La Bête à pain: Another location opens on Chabanel

At La Bête à pain, in Montréal or Laval, we have our routines. We love the original location on Fleury for the smell of fresh bread that hits you right on the sidewalk, the Laval spot for its spacious dining room where you linger over lunch, and the Griffintown one for morning coffee. Each address has its own personality, its own rhythm, its own regulars — and that’s precisely what we love about this place.

“Every Bête à Pain adapts to its own clientele,” confirms Annick Dufresne, co-owner alongside Marc-André Royal and Chantal Gervais. That may be what makes the brand so endearing: it refuses to duplicate itself. The jambon-beurre — gruyère, cornichons, Dijon — stays on the menu from one location to the next (too iconic not to be there!), but everything else gets reinvented according to the neighbourhood, the clientele, and the seasons. La Bête à pain Chabanel arrives in Chabanel with a temperament all its own: a small shop up front, a vast production kitchen in the back, which will finally make it possible to keep up with corporate demand (at last!). Not a race to expand, then, but a desire to better serve those who’ve been knocking at the door for a long time, businesses and individuals alike.

On the menu at La Bête à pain Chabanel, you’ll find the mainstays we never want to give up, along with a few new items designed specifically for this address: an Alsatian hot dog with rémoulade, a mortadella sandwich with lemon and olive oil, a salmon burger with pickled fennel. On the hot side: veal meatballs with polenta, fish and chips with sauce gribiche. Summer will lean toward salads — yellowfin tuna tataki, burrata and tomatoes — and the display cases line up croissants, chocolatines, almond croissants, muffins, and scones. To take home, a carefully curated private import selection, built over twenty years by Chantal Gervais, the house sommelier, with a lovely non-alcoholic section to accompany everyday life.

As always, La Bête à pain Chabanel is the kind of address you love visiting no matter the occasion. A solo coffee first thing in the morning before work, brunch with friends on the weekend, stopping in with your partner to pick out the week’s bread… Every moment is a good one to drop by.

And then there’s the team, whom Annick insists on naming, because they are at the heart of the success of their locations. Head baker Steven Bengoa, “a top-tier baker,” as Annick describes him, who now oversees both the Fleury and Chabanel kitchens. General manager Mélanie Breton, a trusted partner for fifteen years. Chef Romain Pirat in the kitchen. “The three of us build Bête à Pain, but they’re the ones who run it afterwards,” she emphasizes. Same loyalty on the supplier side: the farm next door, from which La Bête à pain has been scooping up the bulk of the yearly harvest for eight years now. Here as at their other locations, local sourcing reigns supreme.

We’ve loved La Bête à pain for a long time, for its breads, for its sandwiches, for that way of doing things you recognize at first glance. This newcomer doesn’t break the rule: same soul, new temperament. And as of today, we have one more Bête à pain to love.

Written by Jean-Philippe Tastet
Photography by Alison Slattery

Updated on April 21, 2026

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