L’Eclisse: Figata’s Little Sister in NDG

L’Eclisse steps away from the Italian roots of the team behind Figata to serve a Mediterranean cuisine that borrows from France, Italy and Spain, with some American touches, in a setting lifted from 1960s European cinema. The two restaurants share a family, but not a personality. Where Figata is built for hanging out over pasta and a glass of wine, L’Eclisse leans toward a proper evening out.

A growing family

The idea surfaced only a few months after Figata opened in Saint-Henri, when Stephen Marcone, the restaurateur behind Bistro Amerigo, brought it to his partners. A Monkland Avenue space he had been eyeing for years had become available, and the timing felt right. Marcone, Agha and Viral Patel, the trio behind Figata, took it on with Naira Kreknina, Amerigo’s head server for a decade, in her first venture as an owner.

For Agha, it is also a return to NDG, where he made his mark at Entre-Deux, a now-closed café and wine bar on Sherbrooke Street West, before opening Figata. When word got out that he was coming back to the neighbourhood, his messages filled up with questions about a single dish.

Back on the menu

That dish is the jambon-beurre, served more like a salad than a sandwich, minus the lettuce: a plate of white ham and browned butter with Comté, cornichons, Dijon and radishes. Regulars at Entre-Deux used to leave notes in their reservations asking the kitchen to save them one, and L’Eclisse now goes through about 10 kilos of ham in five days. The classic tartare made the trip too, served here with bread baked à la minute in the pizza oven. On the menu as well, a thick burger arrives split in half and set in an au poivre sauce, with a mountain of fries on the side, while cod comes dressed in beurre blanc. There’s even a seafood paella, a sign that the kitchen is reaching past France and Italy toward the wider Mediterranean.

Agha spent most of his career in French kitchens, and Figata was his first time cooking Italian. Here, he brings the two together. “Italian food has really raw technique and really raw flavours,” he explains, while French cuisine is “fundamentally sound, there’s a lot of technique, there’s a lot of layering.” Chef Alex Di Prima co-created the menu with him. Patel, who builds the wine list, leans on French, Italian and Spanish regions and on blends that echo the food, while the cocktails, modern takes on classics, come from Alex Quinton (Bar Numéro), a longtime collaborator of Agha’s in NDG. The dirty martini, poured from a freezing cold carafe, is already a staple of the house. Dessert then crosses back over the Atlantic, with a twist on pouding chômeur and a s’mores parfait.

A scene from Antonioni

The name comes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse (1962), starring Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. Marcone fell for the film’s Rome, “very industrial, very raw, but at the same time, very elegant,” and saw in it the brick and fire of his own space. The flowers on the logo come from a scene in which a man who has just lost a fortune on the stock market sits at a bar and sketches flowers on a scrap of paper.

The partners designed the space in house. Orange booths, lamps on every table, a phone booth, a newspaper stand and a spotlit staircase set the tone, and a mural pays homage to the films that inspired Marcone. The goal, he says, was to offer a moment more than a plate.

Agha sums up the family resemblance best. Amerigo is Sunday dinner at your parents’, Figata is a night at a friend’s, and L’Eclisse is more like dinner with the in-laws, where “you’re dressing up just a bit more, just to impress. You’re sitting up just a bit more straight.” The family, meanwhile, is already planning its next addition.

Written by Marie-Ève Godin
Photography by Alison Slattery

Updated on November 13, 2026

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