Meet the new custodians of Aux 2 Clochers, an Eastern Townships institution of 35 years

Maxance Martinez-Ferland and Julien Archambault-Leclerc spent two years in the backroom of a hat shop in Frelighsburg building Passe-Montagne into something special. Their cave à manger became a magnet for locals and day-trippers alike—a place combining grandma's recipes with natural wine, where you could play bingo while eating tacos, where the produce never traveled more than 50 kilometers to reach a plate.

Then their lease expired. "We were stuck with nowhere to go," Julien explains. Passe-Montagne may have been over, but the duo wasn't finished with Frelighsburg.

Just down the road sat Aux 2 Clochers, a 35-year fixture of Eastern Townships dining with a grandfathered riverside terrasse. For two years, rumours swirled about its impending sale, with locals nervously wondering who might take over the helm from Martine Leduc and André Marchand, ITHQ graduates who had run the place since 1989.

"People were scared it would go to someone who either wouldn't understand or would just completely change it," says Julien.

Enter the pair from Passe-Montagne pair, with Maxance's roots in Frelighsburg already running deep. "I've been coming here since I was about one year old," she says, back in her home territory, this time holding a new set of keys.

The club sandwich stays.

Inside Aux 2 Clochers, traces of its past life remain—deliberately so. Paper hats in the kitchen ("We love the kitsch aspect," Julien says), the beloved club sandwich still anchoring the menu, the fajitas that locals have been ordering since the Clinton administration.

"They taste like my childhood," Maxance says, keeping the fajitas exactly as they always were. "I bet it does for a lot of people here as well."

But change is coming, in the measured doses that signal respect rather than revolution. The Swiss cheese on the duck confit poutine has been swapped for proper curds; the burger meat is better now; sauces zhushed up; and gradually, Maxance is introducing items from her Passe-Montagne playbook like a sweet potato gnocchi that happens to be gluten-free.

"It is a challenge sometimes," the chef laughs. "I try to just bring in something as simple as a risotto and clients are like, 'What is that?'"

When you've spent decades eating the same menu, a risotto might as well be molecular gastronomy. But the new owners are playing the long game, using their table d'hôte as a testing ground for new ideas, gauging reactions, making adjustments. "We don't want to shock anybody," Maxance clarifies. "We're just bringing more of our vibe."

The owners next door

If this were Montreal, the previous owners might be nothing more than a footnote in the restaurant's history. But this is Frelighsburg, population somewhere south of 1,200, where André and Martine still live just two houses down the street.

"They've always been there to show us how to work the machines or be there for service," Julien explains.

During a Christmas market rush, when the new owners found themselves in the weeds with 130 lunch customers, they called in André and Martine as reinforcements. The staff, too, are repositories of institutional knowledge—some have been working the floor or manning the stoves for 10, 15, even 20 years.

"There are people that have been here forever," Maxance says. "They know the place inside out."

It's a far cry from Passe-Montagne, where the duo did everything themselves. Now they're navigating the complex psychology of introducing change to people who've been making club sandwiches for decades.

"It's not just pushing our ideas," Julien explains, "but hearing them out and working with them. It's been their life for so long."

The Montreal exodus that wasn't

When you talk to Maxance and Julien about leaving Montreal for the Eastern Townships, you realize this wasn't exactly a pandemic-fueled revelation. Julien's father moved to Sutton over 20 years ago. Maxance was born in these hills. The city was where they cut their teeth in the industry—at Buvette chez Simone, Le Majestique, the Joe Beef ecosystem—but the countryside was already under their skin.

"It's not much of a competition with all the other places here," Julien reflects, contrasting it with Montreal's relentless restaurant churn. "Montreal is really hard for making a name for yourself and staying current. Here, it's more of a community."

Still, there are aspects of city restaurant culture they're importing: the emphasis on natural wine, the spotlight on hyper-local producers, the pop-up collaborations with other chefs. Already they've hosted friends from Sutton for a New Year's Eve takeover, and they're planning more events with the network they built at Passe-Montagne.

Their biggest challenge might be scale. Summer at Aux 2 Clochers means 250 customers a day, lineups for the terrace, and a pace that makes their Christmas market rush look like a quiet Tuesday. "The staff was like, 'Well, that's nothing—it's going to be like that all summer,'" Maxance says.

Version 2.0

At the time of this story, the website still shows the old owners in paper hats, spatulas in hand. The signage remains unchanged. Some regulars probably haven't noticed the difference in the poutine cheese. But beneath the surface, Aux 2 Clochers is evolving.

Behind the bar, Julien is gradually reshaping the wine program, building storage where there was none, introducing bottles from Eastern Townships producers who rarely get shelf space at the SAQ. "The productions are so small," he explains, "and they like working with restaurants because we become the ambassador of their products."

In the kitchen, Maxance balances the old guard's menu with her vegetable-centric sensibilities. A fried cauliflower sandwich is making its debut, the Asian-forward farm Le Rizen down the road is growing vegetables she'll use in summer brochettes, and her own gluten intolerance has made the menu more inclusive almost by default. "When clients say, 'I'm celiac, what can I eat?' and I'm like, 'Well, almost everything,' I see their eyes light up," she says.

They call what they're doing "version 2.0"—a fitting term for two thirty-somethings who named their first restaurant after a character from Children's television series Passe-Partout. It's Aux 2 Clochers reimagined, but not reinvented.

"We see ourselves as a bistro with a twist," Maxance explains. "It's classic, but tasty."

In a dining landscape where "new" often means erasing what came before, Maxance and Julien are attempting something more nuanced: stewardship. They're not just taking over a restaurant; they're carrying on a 35-year conversation between a place and its people, adding their own voices without drowning out the ones that came before.