La Gargamelle: Reveling in food and drink at an Old Montreal reverse speakeasy

Located behind the interactive, gossip-themed bar Tittle Tattle, Loyd Von Rose (née Loïc Fortin)’s first solo foray into the Montreal bar scene, La Gargamelle is—much like the local, self-styled cocktail artist and now chef—an unconventional project.

In a town that normally places speakeasy-style bars behind restaurants, La Gargamelle is what Von Rose calls a ‘reverse-speakeasy’: Walk to the back of Tittle Tattle’s starkly modern interior, and a door leads into a 25-seat dining room wrapped in heritage stone. Tables orbit a long galley kitchen where Von Rose cooks solo throughout the night.

It’s a cocktail lab turned kitchen: “I started this project on New Year’s Eve (in 2023), cooking for family and friends and I fell in love with cooking again. I looked to my partner during that night, and I knew what I wanted to do,” Von Rose says.

“I’ll always be a bartender, but I wanted to add something to my repertoire.”

Insatiable hunger

The restaurant/reverse speakeasy’s bombastically named after the mother of Gargantua, one of two central characters in François Rabelais’ satirical romance Gargantua and Pantagruel where giants struggle with their appetites among pages of sex, booze, food and adventures.

It’s apropos, but Von Rose says that the idea for the name comes from wanting to feed those with an insatiable hunger, but with service that’s gentle and welcoming.

“It’s very much a chef’s table style of service here. I bring plates to tables and explain dishes myself, I take a glass of wine with them… It’s my house,” Von Rose says.

“There a hospitality culture in Montreal which I love, and I’m proud to be here.”

“I’ll always be a bartender, but I wanted to add something to my repertoire.”

As he says this, one need only look around to see ephemera from growing up: Childhood photos of playing in a Terrebonne kitchen making bread or doing dishes, old kitchen equipment, a kitchen hood decked out in collected stickers.

It’s another, gentler side of someone who is an electric, performative character on Montreal’s scene—not a thunderstorm per se, but more akin to watching bolts of lightning pass overhead in something like Nikola Tesla’s laboratory.

Even the name the chef’s taken, Loyd Von Rose, stems from his time performing improv with a rockstar character that was so much larger than life that friends began to call him by it. One can imagine someone crying the moniker out loud on stage as pyrotechnics fire off.

"But food, that is an adventure for me."

That personality has translated into his creativity: In terms of hospitality, the autodidact used the pandemic to train himself on the ways of mixology, picking ingredients from grocers and elsewhere and studying their history.

“I’d look at videos, reading about the culture behind them, and eventually I came to understand that everyone uses the same ingredients. If Mexicans use chocolate and peppers together, but Japanese recipes also use peppers, why not try applying chocolate to them?”

That experience led to online cocktail competitions, eventually culminating in being a finalist on the first season of Netflix’s Drink Masters in 2022.

“The fun thing about cocktails, for me, is that it pushes you to try new things. But you’re limited in your flavours; how could you use the salt and complexity of oysters in a cocktail, for example? It’s hard,” he says.

“But food, that is an adventure for me.”

"This is all me. It’s my baby."

First we drink, then we dine

While being self-taught with cocktails, Von Rose has some experience in cooking, having worked at spots like Barraca Rhumerie and the lauded but long-gone French restaurant Laloux in the Plateau.

“We work a lot with fermentation and conservation of food, reusing as much as possible and reducing waste. A lot of cereals, a lot of superfoods, a lot of pickling,” he explains.

Examples include a dashi made from vegetable scraps that both figures into services as a welcome bowl of broth for guests and in a dish of truffle-ricotta, berlingot-shaped pasta that comes served with grilled and pickled artichokes.

There’s some correspondence with the bar up front as the two minutely share ingredients—say one uses the skin of a beet for a drink while another cooks the flesh—but the two are largely independent from one another.

“There’s some synergy, but it’s easy to juggle,” the chef says.

Much like Tittle Tattle's cocktails, many dishes are unconventional plays on flavour: Oysters come dressed in yuzu sabayon and martini pearls, fish crudo is served with an 'Italian' tigre de leche that focuses on basil, or a duck breast with its jus is lightly sprayed with nikka coffee grain whisky.

Starting out with an à la carte menu that include two amuse-bouches/appetizers, four entrées, four mains, and two desserts (all of which have cocktail or wine pairings), there are plans for an omakase menu in the mix, but things are still in that slow and bubbling soft launch mode. The tension and eager energy of the project is palpable.

Much like Gargamelle to Gargantua, "this is all me. It’s my baby," Von Rose says.

 La Gargamelle is located at 22 Rue Saint-Paul Est.