Joe Beef

Napkins the Size of Bedsheets

4.5 of 5

Some restaurants want you to admire them. Joe Beef wants you fed, a little loud and slightly worse for wear by the end of the night. It has been doing this on Notre-Dame Ouest in Little Burgundy since 2005, and the city has never once asked it to calm down.

David McMillan, Frédéric Morin and Allison Cunningham built the place, and McMillan stepped away in 2021 after three decades in kitchens, leaving Morin and Cunningham in charge. The menu changes every service, written around whatever turns up from Atwater Market and the suppliers they trust. That is how a kitchen run by cooks behaves. Expect steaks and seafood, plus the old French bistro dishes most places abandoned because they are hard to do well: rabbit à la royale, calf sweetbreads. They hand you a napkin roughly the size of a bedsheet. Take the hint and roll up your sleeves. The service is quick, warm and funny, which is rarer than a good sweetbread.

Years of expense-account travel for consulting clients put me in a thousand rooms designed by committee. This one was designed by appetite. It is not cheap and it is not quiet. Book ahead, arrive hungry and let the floor staff steer you toward what the kitchen is proudest of that night.

Order this: Whatever the day's market menu offers, Rabbit à la royale, Calf sweetbreads, A steak or the seafood
The damage: $$$
Go: A weeknight at opening, with a reservation and an empty stomach
Find it: 2491 Rue Notre-Dame O, Montréal, QC H3J 1N6