Ferreira Café

Portugal on Peel Street

3.5 of 5

Ferreira Café has served modern Portuguese cooking on Peel Street since 1996, which in downtown restaurant years makes it something close to a cathedral. The décor has been refreshed recently. The point of the place has not moved: fish, done properly, with a cellar to match.

Chef Natalia Machado Villaverde runs a kitchen that treats seafood with the kind of simplicity that takes years to learn. Sardine fillets roasted with fleur de sel. That is the entire description and it is enough. The creamy seafood rice, loaded with scallops, prawns, squid, mussels and clams, is the dish to share and then fight over. The wine list runs to about four hundred references, most of them Portuguese, with ports and rare spirits waiting at the end of the night for anyone without an early meeting.

The room mixes Portuguese warmth with a bit of big city swagger, and the service is attentive without hovering. On Bell Centre event nights they open at five to feed the crowd before the puck drops. I spent years on consulting expense accounts, and I know the difference between a business dinner and a good dinner. This place manages both at once, which is harder than it looks. Book a weekday lunch for a gentler bill, or go for dinner and order the rice.

Order this: Sardine fillets roasted with fleur de sel, Creamy seafood rice, A glass of port from the list
The damage: $$$
Go: A weekday lunch, or dinner before a Bell Centre night when they open at five
Find it: 1446 Rue Peel, Montréal, QC H3A 1S8