Marc-André Jetté and Mila Rishkova: a success story in both love and business

Marc-André Jetté and Mila Rishkova are at the helm of Hoogan et Beaufort, awarded a Michelin star in 2026, of the catering company Hoogan et Beaufort Événement, of the butcher shop Édouard et Léo and of the wine bar Annette. Business partners, they are also partners in life and the parents of a little girl, Juliette. Together, these two, devoted to restaurants and hospitality, have quietly built one of the finest success stories in the industry. Portrait of an exceptional couple.

Marc-André grew up on a farm in Saint-Césaire, in the Montérégie, where he learned a great deal about agriculture from his father, who was a miller. His start in restaurants came in a sugar shack, where he began washing dishes before taking on various roles in the kitchen. “I went into the kitchen and I never came out,” he says.

Marc-André was turned down by the ITHQ three years in a row, as he likes to recall. After a vocational diploma in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, he was finally admitted to the ITHQ’s advanced cooking program. During his training, he did an internship in France at a 2-Michelin-star restaurant, Coutanceau. “I learned there what I didn’t want to do in my own restaurant, what I didn’t like in people’s attitudes: no leadership, no communication,” he remembers.

Back in Montreal, he worked at l’Épicier, chef Laurent Godbout’s now-closed restaurant, then at Decca 77, at Ferreira, at Petit F and at Laloux, where he became chef at 25!

From Tim Hortons to Graziella

Mila Rishkova cut her teeth in restaurants at McDonald’s and Tim Hortons. “Big deals when you’re 15!” she says. While studying literature at Concordia University, she found a job at the restaurant Newtown, where she worked for a few years. “I was studying, I was working, I’d pull a double, I’d write exams between two shifts,” she tells us. “I started at coat check, I was a server and a bartender. I worked my way up and above all I was hungry to learn.”

It was at Newtown that Mila met Marc-André, who worked there for 18 months; they have been together ever since. “I often say it’s the only good thing that happened to me there,” Marc-André jokes.

Mila then moved to Deca 77, then to Bar et Boeuf and Osteria Venti, where she was manager and handled the wine list. “It was a great assignment because I knew a bit about wine, but it interested me a lot,” she remembers. She then left for the restaurant Graziella, where she deepened her knowledge of sommellerie. “I really developed my passion for wine there. It’s one of the best-run restaurants I’ve come across. We did a lot of blind tastings: Nicolas de Planvin was the sommelier and he was very good at passing on his love and his passion for wine,” Mila says.

The 400 Coups Adventure

Marc-André then became chef of the new restaurant Les 400 coups, in Old Montreal, where he built the menu alongside his good friend, pastry chef Patrice Demers. The restaurant was a hit and the following years flew by. Before long, Marc-André and Mila were close to burnout. “We had tonic, butter, champagne and white wine in our fridge. We worked all the time and sometimes we’d go out to L’Express,” the chef recalls.

Three years after arriving, Marc-André told Patrice he was leaving Les 400 coups to open his own restaurant. As luck would have it, Patrice and his partner were also thinking of launching their own project, Patrice Pâtissier. “We took six weeks off. For us, that was unthinkable, we’d never done it,” he confides. That short break did the couple a world of good.

On their return, Marc-André opened a catering service in the basement of a funeral home and Mila started working at Tapeo.

The Birth of Hoogan et Beaufort

Two years and one child later, in 2015, Marc-André finally opened Hoogan et Beaufort at the Technopôle Angus — Jean-Philippe Tastet was in fact the first food critic to write about the restaurant, in the pages of the daily Le Devoir!

After her maternity leave, Mila moved to Bouillon Bilk. “I think I changed jobs a lot because in restaurants, if you’re hungry to learn and hungry for new challenges, at a certain point you hit a ceiling where you’ve mastered an environment, a menu, a wine list, cocktails. I moved around a lot because I needed constant challenges,” she says.

A position opened up at Marc-André’s catering company and Mila took the chance. “I went to join the team without really knowing what I was getting into. I loved it!” she says. Mila loves the logistics of catering, the planning, the strategy.

In 2018, the idea of a wine bar began to take shape in the couple’s minds as they developed the wine program at Hoogan et Beaufort. The restaurant’s exceptional list – which today runs to more than 750 references – draws customers from as far as New York or Boston, who don’t hesitate to travel to discover the treasures of its cellar. “There are few restaurants with a wine program like Hoogan’s!” Mila says.

A Butcher Shop and a Wine Bar

Then the pandemic hit. Marc-André bought out his partner’s shares and brought Mila in as a business partner. “So I took over as general manager of the catering company and I look after the team, the logistics, the sales, I work with our operations director to line things up, to give them structure, to try to represent well what we offer clients. There’s also an IT and marketing side coming in that I really like,” she explains.

To avoid losing its production and its suppliers during the pandemic, the couple decided to open a butcher shop. That is how Édouard et Léo came about, which now has an online sales platform and two locations, in Ahuntsic and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

The couple then used the pause forced by the pandemic to tackle a project that had been simmering for a long time: Annette wine bar, which finally opened in 2023.

“We’d dreamed of opening a wine bar for a long time. Juliette was two when Marc-André opened the restaurant and he was already talking to me about that project. I decided to wait because it was much easier said than done back then!” Mila confides.

Marc-André continues: “The east end of the city is the area we adopted and that adopted us. It’s an incredible neighbourhood. One day, the Société de développement Angus approached us with a space. They wanted to avoid having businesses competing with each other, to have a long-term vision.” With the agency LG2, they imagined the space and the concept of the wine bar. “Annette is meant to be welcoming to everyone and very accessible, with house wine at $10 a glass as well as wines from unique and rare producers,” Marc-André explains. “We created a place where we’d want to go for a drink, with a music offering and a quality food offering.”

The Star

More than ten years after it opened, Hoogan et Beaufort reached another landmark. In 2026, the restaurant earned its first Michelin star, a distinction that highlights Marc-André’s wood-fired cooking, the remarkable wine list and the work of an entire team that has, from the beginning, helped make the address a benchmark of Montreal gastronomy.

From Cook to Entrepreneur

With the projects multiplying, Marc-André has gradually stepped away from the kitchen to devote himself to his businesses. “It’s the first time I’ve been out of the kitchen since the start of my career. It’s hard, because at heart I’m a cook, but I like business. I like my role as an entrepreneur,” he confides.

Fortunately, he can count on a solid team: “I like slowly becoming the coach of the company, having the chance to have a team of talented young people and being able to grow them within the business. My greatest strength has always been surrounding myself well. Without my team, the pyramid would fall.”

Marc-André and Mila complement each other closely in their strengths and their weaknesses. Both entrepreneurs surround themselves well, they are close to their teams and they are on site every day to make sure everything runs as it should. Both are devoted to restaurants, it’s their world. They breathe hospitality; that is in large part what makes their group work. Their various businesses complement one another too. They are a formidable duo of successful entrepreneurship.

Written by Jean-Philippe Tastet
Photography by Mikael Lebleu