Le Grand Comité: Chef Rémi Lemieux’s Neighbourhood Bistro That Downtown Was Waiting For

Downtown Montréal is full of excellent tables, but real neighbourhood bistros — the kind you make a habit of — are rare there. That’s the gap Le Grand Comité fills: the new address from chef Rémi Lemieux, opened quietly at the end of June 2026. A lively room designed for every moment of the day: weekday breakfast, weekend brunch, a business lunch, dinner with friends, or simply a glass at the counter with a croque-monsieur (maybe one of the best in the city).

The chef arrives with an impressive résumé. A graduate of the ITHQ (Québec’s tourism and hospitality institute), Rémi Lemieux became one of the youngest chefs to run the kitchen at Au Pied de Cochon before joining some of the greatest tables in the world: Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana in Italy, then Éric Ripert’s Le Bernardin in New York. We saw him on Top Chef Canada, and the Michelin Guide placed him among Montréal’s most creative chefs. The man is as uncompromising as his cooking: a perfectionist indifferent to convention and to his own image, part showman, a touch eccentric, plain-spoken. With Le Grand Comité, he has his dream project. “I love the challenge of opening a restaurant that shouldn’t be downtown,” he says. Because that’s exactly what this is: a true neighbourhood bistro, open to everyone, where exceptional products come at gentle prices. The name says plenty: for him, the comité is the circle you gather around the chef — and the Grand Comité throws its doors wide open.

Le Grand Comité: Under the Glass Roof

The space unfolds beneath a spectacular glass roof, a ceiling of glass that caps the room with a greenhouse effect in the middle of downtown. Below it, everything breathes chic bistro: a herringbone floor, soft green velvet banquettes, blond wood panelling and natural light that inhabits the room. Le Grand Comité owes these bones to the former Garden Room, whose framework the team inherited before shaping its own identity. The result is striking, and already ranks among the most beautiful restaurants in the city.

Lab-Grade Rigour, Bistro Clothes

The concept comes down to a few words: accessible and precise. Beneath that stated simplicity hides the chef’s obsession with research and development. “I sleep two hours a night,” he admits, fine-tuning his recipes. The result is cooking of total command, deeply technical, that asks nothing of the guest but to let themselves be carried along.

Classics Reworked With Precision at Le Grand Comité

Rémi’s cooking celebrates the great bistro classics while folding in a Montréal signature. The vast majority of the products come from local farms and artisans. The stuffed cabbage is already establishing itself as a house favourite, alongside the aged local beef burger served medium-rare. The trio of croques is winning converts, starting with the salmon one, served with a vivid green ranch, airy and packed with dill. The steak-frites sums up the whole approach: a modest shoulder cut, deboned then aged three weeks in koji to concentrate its flavour, seared to a savoury crust and served with crisp fries, absolutely divine — all for under $40, $37 to be exact.

Le Grand Comité also makes a choice still rare in a bistro: bringing on a pastry chef. In charge of the sweet side, Iari Prassi — with an international path forged in the fine-dining kitchens of Australia, Denmark, Italy and France — went on to build his career in Montréal, notably at L’Île Flottante and Hiatus. He’s behind a floating island inspired by the Orange Julep (Montréal’s iconic frothy orange drink) and a sticky toffee done in the style of pouding chômeur (a classic Québécois dessert).

“We want a simple bread-and-butter to be memorable enough to justify a visit on its own,” Rémi sums up. The same standard runs through the welcome, imagined the way you host at home: small touches slipped in unnoticed, the right word at the right moment, a wink that turns a meal into a memory. From arrival to departure, you feel looked after by the whole team. Here, the table holds as many surprises as the plate. “I take care of the wow; people just have to be here and have fun.” — Rémi Lemieux.

A Bet on Discovery

Where downtown happily serves safe bets, sommelier and co-owner David Zamora offers a wine list that runs against the current, dodging the obvious in favour of discovery. Natural wines as much as sharp appellations, often cuvées that brush up against a familiar style without quite being one. Add to that wines from Domaine La Bauge drawn on tap. The wines by the glass, meanwhile, travel by Vespa: a vintage one parked in the room, its trunk full of open bottles poured as the mood strikes. And the cocktails lift off with seasonal aromatics, wild lovage among them. A living, evolving list, brilliantly considered.

From August, Le Grand Comité will welcome guests from morning to evening, seven days a week except Sunday evening. The bet is clear: give downtown the neighbourhood bistro it was missing, where fine dining slips in behind accessibility.

And it’s only the beginning: Petit Comité — more intimate, more mysterious — is already taking shape on the floor below, with an opening planned for the fall. Judging by the guided tour we got from Ali, one of the three partners, it may well surprise more than a few people.

With Le Grand Comité, Rémi Lemieux reconciles high technique and affordability, placing refinement and rigour at the heart of the experience. A restaurant that does downtown good. Happy discovering.

Written by Jean-Philippe Tastet
Photography by Alison Slattery

Updated on July 30, 2026

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