it a Plateau institution in the first place.

Chef Mickael Guigon runs a kitchen rooted in the French bistro tradition—steak-frites with truffle mayo and pepper sauce, magret de canard with whiskey cream, linguine aux palourdes—but the menu reaches wider when it wants to: grilled octopus with romesco and chorizo, tuna crudo with miso and habanero, arancini with raw-milk Comté. Oysters come dressed with shallot mignonette and mullet caviar, paired with hot sauces from local partner La Sauce MTL.

A sommelier-curated wine list leans heavily toward natural and biodynamic producers, with a generous by-the-glass selection.

A multi-tiered hospitality concept taking over the upper floors of Place VIlle-Marie, Hiatus has truly set itself up to do it all: An outdoor terrasse with Mediterranean raw bar dining on the 44th floor, a bar with snacks on the 45th, and a full-fledged restaurant on the floor above that (the 46th and highest in the building) cooks up Japanese and French plates with technique interplay between the two cuisines. That translates to things like ramen or nori tacos as well as foie gras tartelettes and arctic char. With ambitious interior redesigns by Sid Lee Architecture, Hiatus has among the highest and most highly-prized tables in the city when it comes to lavish dining.