Chef Danny Smiles Makes a Grand Return to Montreal’s Upscale Dining Scene
At his new restaurant, Le Violon, Smiles mines his own memories to cook food that makes sense to all.
It’s not often that you sit across from a chef and try to shake the image of them taking a shot of liquor from a phallic-shaped shot glass. But that’s what happened when I sat down with chef Danny Smiles (a.k.a. Daniele Francis) in his recently opened Montreal restaurant Le Violon. A decade prior, Smiles, along with Chuck Hughes, his partner at the hit seafood restaurant Le Bremner, was the subject of an episode of Munchies’ Chef’s Night Out web series, where chefs were sent out (usually drunkenly) to explore the cuisine of their native cities. Halfway through the episode, the pair arrived at Maison Publique, Derek Dammann’s lauded paean to Canadian cuisine that occupied 4720 Rue Marquette, where Le Violon is now located, and were greeted with typically boisterous hospitality. Dishes came rolling out of the kitchen, drinks flowed, and eventually, a dildo appeared over Smiles’s shoulder. One thing led to another, and the young chef whose star was then just beginning to rise was drinking liquor in a way that’s hard to forget.
Le Violon’s interiors, designed by partner Dan Climan (whose artwork is showcased) and interior architect Zèbulon Perron, ride the fine line between playful and refined.
While it was those kinds of antics that helped form Smiles’s image as a buzzworthy iconoclast in the stuffy world of fine dining, nowadays his energetic demeanour wears a mature visage patinated by a further decade spent mesmerizing diners in restaurants across Montreal and beyond. He spent most of those years at Le Bremner, developing a menu that soared to the upper echelons of Canadian cuisine with its unpretentious, home-style, seafood-focused dishes. After leaving Le Bremner in December 2019, Smiles stayed busy: coming within inches of opening an upscale Italian restaurant before COVID sounded its death knell, starting a pandemic project meal-kit service called Mise En Place, and moving to the country after being named executive chef at the Willow Inn, a historic hotel in Hudson, Quebec, whose restaurant he was able to resuscitate and nudge well into the annals of Canada’s 100 Best during his brief stint there.
Throughout it all, Smiles gained legions of fans, becoming one of Canada’s few true celebrity chefs along the way. But something was missing: a fine dining restaurant in Montreal to stake his reputation on. By the time he opened Double’s, a late-night burger joint and bar in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood in early 2023, Smiles was well and truly ready to make a grand return to his hometown. So when Dammann called to say he was closing Maison Publique in September 2023, Smiles immediately knew he wanted to take over 4720 Rue Marquette. He got in touch with his now-partners—co-executive chef Mitchell Laughren, general manager Andrew Park, and creative director Dan Climan—and together they opened Le Violon less than a year after Maison Publique shuttered.
Designed by Climan, an artist, in collaboration with Montreal interior architect Zébulon Perron, Le Violon’s updated interiors straddle the line between classical and whimsical. A far cry from the darkly brooding, knick-knack-littered interiors of its past life, Le Violon’s occupation of the space plays with a subtle palette of creams and khakis, with sparks of colour dabbled sparingly throughout. The pink-hued marble that tops the tables and bar was one design detail that Smiles himself lobbied for, something he is more willing to do now after decades in the restaurant industry. “People really appreciate all the details now when you go to a restaurant—the quality of the menu paper, the embossing that we have, how everything is curated, the art, the florals, everything about it is super important,” he says. However, while all the small details come together to give Le Violon its signature ambience, Climan’s own large-scale artworks are the cherry on top, with one of a Dalmatian (dogs are one of his frequent subjects) anchoring the intimate dining space opposite the busy landscape surrounding the bar, providing a bit of necessary levity in the ultrarefined space.
Smiles’s hyperseasonal menus are natural evolutions of the cooking he did at Le Bremner, prominently featuring seafood and deftly incorporating references to the myriad cuisines that inspire him. During my visit at the height of tomato season, Le Violon’s menu was overflowing with dishes built with a cornucopia of local heirloom varieties. Just days before, Smiles was being a good figlio, making sugo with his family on their driveway, but at Le Violon he put this bounty toward more polished purposes, in a way that displays both his innate character and his maturation as a chef. “Food is like fashion, like music, it’s like anything, you know, it changes, but the essence of who I am as a chef is going to stay,” he says. “I just really want to work with amazing producers around me that are doing the best and that are here to showcase the best products that they have, and then from there that’s really the way we build the menu.”
Smiles possesses an uncanny ability to artfully replicate, reimagine, and reference dishes from across the spectrum of Canadian cuisines, introducing seemingly disparate elements to create a cohesive whole. For example, the sorpresine fagioli is a positively indelicate dish made with handmade pasta and borlotti beans that by all accounts pays respects to Smiles’s Italian heritage. But take a step back, and other reference points are immediately clear. The broth, enriched with salumi ends from a local butcher, when taken in tandem with the beans’ grainy texture, makes it immediately recognizable to any French Canadian as an elevated take on pea soup.
Smiles’s ability to find similarities and draw connections between different food cultures feels ironically personal to the chef, whose memories of making sugo and other delicacies with his family inform his deep appreciation for foodways of all sorts. “I like tradition. I like the idea of tradition,” he says. “I like the idea of seeing my kids make tomato sauce, and it makes me remember when I was a kid. I don’t know, it’s like therapy or something like that. It kind of helps me, you know, move forward.” And move forward he has. From the beginnings of his chefdom, where his devil-may-care attitude shone nearly as brightly as his droolworthy dishes, to Le Violon, with its halcyon refinement, Smiles has grown up right before the eyes of hungry Canadians from coast to coast. But his ability to make memories remains the same. At Le Violon, those made are so powerful that they leave little space in the mind for chefs drinking out of phallic-shaped shot glasses.
