At Montreal’s Restaurant Limbo, Chef Harrison Shewchuk Gets Lost in the Flavour

Harrison Shewchuk doesn’t like to sit still. I count myself lucky that I am able to get him to spend even an hour with me on a bench in Montreal’s Little Italy neighbourhood. It’s not just the kitchen of his new restaurant, Limbo, that keeps him on the move—although he does attempt clandestine looks at it throughout our chat—but an all-encompassing need for self-discovery and adventure. Along with his serious commitment to skateboarding, Shewchuk also plays in a hardcore punk band called Faze, and on the day we meet, he is bowing out of service early (with full faith in his crack team) to play a show with another act above Café Cléopâtre, the iconic cabaret venue in the Quartier des Spectacles. In fact, Limbo, which he opened in late March of this year, is one of the few things he looks to for constancy these days. “I want it to be maybe my last restaurant, and I want to just be steady, you know,” he says.

Before opening Limbo with partners Jack Zeppetelli, Jesse Massumi, and Xavier Cloutier-Guérard, all currently or formerly of Pichai, the nearby Thai hot spot, and “hype man” and fellow skateboarder Conor Neeson, Shewchuk led an itinerant existence through some of Montreal’s top kitchens. After leaving Dawson College, where he graduated with a diploma in professional photography, he began his career as a photography assistant but found the pace of the work too slow for his liking. “The assisting work wasn’t for me,” he says. “I was really fast-living, skating a lot, playing in bands. I wanted to get energy, so I got a job dishwashing with a friend, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I actually always loved food—put me on the line.’”

Immediately, the now-34-year-old chef was hooked on the kitchen. “I started cooking and just loved it, loved the energy, loved the camaraderie,” he says. “I could be creative with food and put two things together and like, you know, innovate and move.” That outlook led him to some of Montreal’s best restaurants, including Joe Beef and Maison Publique, where he would eventually find his voice as sous chef. “I had been doing it for two years, the sous chef thing at Maison Publique, and I just kind of went crazy, and it was like, yo, I’m going to move on and quit. I don’t know why I quit, really, in the end. It was just time for me to move on. I guess it was just in me.” From there, Shewchuk went on to help open a few restaurants before starting the first certified hit of his own, the pandemic-project-turned-mainstay Salle Climatisée. After a few years at the helm there, he once again got the itch to move, stepping away from the kitchen and gathering himself over a year farming and doing pop-ups in Montreal before beginning work on Limbo.

On a typical evening, Limbo, whose space was bootstrapped by the partners alongside acquaintances from their other walks of life (including Shewchuk’s friend Phil D’Aoust, the noted Montreal skatepark builder who was tasked with the woodwork and finishing throughout), radiates with energy. The open kitchen turns out dishes that range from familiar (roast duck served on a bed of greens and jus) to fanciful (Rimouski urchin, whole raspberries, olive oil, coriander flower) and everything in between (beef tartar with borlotti beans). Across the menu, the complexity of Shewchuk’s cooking, which he describes as French-rooted with modern flourishes, belies the humble chef’s matter-of-fact assessment of it: “It’s about a good sauce, a good element, like a protein or a veg, and a combination of ingredients that is interesting.”

One great advantage of Shewchuk’s culinary restlessness is that he sometimes stumbles onto pure genius along the way. While his cooking can, from outside, seem as categorical as he describes, there is an esoteric angle to it as well, one that benefits from his intuition and ability to respond to diners and ask that they respond in kind. “I’m trying to do simple cooking and then combine things to evoke an emotion or a thought or a feeling,” he says. During my visit, a late-summer panisse à la provençale stars. The chickpea panisse is perfectly fried until nearly runny on the inside and then topped with a buoyant red pepper condiment and microscopic edible flowers, culminating in a dish strong enough to define a dining experience. However, when Shewchuk sends out an off-menu riff, halving the condiment and adding a chopped tuna belly, the two bites it takes to down the dish evoke contemplation, yes, but they also verge on the ecstatic.

Having moved through so many kitchens and subcultures, Shewchuk has collected an impressive list of collaborators, and nowhere at Limbo is this more evident than in the drinks programming. The wine list, curated by Henri Murray (also of Pichai), tends toward the natural, with esoteric wines from niche regions taking pride of place. With easy-drinking grower champagne, Quebec wines for the cool-kid set, and cult bottles from France’s Jura region, there is an almost infinite number of flavour pairings to be made with Shewchuk’s food. The cocktail program headed by Elo Lavallée Davis matches the wine list’s playfulness with modern spins on classic cocktails (the house martini delights thanks to a touch of rice vinegar) and a rotating slushie option, including one made with a savagnin from Jura.

Like the name of his latest, and perhaps last, restaurant suggests, Shewchuk is a chef between worlds. But far from the agonizing statelessness of limbo, the peripatetic chef is at home oscillating between skating, playing music, and cooking some of Canada’s finest food. Two weeks after we meet, he’s heading on tour with Faze to play nine shows in Spain, France, and the United Kingdom before vacationing in Paris. It will be his 12th trip to the City of Light, and he plans on making the most of it, visiting his favourite restaurants in search of good food and inspiration. There’s no saying what direction Shewchuk may take at Restaurant Limbo, which is the one of the great joys of his cooking. But one thing’s for sure, it’ll leave an impression that lasts.

Photos by Clara Lacasse.

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