Montréal Restaurant Week opens its tenth edition on Thursday with the largest participating-restaurant list in the festival's history and the most overtly Québécois menus a Restaurant Week has tabled. The shift is deliberate — and a small data point on a larger conversation about what "Montréal cooking" means in 2026.
Two hundred and forty restaurants signed on this year, up from a hundred and ninety in 2024. The geographical distribution has also widened: roughly a third of participants are now outside the Plateau, Mile End, and Old Port — the festival's historic centres of gravity — with a particularly strong showing from Verdun, Pointe-Saint-Charles, and the East End.
The menus tell a quieter story. A growing share of participating restaurants are offering tasting menus built around Québec terroir — Charlevoix vegetables in winter, Gaspé seafood, Eastern Townships cheese, Boréal foragings from the Lower Laurentians — rather than the broadly French-bistro vocabulary that defined the festival's early years. Several chefs interviewed by Fine Times Canada framed the shift as a generational matter: restaurateurs who grew up in Montréal are increasingly cooking with the ingredients they ate as children.
Pricing has also moved. The festival's prix-fixe band is now $32-$58 (up from $25-$45 in 2019), reflecting both food-cost inflation and a broader move toward genuinely small-format menus rather than abbreviated regular offerings.
Reservations are bookable online and run through the second week of March. The festival's organizers project that participating restaurants will collectively serve more than 180,000 covers across the run.