Restaurant review: L'Express

Nostalgia month continues with a Montreal classic

A note to subscribers: I’ve been pondering how to best offer enriched content to paid subscribers and decided that restaurant reviews will be placed behind a paywall. Also, unlike my former reviews for the Montreal Gazette, I will not be adding a star rating to restaurant write-ups. As I’m not dining out as frequently as in the past, I prefer to simply review the restaurant without placing it in a category. This week’s review is devoted to a classic restaurant, but there will be newer restos featured here as well.

This month’s posts have drawn me back into my Montreal of old, and by “old” I mean pre-pandemic, which feels like a decade ago. So much has changed in the city in the past three years. That that was blatantly obvious as I walked up St-Denis Street to dine at one of my favourite restaurants, L’Express.

L’Express at night, as crowded as ever.

Having seen dozens of swell restaurants disappear over the years (as detailed in my Restaurants I Miss Most post), I’ve always felt the closing that would hurt the most would be L’Express. Walking down the street I pass the locales of several long-gone establishments like Witloof, Tasso, Le Continental, Café Jongleux, and the graffiti-covered (and empty) original Toqué!. Yet despite all the À Louer signs (don’t get me started on Arthur Quentin and Marcel Proulx!), the legendary Plateau bistro is still going strong. Hooray! So strong, actually, that I haven’t had much luck garnering a reservation at L’ Express for months. But after a long wait, I’m back to celebrate my 56th birthday, seated on a well-worn chair, perusing the red-rimmed menu, wondering if much had changed since I lunched here in the fall of 2020. It was at the height of the pandemic when half the tables had been removed and the remaining ones were separated by plexiglass dividers. We were all a bit nervous to be dining out again, yet relieved that the food was as good as ever.

Back in this bustling room once again, all that seems a distant memory. L’Express appears unchanged from pre-pandemic days. And yet that’s not quite the case.