Marie-Josée Beaudoin and Patrice Demers: A Different Idea of Success

Over more than 25 years in the business, Patrice Demers and Marie-Josée Beaudoin have known packed dining rooms, television sets and the adventure of a pastry shop that became a benchmark. With Sabayon, their small 16-seat house in Pointe-Saint-Charles, awarded a Michelin star, the chef and the sommelier offer an intimate and deeply personal vision of the restaurant business, where the pleasure of hosting, trust and respect for the craft guide every choice.

The honours of recent years are enough to make anyone’s head spin. In November 2024, enRoute ranked Sabayon first among Canada’s best new restaurants. In May 2025, the very first Québec edition of the MICHELIN Guide awarded it a star. Canada’s 100 Best named Patrice the country’s best pastry chef two years running, in 2025 and 2026.

In the industry, recognition like this often leads to expansion. Patrice and Marie-Josée chose instead to build a house on the scale of their convictions, designed to stand the test of time. Even after the star, keeping their table accessible remains at the heart of their mission. Sabayon grew out of their experiences and an ever-firmer certainty about what they wanted to preserve and what they now hope to pass on.

How Patrice Got His Start

With dual training in pastry and cuisine from hotel school, Patrice has a love of cooking that embraces savoury and sweet alike. Drawn to the buzz of the restaurant world, he was hired as a cook when Chez l’Épicier opened, and the desserts were soon entrusted to him. At 21, he became pastry chef at Leméac from the day it opened. “The names were there: a coffee crème caramel, a chocolate tart, a lemon tart. But there were no recipes.” So he developed them, and several have endured for decades, including the legendary pain perdu, one of the 10 most iconic desserts in Montréal (!)

In 2002, he co-founded Les Chèvres, a bold fine-dining restaurant where vegetables took centre stage, soon joined next door by Le Chou, its bistro counterpart. Critics praised the daring of Les Chèvres, which climbed to third place in the enRoute ranking. The restaurant never found its financial footing, however, and closed after three and a half years. Yet it was there that Patrice’s name began to circulate: a first book, his television debut alongside Josée di Stasio, and a chocolate, caramel and Maldon salt pot de crème that became a classic and ranks among the most popular recipes on our site. The influence of Les Chèvres would resurface some 20 years later in Sabayon’s vegetable-forward approach.

Wine on One Side, Hospitality on the Other

Marie-Josée was 12 when her father bought a restaurant. She spent her teenage weekends there and discovered an early passion for the trade. She entered the ITHQ after high school, joined every committee she could, then left to study sommellerie in France in the early 2000s. “Back then, nearly every restaurant had the same wine list, and they were only just beginning to open up to the world,” Marie-Josée recalls. Next came a bachelor’s degree in administration, majoring in hotel management, at the University of Guelph, then a return to Montréal in 2005, where she worked at Chez l’Épicier and Laloux, among others.

Everywhere she went, she combined the roles of maître d’ and sommelier.

“If I’m only a sommelier, I get a little bored, and if I’m only a maître d’, I miss the wine.” — Marie-Josée Beaudoin

At Laloux, she joined Patrice and Marc-André Jetté. The trio found its balance between cuisine, pastry and wine. In 2009, they moved on together to Newtown, a stage that helped them better define what suited them. Marie-Josée, though, remembers what mattered most. “The only good thing that happened that year was that Patrice and I became a couple,” she says with a laugh.

Les 400 Coups followed, still alongside Marc-André. Success was instant: two months after opening, the dining room was full every night. It was there that they met a host of industry people and that colleagues became friends. Then each of them felt the need to build something of their own. Patrice and Marie-Josée launched into pastry, a choice that still makes the sommelier smile, since she admits she is anything but an early riser.

The Patrice Pâtissier Chapter

“We had the good, or bad, idea of opening a pastry shop. We’d never worked in a pastry shop,” says Patrice. It took two or three years of 75-hour weeks and fragile profitability before the business found its momentum and became one of Montréal’s most cherished addresses. In 2018, Patrice was named pastry chef of the year at the first Lauriers de la gastronomie québécoise. Yet the couple missed restaurant life. When the lease came up, in the middle of a labour shortage, they decided to close that chapter.

The pastry shop closed in August 2022, with no specific plan for what came next. They treated themselves to a month in Italy. One evening near the end of the trip, they discovered a small restaurant in a village near Alba: about 20 covers, a menu of a few courses and a couple whose presence made them feel welcomed as if at home. The first spark of Sabayon was lit that night.

It took them a few months to realize that, at this stage of their careers, they no longer wanted to work for others. So Marie-Josée built an Excel spreadsheet to make sure a tasting menu served to a small circle of guests could hold up. “We had missed restaurants so much. We wanted to do what we love, we just needed 14 customers a night,” she recalls.

One evening, walking through Pointe-Saint-Charles, they spotted a “for rent” sign on rue Centre, a few streets from their home. The space with its large windows won them over right away. Five days later, the lease was signed. Sabayon opened in late August 2023, a year after the pastry shop closed.

Sabayon, the Crowning Achievement

Sabayon brings together their experience in the kitchen, in the dining room and in wine. “We couldn’t have opened this place at 28,” they sum up.

The six-course menu favours Québec vegetables, fish and seafood, before giving way to Patrice’s desserts. “The last thing we want is for a guest to come in hoping for a nice wagyu steak or a duck breast,” the chef warns.

On Friday and Saturday afternoons, Tea Time pairs three desserts with Camellia Sinensis teas, after a glass of bubbly. “Patrice does the desserts, I do the tea. It’s our own little thing,” says Marie-Josée. The pleasure of hosting remains the same: “We want people to feel as though we’re welcoming them into our home.”

Sabayon was also among the first Montréal restaurants to sell reservations like concert tickets. It’s a way to guard against no-shows, the absences the whole industry pays for and that can weigh extremely heavily on a small restaurant with only 14 seats.

Sabayon exceeded their expectations. When enRoute named it the best new restaurant in the country, they couldn’t believe it. “It didn’t even cross our minds that we could be number 1.”

A Michelin star seemed just as far from their reality. They had even voted against the guide coming to Québec. “When I started in this business, Michelin wasn’t even in America,” Patrice points out. But the predictions multiplied, guests brought it up, and they too ended up getting caught up in the game.

The star was awarded, but their guiding principle stayed the same: “We’d told ourselves that whether we got a star or not, we wouldn’t change a thing.”

When Everything Rests on Trust

What makes your duo work, after all these years of living and working together? For Patrice, it all comes down to trust. “We both have immense confidence in each other’s skills.” He remembers how anxious he felt in other restaurants when handing a dessert over to the floor staff. “Would they set the plate down the right way? Here, I don’t even have to think about it.” A quiet tribute to Marie-Josée, who returns the compliment: in the dining room, she knows the seasoning and the cooking are in good hands… always!

“The fact that we were colleagues before we were a couple helps,” she notes. A year and a half of working together preceded their love story. Married since 2014, they still advise and listen to each other with the same trust. At the restaurant, they talk shop; at home, Sabayon joins them at the table as little as possible.

Leading by Example, Every Day

Sabayon welcomes many interns each year, and showing them that this profession can be practised at the highest level, with respect, is central to their concerns. The couple is committed to offering them a healthy environment, where the intensity of service never justifies raised voices or intimidation. “Even though our world is one of passion and intensity, it’s possible to do it in a balanced way,” they say. In a profession long associated with excess, and aware of the abuses that persist, they make it their duty to be positive role models for the next generation. Marie-Josée extends this commitment as co-founder of La Tablée au féminin, a supportive collective of women working in the food and hospitality trades.

That balance is also cultivated outside the restaurant’s walls. With three nights of service a week, they take time to see friends, work out, travel and eat out in Montréal and elsewhere. “We love discovering young chefs and going to see people who inspire us and who work better than we do,” they say. These discoveries, in turn, feed Sabayon’s creativity.

There is something deeply heartening about hearing two such accomplished artisans speak so enthusiastically about other people’s work. This undiminished curiosity, this esteem for their peers and this love of sharing make Patrice and Marie-Josée cherished figures in Québec’s restaurant scene. We wish them a long continuation of this wonderful adventure, and to those taking their first steps in the profession, the good fortune of crossing their path.