After closing his upscale Mediterranean restaurant, Miel, for lockdown last fall, Hakim Chajar — 2014 winner of Quebec reality-TV cooking show Les Chefs! — relaunched his Pointe-Saint-Charles space as Rubie’s, a casual gluten-free-fried-chicken takeout operation. It quickly garnered a following for its crispy free-range local birds in KFC-style buckets with skinny fries and array of sauces, from foie gras to barbecue to ranch. “People drive an hour for [my] takeout,” notes Chajar. Now he’s opening two more: a counter at a new urban water park in Beloeil (east of Montreal) in 2022 and, on July 1st this year, a diner in the resort town of Mont-Tremblant, replete with cocktails and “fantasy” fried chicken — crispy butterflied chicken topped with a slab of foie gras. The original Miel location now operates as an event space and catering kitchen, where Chajar preps boxes of raw scallops, black cod and lava-cake ingredients to be shipped near and far for custom virtual cooking classes.

—Amie WatsonPhoto credit: Lise Bouthillette