Where to Eat and Drink in Old Montreal: A Foodie’s Review
Six restaurants and bars to add to your Montreal checklist.
I started my Montreal trip with a magnificent mistake: booking a hotel a brisk 31 minutes walk from Old Montreal, a historic neighbourhood with cobblestone streets and an overwhelming spread of restaurants. Preferring to explore the dining scene by foot, my partner and I quickly realized that the walk was something we’d be doing over and over and over again, so between window shopping, snacking, and sipping, we walked almost 40 kilometres in three days. We worked hard and we ate hard, and these are the best restaurants we found along the way.
You know how most bands only have one truly famous person, and the rest of the band, no matter their talent, kind of fades namelessly into the background? That’s the case at Dandy, where star power rules the plates of every bruncher. When we rolled in at noon on a Tuesday, every table looked like a copy/paste of the next: one order of the fried chicken sandwich, one order of the ricotta pancakes. We resisted the urge to be “not like other diners” and instead adopted a when-in-Dandy mentality, because why mess with a good thing?
The hulking sandwich was a beast—one bite and it was game over for the cute brunch illusion: cue bits of slaw dropping onto my plate and lap as I tried to adorably unhinge my jaw. But looking like a Jurassic Park jump scare was worth it for the crunchy, juicy buttermilk fried chicken—it was almost as good as the pancakes. There’s no aesthetic presentation here, but the lemon cream and maple brown butter sauce makes these light, fluffy flapjacks sing. And while I’m sure other menu items are great (the housemade cavatelli with roasted butternut squash sounds delightful), this is your permission to walk in and shut off your brain. Chicken. Pancakes. Dare to be basic.
This noodle shop is in Chinatown, a block or two west of Old Montreal, and is easy to spot thanks to the chefs pulling delicate ropes of noodles in the window. The no-frills space moves through customers like clockwork, in the most charming way: there are only four noodle dishes and seven noodle thicknesses to choose from, and combos come with small sides like edamame and spicy cucumber salad. Noticing how efficiently the staff moved, I timed the process. From the moment we ordered to the moment the steamy bowls of beef noodle soup and dan dan noodles arrived, less than four minutes had passed.
Sometimes quality suffers due to quick service, but not here. Not even a bit. The noodles are glorious, so chewy and fresh that they take on all the deep flavours of their respective soups and sauces. The dan dan style is a favourite of mine, but the beef soup won in this very tight race: the spécial nouilles de boeuf Lanzhou is an ideal cozy dish for below-zero days.
We have our fair share of “secret” bars in Canada, but this one is the most nondescript I have ever seen—I challenge you to find it without getting in at least one argument with your dining partner. Press a button on the outside of the unmarked black door, and a duck-shaped light turns on. Then wait (for a while, depending on how busy they are) for a staff member to let you go down the dark staircase into the low-ceilinged, pub-like cocktail bar. The process feels… scary. The space itself, though, is warm and inviting, with inventive cocktails that each has its own story. I got the Rice to Meet You (couldn’t resist the name), a sweet mix of passionfruit, sake, Appleton 8, lemon, toasted rice, and tamarind. The duck theme was inspired by the Rubber Duck Squad, a Montreal police unit active in the 1970s, and the building itself is nearly 150 years old—a hidden history to match the hidden bar.
Kwizinn is a Caribbean fusion restaurant with pretty impeccable vibes—the interior is moody and elegant, with deep blues and brassy metals, and every song floating through the speakers feels straight out of a rom-com soundtrack. Cocktails-wise, the Paloma Zuzu (tequila, cucumber cordial, grapefruit, fire water, yuzu) and Tina Spritz limoncello, prosecco, yuzu) were both probably a little summery to order during a Montreal downpour, but that was the choice we made, and there’s no harm in embracing a sunny vibe when the weather is so yucky.
We happened to visit during MtlàTable, which is Montreal’s version of Dine Out, and had a three-course meal that was absolutely fantastic: arctic char with taro chips, Creole-style Lac Brome duck breast, and kremas tirimasu. The duck breast was the dish I was still talking about on the plane back to YVR. It was served with a flavourful jus and creamy aligot (Why does every Vancouver restaurant not serve these indulgently cheesy potatoes? There are cheese and potatoes here. We have the means) and is surely what the French-speaking would call délicieux.
Bevo is two floors of brick-walled beauty rich with the smell of freshly fired pizzas, but I’ll admit that when we stepped into this buzzy Italian spot, we were not feeling our best. We’d reached the point in our trip where we’d walked about 35 of our 40 total kilometres and didn’t have the energy to do a restaurant research deep-dive. So we just walked into the first place we saw that served pizza.
Luckily, this spot was what we needed: nothing fancy, just a lively, casual space with a spicy pepperoni pizza on the menu. The dough was perfectly cooked with just the right amount of char, the sauce was bright and balanced, and the crispy pepperoni curled up just right. It revived us to the degree that we managed to squeeze one last stop in before calling it a night.
And that last stop was Bar Le Mal Nécessaire, which feels straight out of one of those sexy yet incomprehensible perfume ads. It’s not within the borders of Old Montreal, but it’s very close. With soft-pink tiled columns, sheer curtains, glowy lights, and sumptuous seating, it’s exciting and mysterious and fun. But it’s not just nice to look at—according to the menu, the bar team “is obsessed with finding creative ways to extract every ounce of flavor from our base ingredients before composting the rest.” They collaborate with other local businesses to do so: for example, the falernum syrup is made from avocado pits from nearby La Capital Tacos. My drink, Big Fun in Little China, was a savoury-leaning twist on a dark and stormy: dark El Dorado, Chinese five-spice, ginger, and lime. It came with a fortune cookie, the best kind of ice (tiny and cubed), and in a very pretty mug that I really wanted to steal but did not, even though I think theft would have been in line with the bar’s ethos of getting absolutely everything you can out of something.
