Le Jus: The Smash Burger Counter Hiding in Plain Sight on Monkland

Plenty of people walk past Le Jus on Monkland and assume it’s a smoothie bar. It isn’t. Behind that misleading name sits one of the best smash burger counters in NDG.

This tiny halal spot opened in June 2025 in the former Buboy space, and it’s the project of Justin Bragg. So why name a burger joint Le Jus? It’s a play on “Justin” — plus a small confession: the guy is hooked on peach juice.

Justin put in the work long before he had his own four walls. It all started as a pop-up in April 2024, inside a friend’s restaurant, Buboy, at slightly unhinged hours (9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays). “At those hours, I really didn’t think I’d pull much of a crowd, but we ended up with all kinds of people stopping by,” he tells us. He was working as a head chef at another address at the same time. When he saw how the pop-up took off, he jumped on the opening. And as luck would have it, Buboy was moving to Chinatown. Six weeks later, investors had come aboard, and Le Jus came together in a single month: walls painted, shelves drilled in, equipment tracked down at the best price — all by Justin himself. “If you look closely at the walls, you can tell I painted them,” he laughs.

The menu gets straight to the point: smash burgers, fried chicken sandwiches, cheese fries. We fell for the classic smash — generous, almost fondant on the tongue — and for the buffalo chicken sandwich, its breading staying craquant over juicy meat. Just thinking about it makes us hungry. It’s a sandwich Justin has been fine-tuning for two years, and you can taste the work behind it. The smash burgers are what Le Jus is known for, but don’t sleep on the fried chicken burgers. And everything here is halal, right down to the bacon.

As for the room, expect something small and humble: twelve seats, so it’s grab-and-go or takeout. You don’t come for the decor or the atmosphere — quiet, chill, the classic comfort-food counter. You come for warming food, made with care, by a genuinely nice team. And that comes through in every bite.

NDG needed a spot like Le Jus, one that gives comfort food its full meaning.

Bon appétit!

Written by Jean-Philippe Tastet
Photography by Alison Slattery

Updated on June 05, 2026

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