Leila serves up a no-hype approach to the Mediterranean in the Mile End

Amine Laabi wants you to know that Leila, his new Mile End restaurant, isn't "selling any dreams." It's just good food, good wine, good energy—a straightforward proposition in a city where restaurant openings often come wrapped, and even bogged down, in layers of concept and pretense.

"We just want to be cool," he says, then pauses. "That's our main goal."

"We know the industry and when we go out, it's very important to get back to the basics because when you open a restaurant, you try to do too much. A lot of people do too much, and for us less is better, so we're trying to do it in the right way."

Coming from most chefs, this might sound like false modesty or calculated understatement. But Laabi has already done the influencer thing. With over a million followers across Instagram and TikTok (857K and 479.2K respectively), he spent three years building a content empire, traveling the world for collabs, running a studio for content creation. He could have kept riding that wave straight to LA, linking up with the Benny Blancos and Matty Mathesons of the food world.

Instead, he opened a restaurant on Saint-Laurent near Saint-Viateur that doesn't even keep its menu posted online.

"I want to be identified as a chef, not as an influencer," Laabi says. "At the end of the day, you can lose yourself very easily in this industry. There's a lot of money to be made, but you need to make it the right way."

Back to basics—sort of

For Laabi, Leila is almost like a homecoming, but it took a while to get to this point. After cooking school and a stage at the Ritz, he worked his way through Montreal kitchens like Pizza No. 900, running the show at Café Gentile Westmount, and helping launch Gentile Pizza Parlour.

But when COVID hit, he pivoted to social media, made it to the finals of the culinary competition show Les Chefs!, and eventually opened Loumi, a Mediterranean fast-food spot focused on halloumi cheese and homemade lemonade in a quick-service format.

But something was missing. Together with Gregory Watson, who was sous chef at Beba, and front-of-house veterans Philippe Carile and Giuseppe Carta—all friends from days spent together at Café Gentile—Laabi started plotting a return to proper restaurant cooking. They found a space with history (once home to the now-closed Beau Temps, Maïs and the back alley Parasol), and set about creating the kind of place where they'd want to eat.

Homecoming begets making a place feel like home: The 50-seat space feels lived-in already, with its dark browns, greens and blues, an open kitchen that grounds the room, and a back lounge filled with vintage rugs and armchairs where guests can wait for their table over drinks and small bites. It's the kind of thoughtful touch that signals this isn't just another restaurant rushing to maximize covers.

The menu changes with the seasons and the kitchen's mood, but it's built around honest Mediterranean cooking that spans from southern France to Morocco. They break down whole Quebec lambs for house-made merguez, import sardines from Morocco for brioche toasts, and slow-braise beef cheek with fennel and chickpeas—the latter a refinement of a dish from Laabi's childhood, swapping in beef for the traditional veal foot and adding cumin.

"We chose Mediterranean cuisine because I didn't want to open another Italian restaurant. There's too many of them in the city and my Moroccan background is, I think, a plus. With the Mediterranean, we're in South Portugal, we're in south of Italy, we're a little bit of France, we're in Basque, we're in Greece—all with flavors that we know and love," Laabi says.

Good food, good energy, good wine

With no menu officially posted, the whole operation runs on trust: Trust in the ingredients, trust in the team, trust that if you serve honest food at fair prices, people will come back. It's working. Since opening quietly in December 2024, they've already got regulars.

"When you go to people's homes, you don't ask what you want to eat," Laabi says. "You eat what's available."

"It's two, three, four ingredients maximum of good quality, and we work them beautifully. We're trying to stay as simple as we can, because with Mediterranean cuisine, it's all about the products and it's all about that homey, comforting effect."

This philosophy extends through everything at Leila. The wine list, curated by Alizée Jutras, skips the usual natural wine greatest hits for a focused selection of Italian, French and Spanish bottles. The cocktails stick to well-executed classics. Nothing fancy, nothing forced.

"We're not inventing anything special," Laabi insists. "We're just doing what needs to be done."