Young Montreal chefs are drawing
on their multicultural heritage
to reinvent the local food scene
at new restaurants in some of the
city’s oldest districts
Outside
Influencers
ON A SIDE STREET in the 17th-century borough of Verdun, I recently had what
struck me as the most Montreal meal of my life. Beba, opened last summer by
brothers Pablo and Ari Schor, pays homage to the Spanish and Italian émigré
cooking of Buenos Aires, their birthplace. “It’s the food we grew up eating, but
with Montreal touches and ingredients,” says chef Ari. “We’re re-creating the
immigrant flavors of our former homeland.” Take the empanadas, which combine
nods to Galicia, where empanadas were invented, and the hand pies the brothers
loved as boys in Argentina, but are filled with Quebecois cheese curds for a reverse
poutine effect. Sometimes they’re stuffed with duck hearts instead of the usual
beef—“because, Quebec,” Ari says.
The Schors’ open-minded, continent-hopping cuisine represents a new way
of cooking in Montreal’s original neighborhoods that fits the open-minded, mul-
ticultural spirit of contemporary Canada. Their own favorite new place is Tiers
Paysage, a conceptual cave à manger (a Parisian term for a wine bar with small
plates and bottles) on the cobblestone Rue Saint Paul, the oldest street in the
city. It’s the brainchild of Montreal chef Harrison Shewchuk and Moroccan-born
co-owner Samia Hannouni, formerly a beloved front-of-house presence at equally
beloved Joe Beef. The dishes here, however, have little in common with the fat-
upon-fat excess that put Hannouni’s old restaurant on the map. “We’re turning
away from the big plates of food that make you so full that you want to crawl home
and die,” says Shewchuk. Here, he treats parsnips like braised beef, poaching them
in court bouillon, then torching their exteriors and serving them in a sticky bone
marrow sauce. The restaurant’s name comes from a French manifesto about theChef Ari Schor of
Beba, preparing an
eggplant ravioli dish
The vegetable-
forward small plates
at Tiers Paysage24 CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER APRIL 2020
PHOTOGRAPHS: MATTHEW
PERRIN; ALISON SLATTERY
word of mouth^ ➤^ eat here now