Canada's 100 Best Restaurants List 2024 - Montréal Is Home to the Best Restaurant in the Country for the Fourth Year

Tourisme Montréal is excited to share that the city once again stands out in Canada's 100 Best Restaurants, being home to nearly 30% of the best restaurants in the country and maintaining its position as a leader with Mon Lapin at the top of the list.

"There simply isn't anywhere else in the world one would wish to have a restaurant; Montreal is magical! It's thanks to the discerning and curious clientele that the culinary scene here is so rich. The Montreal joie de vivre is unique and contagious! We couldn't be prouder of our city!" exclaims Vanya Filipovic, co-owner of Mon Lapin, who also won the Best Sommelier Team award alongside her colleague and co-owner, sommelier Alex Landry.

Since the creation of this list 10 years ago, the city has kept an incomparable reputation for gastronomy, celebrating this year its fourth recognition as number 1 in Canada. This performance testifies to the exceptional quality of the local gastronomic scene and confirms the undisputed reputation of Montréal as the gastronomic capital of the country.

The restaurants Beba, Monarque, Montréal Plaza and Toqué! are also honored in the top 20. Opened recently, Sabayon and Casavant also managed to earn a place among the list. Internationally renowned Montreal chef Paul Toussaint, owner of Kamuy restaurant, wins the American Express Award for Community Leadership.

"What pride to see Montréal shine so much in the field of gastronomy! This recognition reinforces our commitment to promoting our vibrant and diverse tables," says Yves Lalumière, President and CEO of Tourisme Montréal.

Montréal restaurants in the top 100:

1 - Mon Lapin

63 - Bar St-Denis

8 - Beba

68 - Pichai

11 - Monarque

69 - Bouillon Bilk

13 - Montréal Plaza

72 - Alma

19 - Toqué !

73 - Mastard

21 - Cabaret l'Enfer

79 - Sabayon

41 - Joe Beef

80 - Le Vin Papillon

50 - Salle Climatisée

83 - Foxy

51 - Au Pied de Cochon

84 - Gia Vin et Grill

53 - L'Express

87 - Casavant

54 - Otto

93 - Liverpool House

55 - Paloma

96 - Hoogan et Beaufort

56 - Nora Gray

98 - Le Mousso

61 - Lawrence

100 - Park

Montréal Celebrates Gastronomy

The best restaurateurs from everywhere in the province will gather in the city on May 27 for the Gala des Lauriers de la Gastronomie Québécoise. With 17 categories to celebrate, the evening will highlight the richness and diversity of Quebec's culinary scene. The talent and dedication of chefs, restaurateurs and all those who contribute to making local gastronomy a real tourist attraction will also be honored during the ceremony. Once again, this year, Tourisme Montréal is committed to gastronomic excellence and will award a prize in the gourmet tourism category. This award recognizes the crucial role of local cuisine in the overall visitor experience.

The Taste of Place Summit in Montréal

Montréal has been selected to host the second edition of the Taste of Place Summit, an annual conference on culinary tourism and agritourism in Canada. The event will be held from May 26 to 28 at the Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec. Yves Lalumière, President and CEO of Tourisme Montréal will take the stage to explain the key role the organization plays in highlighting the growing importance of gastronomy in the tourism industry. He will also explore the links between local cuisine, cultural identity, and tourist attraction.

About Tourisme Montréal

Tourisme Montréal is a 100-year-old private, non-profit organization that works to position Montréal as an international-calibre leisure and business travel destination. To this end, the organization is piloting innovative hospitality strategies with a two-fold objective: ensuring that visitors enjoy a memorable experience and maximizing tourism economic spin-offs in a sustainable way with long-term impacts for the city. Uniting nearly 1,000 businesses and organizations working directly or indirectly in tourism, Tourisme Montréal plays a leading role in the management and development of Montréal's tourism business, and makes recommendations on issues surrounding the city's economic, urban and cultural development. For more information, go to www.mtl.org.

Montreal Bike Festival Heralds Release From Grip Of COVID

If the 21-story Leonard Cohen mural that commands Montreal’s skyline could talk, it might tell you what this city’s crackling cultural life was like when the pandemic hit and everyone hunkered down. To borrow from his lyrics, it was a cold and a broken hallelujah.

The party’s back on.
The first weekend in June, Montrealers will line sidewalks and porches, toot horns and shout “bonne journee” or just plain “go!” as swarms of cyclists wend their way through the iconic urban spaces of this bicycle-mad city.

The Go Bike Montreal Festival is traditionally and once more the kickoff to a spring and summer season of music, outdoor pursuits, art extravaganzas and other joie de vivre exuberance.
This is no race of hotshots. Rather, the crowds turn out to cheer on neighbors and strangers, some 20,000 of them in each of two main rides, during a week-long festival that celebrates Montreal’s status as one of North America’s best bicycling cities.

This, in a province with a vast cycling network — Route Verte — that National Geographic rated first among the world’s top 10 cycling destinations.

Velo Quebec, the cycling organization that manages the network and puts on the festival, considers this year’s version to be the first full-blown one since COVID-19 at first crushed, then curtailed, the annual event and other large gatherings.

“We’re back to historical numbers,” said Jean-François Rheault, Velo Quebec’s CEO. “We’re back in celebration mode. Now the celebration is almost everywhere in the city.”

The festival opens May 28 with the Metropolitan Challenge, covering routes as long as 145 kilometers (90 miles) in the nearby Monteregie countryside.

The classic events with closed-off downtown streets are the following weekend. On June 2, the hordes head out at sunset on Tour la Nuit, many in oddball costumes with bikes bedecked in carnivalesque lights. On June 4 comes the longer Tour de l’ile de Montreal, covering 45 km, or 28 miles.

Both urban rides begin and end at Parc Maisonneuve, site of Olympic Stadium, the Biodome and the Montreal Botanical Gardens. Other landmarks are en route or close by.

Rheault said the pandemic spurred cities including Montreal to accelerate improvements to bikeways. While bicycle commuting shrank in the city’s protracted and strictly enforced lockdown, plenty more people took up cycling as a way to avoid going stir crazy. “Many who started biking realized they could safely and efficiently get around,” he said, and they’ve stuck with it.

In the 2019 Tour de l’Île a street corner in a forlorn warehouse district rang out with bracing songs in French from a Black choir as cyclists splashed through sheets of driving rain. Surprises like that are around one corner after another in the festival rides.

Quebec’s dedication to bicycle commuting and touring development is well known in the cycling and urban-policy worlds, with the more than 5,000-km (3,000-mile) Route Verte as the backbone. Over a quarter century, bikeways — bicycle paths, multipurpose trails, protected bike lanes and safe shoulders — have grown five-fold.

Velo Quebec counts 10,600 km or nearly 6,600 miles of bikeways in the province. For Montreal alone, its studies find that 2 in 3 adults used a bike for utility purposes — work commutes, shopping, errands — in 2020, up from 42% five years earlier.

The Colorado-based advocacy and research group PeopleforBikes, which produces worldwide ratings on urban biking, ranks Montreal No. 1 among large cities in North America for bike-friendly attributes.

Similarly, an MIT book on global cycling trends by urban planning researchers John Pucher of Rutgers University and Ralph Buehler of Virginia Tech named Montreal a world leader in establishing a safe network for bike commuting and recreation.

Pucher told the AP the city was “way ahead of the curve” in producing “the most comfortable, the least stressful bicycling infrastructure.”

Even before COVID got even more people on bikes, Montreal experienced a nearly two-thirds drop in the rate of serious cycling injuries since 2000 as the city’s bike network more than doubled, Buehler and Pucher found.

Cycling in the U.S. and Canada has been shaped by three waves, said Rheault, of Velo Quebec.

First came initial bike trails in the 1970s, many in existing parks. Then a surge in bike paths and the advent of urban bike-share from 2005 to 2010. The COVID era brought on the third wave as e-bike sales have surged and the next generation of bike lanes, wider and better protected than before, has taken shape.

By CALVIN WOODWARD

The 2023 Cruise Season Is Officially Underway At The Port Of Montreal With New Ships, And Increased Tourism

The 2023 cruise season at the Port of Montreal got off to a great start this morning with the arrival of Holland America Line's Zaandam, one of the largest cruise ships that visits the Port of Montreal, with a capacity of 1,440 passengers. To mark the occasion and honour the 150th anniversary of Holland America Line, a plaque was presented to the captain of the Zaandam, Ane Smit. The season will run until October 30, 2023, and the number of international passengers is expected to exceed 45,000, up nearly 20% more than last year.

With 51 visits (five more than last year) featuring 38 embarking and disembarking operations and 13 stopovers, the season will generate $25 million in economic impact.

Confirming the resolve of cruise lines to lower their environmental impact, several of the scheduled ships are equipped to use the shore power supply facilities that have been available at the Port of Montreal's Grand Quay since 2017. This technology makes it possible for berthed cruise ships and wintering vessels to turn off their engines, resulting in an average reduction of five tonnes of GHG emissions with each connection. Eight different ships, from the Holland-America, Regent Seven Seas, Hapag-Lloyd and Viking cruise lines, on altogether 19 visits this season will be able to plug in and power up this way.

"The cruise sector is proving its attractiveness and dynamism in Montreal. Not only is the number of passengers up from last year, gradually returning to a level of traffic comparable to our pre-pandemic levels, but more and more of the cruise ships that stop at the Port are using our shore power supply system. The Port of Montreal is the only port on the St. Lawrence and one of only 25 in the world to provide this service to cruise ships. As well as generating major economic benefits for the City, the cruise industry is a tourism sector that is transitioning to more energy-efficient and sustainable practices," said Martin Imbleau, President and Chief Executive Officer of the MPA.

"Every year, the docking of the first cruise ship kicks off the long-awaited summer tourist season. Montréal is delighted to see the arrival of thousands of cruise passengers, who will add to the lively atmosphere of the Old Port as they enjoy its many cultural activities. We are particularly excited about the on-dock shore power at our cruise terminal, which aligns perfectly with the values of the sustainable destination that we are," said Yves Lalumière, President and CEO of Tourisme Montréal.

Many first visits

Five ships will call at the Port of Montreal for the first time this season:

Hapag-Lloyd's Hanseatic Inspiration (230 passengers)

Oceania's Vista (1,200 passengers)

Peace Boat's Pacific World (1,950 passengers)

Viking Ocean Cruises' Viking Neptune and Viking Mars (930 passengers each)

Of note, the ship The World, that last visited in 2015, will be in Montreal from September 25 to 27, 2023. What makes this 165-residence ship distinctive is that passengers own their own cabin. Imagine having a condo on the sea!

Marking Holland-America Line's 150th anniversary with a regular at the Port Piloted by Netherlands native Captain Ane Smit, who has been with Holland America Line for 23 years, the Zaandam is the first cruise ship to visit the Port of Montreal in 2023.

Celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, Holland America Line has become the largest cruise line to visit Montreal in recent years. In fact, between 2010 and 2022, Holland-America Line ships made 136 visits to Montreal and brought 337,111 passengers, representing 54% of all passengers in Montreal during this period. In other words, more than one out of every two passengers arrived or departed from Montreal aboard a Holland-America Line cruise ship.

For nore details, please visit: https://www.port-montreal.com/en/cruises/arrivals-and-departures