BEAU MONT, the keenly anticipated new restaurant from chef Normand Laprise and his long-time business partner Christine Lamarche, opens on Beaumont Avenue and Acadie in Montreal’s Park Extension.

The 80-seat restaurant has austere industrial finishes (stone floor, grey stone bar, exposed ceiling) warmed up with stylistic flourishes like dangling orb lights, tan leather chairs and matching banquettes—as well as an array of Quebec hunting and fishing trophies, from deer mounts to the lacquered heads, tails and fins of giant bluefin tuna (that you may well have eaten a slice of years back at Toqué!).

Laprise’s kitchen here will aim to showcase such favourite local products with perfectly executed simplicity. “Beau Mont will be somewhere in the middle, between Toqué! and the Brasserie,” Lamarche explained of the new restaurant concept. Likewise the pricing, which at dinnertime will be somewhere close to $90 per person (figure $55 at T! and $190 at Toqué!).

But Beau Mont is more than a restaurant. Its vast kitchen comprises a full butchering facility as well as a large commissary. For Beau Mont will include a traiteur and boucherie to sell to the public those same Quebec products (raw and simply prepared) on which Laprise has forged his sizeable culinary reputation at his restaurants. The commissary, meanwhile, will also serve as prep kitchen for the original Brasserie T! in the Quartier des Spectacles, as well as the new Brasserie T! that opened in Brossard in February. And there are plans afoot for at least three more.

Laprise and Lamarche’s burgeoning business plan is designed not just to increase sales but to solve supply problems from Toqué! on down, by providing Laprise’s notoriously vulnerable niche suppliers with new demand for their products. And it will allow the restaurant group the ultimate quality control, by processing whole animals to suit needs across all operations.

“We always sell duck magrets, lamb saddles and racks at Toqué!,” Lamarche explains. “Now we’ll have restaurants for the legs and necks as well.”
— MARIE-CLAUDE LORTIE