St. Lawrence: Québec served as a region of France, in Vancouver

On Powell Street, at the edge of Gastown, a door opens onto a country house. Antiques on the walls, French-speaking staff, pâté en croûte and pouding au riz on the menu: St. Lawrence is Vancouver’s only Québécois restaurant, and one of the few tables in the city to hold a Michelin star, earned in 2022. At the stove since the 2017 opening, JC Poirier serves a cuisine he sums up in one line: treat Québec as a region of France.

The chef arrived from Montréal in 2004 with a backpack and his knives, speaking no English, for what was meant to be one year at Rob Feenie’s Lumière. Trained at Les Remparts, a classic French table in Old Montréal, then at Normand Laprise’s Toqué!, he first made his mark in Vancouver with Pizzeria Farina and Ask for Luigi. Meanwhile, another idea was taking shape: a return to the French classics he had learned at the start. “Galantines, ballottines, pâté en croûte, it had been so long since people had seen those that they were going to feel new again. Plenty of people had never tasted them.” When a space came up a few streets from Ask for Luigi, St. Lawrence was born.

The name was weighed carefully. A name people here remember, and one that says where he comes from. Everything else follows the same logic. Some of the staff speak French, and the mandate is to transport guests to Québec or France for the length of a dinner. “I missed Québec. This was my way of bringing it here and having it every day,” says the chef, who also wanted to show Vancouverites that French cooking runs well beyond the croque-monsieur of Parisian-style bistros.

On the plate, the season decides the ratio of Québec to France. In winter, peasant cooking takes over, pork, cabbage and potatoes, along with the English heritage you can read in the pea soup and the baked beans. In summer, the chef cooks the British Columbia market, with a few ingredients he still brings in from Québec. The menu takes the form of a four-course table d’hôte that changes with the seasons, but a few classics never move. Escargots en bouchée de la reine, in puff pastry coated with garlic sauce. Lobster and scallop terrine served with its bisque. The pâté en croûte, always on the menu, whose filling changes every week. Duck ballottine with orange sauce, soon joined by the return of the mushroom vol-au-vent. And to finish, J-C Poirier’s favourite dessert, rice pudding, what France would call riz au lait, with salted caramel and maple syrup pecans.

The bar follows the same line. No whisky, no scotch, no American products at all: they work with gin, including Québec gins, calvados and French spirits, on a deliberately short cocktail list. The beers come from France and Québec. The wine was strictly French at the start; it has since opened up to a few bottles from Québec and Spain, but remains firmly Old World.

The 32-seat room, with its counter facing the kitchen, feels like the home of a grandmother with good taste. The chef spent years collecting antiques, stored under staircases while waiting for the right moment, before hanging everything on the walls. Service is precise but friendly. “Michelin sometimes comes with a stiff side. We’re not that,” he sums up.

The accolades have kept coming since 2017, including several appearances in the top three of Canada’s 100 Best, then the star. The chef, who took sole charge of the restaurant after five years, is now stepping back a little from the stove and helped two pillars of his team, sommelier David Lawson and sous-chef Margaux Herder, open Chez Céline on Fraser Street in 2025, a more fun and casual little sister. St. Lawrence, for its part, remains the place you come to for amazing classic French done by the book.

Written by Fabie Lubin
Photography by Hakan Burcuoglu

Updated on October 14, 2026

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