La Marelle: Don’t even think of boxing this Mile-Ex restaurant in

Riding the slow but sure rolling waves of arrivals in Mile-Ex like Taverne Atlantic and Bar Wills, La Marelle’s like a candlelit lifeboat on its stretch of Beaubien Ouest.

An unassuming exterior leads you right into a long wooden bar facing an open kitchen running the length of a main room—an inheritance from the space's previous tenant, Le Diplomate—and passage to a spacious casual dining room in the back, skylit by day and candlelit by night.

A new project from Maison Publique and Salle Climatisée alumni Brendan Lavery-Breier, chef Carlos Melgar, and Taylor D’Ottavi, La Marelle is what you'd call the modern definition of a 'Montreal restaurant' through and through.

...All three of our experiences show how the city can bring people together, most importantly through hospitality. I think that’s a beautiful facet of our story.

Coloring outside the lines

La Marelle is a casual dining restaurant defined by a sense of play. Named after the French word for hopscotch, it speaks to how the place doesn't like to stick to one definition—jumping from one square to another freely.

Its chef's El Salvadorean roots and memories take on new dimensions with Eurocentric training, but the menu isn't defined by one or the other; its wine list by D'Ottavi harkens back to classic and conventional winemaking by design, but the bar will pull a pint of Labatt 50 just as well; its service is informed by experience at some of the best institutions this city's seen in recent history, but shit can get wild here later at night if the vibe is right.

Just like hopscotch, you can tell yourself you know the rules and make assumptions, but you don’t know how that game will turn out in the end.

“It is a Canadian experience here, a Montreal experience," Brendan says. "We all come from different backgrounds and countries and languages, and all three of our experiences show how the city can bring people together, most importantly through hospitality. I think that’s a beautiful facet of our story.”

We want our friends and family here, and we want to make friends here. We want you to feel like you’re at a dinner party at someone’s house when you come see us.

Every night's a kitchen party

La Marelle is, in short, a restaurant focused on having a good time—as its owners and chef often say themselves—but that would be putting it lightly.

As the ex-Majestique Sarah Jane Patry and Taylor run the front of house and Carlos fans flames on a grill in the kitchen, you can have fun but also opt to keep it formal, drink a fine wine or guzzle a cold one, eat delicately or with your hands.

"I have a genuine appreciation for meeting and creating meaningful connections and relations with people; growing up, house parties and family functions where people are hanging out and getting comfortable in the kitchen—restaurants are a larger extension of that,” Brendan says.

“People surrender something when they’re eating food, drinking and spending time with one another, and we like to contribute to making that experience as excellent as possible.”

The consensus right now is that the white tablecloth restaurant is dead, but while everything after that could be elevated in their thought process and service style gets labelled as casual, and we respond to that with conviviality and fun.

“Right now, we’re seeing a shift towards deformalizing fine dining, but we’re neither," Taylor says, whose self-taught hospitality includes an expansive CV running the gamut from Michelin-starred addresses in the United States to local spots like Tuck Shop—but he makes those notches in his belt his own, rather than be defined by them.

"We’re a simple restaurant putting out simple food with simple service. We want our friends and family here, and we want to make friends here. We want you to feel like you’re at a dinner party at someone’s house when you come see us.”

“The consensus right now is that the white tablecloth restaurant is dead, but while everything after that could be elevated in their thought process and service style gets labelled as casual, and we respond to that with conviviality and fun.”

Cooking as an alternating current

Just like the service, the food at La Marelle can seem simple on paper as its leadership's lineage at Salle results in a focus on small, shareable plates of vegetable and meat dishes—but that's be doing it a disservice.

“Everyone wants to know what the food is, a specific answer of what it is, and it’s hard to say," explains Carlos, who came to Montreal at the age of 17 from El Salvador.

"I’m Latino and I have Latino flavours in my mind, but since I came to Montreal I’ve been working in European-forward restaurants," the chef says. "I learned a lot at them—French, Italian, Spanish—and I’m bringing together those experiences together here."

Having worked at a litany of places like Alma, Tinc Set, Maison Publique, Salle Climatisée and many others following classes out of the École des métiers de la restauration et du tourisme, Melgar's cooking at La Marelle represent a confluence of childhood, time in kitchens, and creativity pushing into the future.

“I’ve always been interested in cooking since watching my grandmother as a child, but I would never touch anything in her kitchen. She was a little superstitious almost, but it was always in my mind,” Carlos remembers.

“She was always explaining, and I was always watching. So here, I’m putting those lessons to work.”

Opposite the kitchen, a handwritten chalkboard's menu changes often to meet the needs of a revolving door of regular clientele and the shifting of the seasons. Dishes will read like many you'd find at bistros elsewhere, where a dish is broken down into its composite parts, but they'll often/occasionally/surprisingly—however the inspiration strikes—be punctuated by ingredients Carlos has known all his life.

The kitchen features things one could imagine eating out of small Parisian restaurants, like a trout with a 'confetti' of brunoise vegetables in a beurre blanc sauce, or kohlrabi with sorrel and Louis d’Or cheese. At the same time, they could receive punches of spice and aromatics unfamiliar to much of what one would find across Eurocentric restaurants.

There's auguachile swimming in spicy and acidic liquid, but there's also dishes like treviso roasted with tomato and habanero, beef tartare with ancho chili and pepper that's served with a rice cracker reminiscent of chicharron—a classic dish treated to Carlos’s memory and experience—and sweetbreads grilled to resemble fried chicken with a relajo sauce of roasted and toasted aromatics (the foundation of many Salvadoran dishes) that’ll hit you like a rich Mexican mole.

Think of it as European techniques with some strong Latino flavours, but always on a balanced plate.

“People ask if it’s a Latino restaurant, but if that’s what I wanted to do, I would do it," Carlos adds. “Latino food to me is about having a lot of flavours and spices, and while I’m trying to do that here, I don’t want to overburden any idea.”

Questions of authenticity could come into play, so who is (Carlos's) food authentic to? That’s how he cooks. People look for buzzwords and hashtags, but at the end of the day, we’re focused on the experience, the environment, and food that Carlos simply thinks is good.

Simple food, simple service, and simply how they eat

"One of the things that gives me confidence and pride in standing next to Carlos is how tactile he is, and how intuitive his cooking is," Brendan explains.

"Carlos’s food is his professional experience, but his baseline palette is one that enjoys loud flavours. It’s not fusion food, he’s not strictly being a Latino chef—he’s just doing what’s honest to him and how he wants food to taste."

"Questions of authenticity could come into play, so who is his food authentic to? That’s how he cooks. People look for buzzwords and hashtags, but at the end of the day, we’re focused on the experience, the environment, and food that Carlos simply thinks is good."

"It’s food we trust, and it’s done in a place to enjoy an evening with people you care about.”

It’s food we trust, and it’s done in a place to enjoy an evening with people you care about.

That food's complimented by Taylor's wine program which focuses on newer and underexplored generations of new winemakers that pay homage to generations the came before them.

“It’s rustic. In the way the wine world has turned in the last 10 or 15 years, there’s a big division between the classic, conventional wine and more modern ‘natural’ wine, but I look for the sweet spot in the middle of that Venn diagram," Taylor explains.

“It’s low-intervention, natural, biodynamic wine that isn’t off-putting, easy-drinking, well-made wines which lean and taste classic.”

Holding a candle for Mile-Ex

“I love the small spots full of people that easily fill up with the sound of glasses clinking together, people handing things to one another over their heads in a small space. La Marelle is bigger, and that extra space feeds into the food,” Brendan adds.

Having made his first foray into the neighbourhood with Salle Climatisée, an affection for the neighbourhood, his colleagues, and the city as a whole drove the creation of a whole new place.

“I believe in this neighbourhood so much and I love it. I’ve lived here for years, I’ve been a Beaubien guy for a while, and while our stretch has always been a bit transient, I feel so proud to have embraced this place. It’s not off the beaten path anymore,” he says.

As for down the road?

“We were friends throughout our time at Salle, and I also recognized Carlos’s taste in food is amazing. And with him, Taylor, and myself, we’ve been able to work together in a meaningful way. Friendship and our sense of business has always been balanced between us. Things aligned.”

La Marelle is located at 129 Rue Beaubien Ouest.