By Laura Pratt
It was early June in Montreal, and restaurants were revving their engines in anticipation of a roaring summer season, not the least because the annual Formula One automobile race was in town. The Canadian Grand Prix, part of the Formula One World Championship since 1967 and a highlight of Montreal’s late spring since 1978, is among the most lucrative events on the city’s calendar, bringing in $162 million last year, including $110 million from tourists outside Quebec. Glenn Castanheira, executive director of the Montréal centre-ville business association, says the Grand Prix weekend, for many restaurants, “pays rent for most of the year.” But at 9 p.m. on the Friday of this year’s racing weekend, in the centre of the F1 Grand Prix bustle in downtown Montreal, the Portuguese fish restaurant, Ferreira Café, was rolling up its terrace and telling patrons they had to vacate its sweet outdoor vibe in response to a city official’s determination that the eatery’s Peel St. patio was not up to code.
In a stunned post on Instagram, Groupe Ferreira director of Operations Sandra Ferreira explained how members of the Service de securité incendie de Montreal (SIM) told her that all her customers had to vacate the Ferreira Café terrace or the whole restaurant would be shut down.
It’s a political move that other restaurateurs claim characterizes the current scene for restaurants operating in Quebec: having to conduct business under the watchful eyes of an unsupportive, confrontational, persnickety government. While foodservice operators doing business in this province suffer so many of the same impediments and challenges their counterparts across Canada currently do — including rising prices, scarce labour, bankruptcies, and pinched consumer purses, to say nothing of historically high failure rates and thin margins — Quebec restaurateurs are also up against a significant internal threat: their own demanding and unaccommodating government.
“There’s just not a lot of support for small businesses here,” says Renée Deschenes-O’Hagan, managing partner of Franquette, a neighbourhood bistro and cocktail bar in Westmount, an affluent municipality on the Island of Montreal. “The infrastructure seems built against restaurants and bars in Quebec. There are all these hoops we have to jump through that restaurateurs in Ontario don’t have to. Add that to the fact that we pay the highest taxes in the country, and it’s not conducive for people to have small businesses here. I understand why so many people are throwing in the towel.”
Deschenes-O’Hagan, who also cites the absence of volume discounts or any kind of conciliatory partnership with the SAQ, the Crown corporation responsible for the trade of alcoholic beverages within the province, quotes Frédéric Morin, the co-owner of Montreal’s Joe Beef Group, from a conference she attended in the spring, commenting on the state of doing business in Canada’s largest province: “The powers that be make us guilty for being restaurateurs.”
“We don’t often pull back the curtain on what’s going on because we want a guest to feel good, positive, like there are no worries,” says Deschenes-O’Hagan. “But there’s a ton of worries, obviously.”
Dyan Solomon, co-owner of Olive et Gourmando, a daytime diner that’s flourished in Old Montreal since its launch in 1998, is worried, too. Solomon, who’s opening a second location of her popular restaurant in the fall, points to the language requirements by which Quebec restaurants must abide as the biggest threat to a restaurant’s success in this province.
In January 2024, the Government of Quebec updated language laws introduced by Bill 96. Quebec restaurateurs are no strangers to language requirements, first set out in the Charter of the French Language, a foundational law in place since 1977 that established French as the official language of the province. With Bill 96, which hit the streets in 2022, the government added stricter rules around French compliance to its language requirements, including a call for all businesses to employ predominantly French translations in their communications — or face a fine of up to $30,000. But a recent development is seeing many restaurants who already went through the changing of their signs having to change them again thanks to a new rule requiring all signs on commercial businesses, aside from the company name, to be predominately in French by June 2025.
Businesses were given one year to assign at least twice as much space on their storefronts to French as any other language as part of the government’s ongoing effort to protect Quebec’s official language.
Solomon, who has had the “language police” visit her restaurant three times in the last two years, once blasting her for including the word “homemade” on her chalkboard, calls “the language situation one of the more complicated aspects of running a restaurant here.
In addition to changes to language requirements, Quebec’s new tax laws for bars and restaurants load further obligations on participants in this province’s foodservice industry. Reflecting a broader global trend of integrating technology into governance and tax administration, the provincial government is now mandating that restaurants change the platform they use to record their sales — specifically, that they shift from physical sales-recording modules (SRMs) to a new cloud-based IT solution (the WEB-SRM). By May 31, 2025, restaurants need to produce and file all required sommaires périodiques des ventes (periodic sales summaries), including the one for the month they start using the new IT solution, to Revenu Québec, in real time.
This extra bureaucratic burden represents another cost for an industry that’s already swimming in them. “It’s going to be a couple of thousand dollars at a time when about 52 per cent of restaurants are barely breaking even or are operating at a loss,” says Maximilien Roy, vice-president of Restaurants Canada, federal and Quebec. He calls the summer of 2024 “the summer of ultimatums” for restaurants in Quebec.
These constraints kick in, he says, at a time when customers have less discretionary income and are not as confident in their economic futures as before. He points to the price of cooking oil increasing by about 40 per cent in the past year as a representative example. “So, the price of food is going up and fewer people are going to the restaurant. It’s a double hit on our industry.”
He chalks up the scene to a range of influences, including changes in customer behaviour, inflation and labour requirements that make it tough for restaurants to operate at full capacity. Of the 72,000 restaurant employment vacancies across Canada, close to 6,000 are in Quebec.
“There are just not enough employees for the industry,” says Roy, who notes that restaurants have tried to improve the scene by reducing their open hours, a tactic that also shrinks their capacity to make the necessary profit to run a business.
“There’s lots of bureaucracy, construction is out of control,” Solomon says of Quebec’s government. “There’s a lot of mismanagement of public money and, if you’re a small business owner, you don’t have the impression in Quebec that you are appreciated and helped. You don’t feel like someone’s giving you a pat on the back saying, thank you for employing people, for running restaurants that attract tourism. It’s no, we’re going to fine you for this, there’s that permit and this rule. People always say people who run restaurants in Quebec are insane. Quebec is the end-all of bureaucracy.”
The paradox, Solomon continues, is that the government regularly hails its restaurant industry in its efforts to attract tourists to the province. “Quebec will talk a lot about the food scene as one of their main shining jewels, but there’s not a lot of support there.”
There are 22,295 foodservice businesses currently operating in Quebec, and they employ 254,500 people — 5.6 per cent of the province’s workforce. In 2023, they generated $22.1 billion in revenues. The Quebec restaurant industry is mainly composed of independents — about 60 per cent of restaurants here are independent — a defining feature that’s very specific to the province, whose residents have a preference for sitting down to enjoying a meal with one another, thus eschewing the fast food and counter-style restaurants that dominate elsewhere in the country.
But Roy doesn’t hesitate to single out a handful of positives of running a restaurant in this province, including the diversity it promotes and the way that reality is powering a re-discovery of some of the cuisine that’s typical of traditional Quebec, such as cabane à sucre favourites pea soup, cretons and maple-smoked ham. Quebeckers are proud of their culinary heritage, he states, which includes traditional recipes inherited from the French and English long before the founding of the New France, as well as recipes handed down by the First Nations and by immigrants from all over the world. Quebec gastronomy can still find novelty in its roots, he says, and that’s what’s behind this enthusiastic rediscovery. “We feel like things are turning,” he says. “Customers are feeling more confidence in the second half of 2024. They have more money and want to visit restaurants more. The outlook is positive.”
Positive too, says Deschenes-O’Hagan, are the individuals who are seeing through their dreams by opening and operating restaurants in the face of the obstacles her province throws up. “I think restaurateurs are always going to be people who are resourceful, highly intelligent, and problem-solvers,” she says, “because we literally have a million problems to solve every day. People are always finding ways to work around them; to change concepts; to make things more harmonious, easier, and more attractive to people coming into the industry.”
Solomon is also feeling a bit bullish about the future for her game — a change, she acknowledges, from the same time last year. She says the comments she shared about her industry a year ago were filled with gloom. “I told everyone all the restaurants here were going to close and that we’d all be eating at McDonald’s,” she says. “I gave a lot of interviews where I said, I don’t see the future, it doesn’t look good.”
But Solomon calls Montreal’s current restaurant scene “thriving,” and points to a recent trend of restaurant openings in that famously foodie city. “After COVID there was a lot of suffering and a lot of places closed. But just this summer in Montreal alone, there are about five top restaurants owned by respected chefs or known restaurant groups, opening up in beautiful spaces.” She says she knows it’s an unexpected observation to make, but that there’s a “strange energy” circulating in the local restaurant scene in Quebec’s biggest city right now, especially sparked by young chefs, which she finds “fascinating, amazing, and inspiring. I feel like there’s a little beacon of light shining over here in Quebec restaurants.”
