In 1976 the Bonnots left Montréal-Nord to buy a French table named after the corsair Robert Surcouf — their thirteen-year-old daughter washed the dishes there, and today she is the one who keeps the house.
The story begins with an uprooting. In 1976, Dominique Bonnot's family abruptly changed course, left Montréal-Nord and bought a French restaurant on rue Sainte-Anne, Le Surcouf, named after the Saint-Malo corsair Robert Surcouf. «Pour moi, Sainte-Anne, c'était vraiment le bout du monde», she would later tell Voir. At thirteen she was at the sink; the trade, she learned «sur le tas, comme on dit».
Gone by her early twenties, she would never have bet on coming back. Yet it was her father's offer to sell, about a decade later, that brought her back to the helm — and her first move would prove the right one: going out to find a chef-partner, Serge Magnier, French by origin, who has cooked at her side ever since. «C'est le meilleur conseil d'affaires que mon père m'ait jamais donné», she would say. More than a quarter-century later, the tandem still holds: she in the dining room as maître d'hôtel, he at the stoves, with sous-chef Gerry Bouchard in the brigade for more than twenty years.
What lasts here are the classics — and the habitués see to it. The house did try to retire the châteaubriand for two in favour of a côte de bœuf: «Mais ça n'a pas passé», Dominique admits. The steak au poivre flambéed with cognac remains immovable, in a traditional French cuisine wedded to Québec terroir. And the third generation is already on the floor: Magali, manager, granddaughter of the family that started it all in 1976.