1
Global•Montreal•value
Keela
Keela is a pandemic-era origin story that actually stuck.
Hidden gemsdinnerlow key
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.6 Google
9.6
538 Google reviews
GuideUpdated July 15, 2026
6 Best Places for Beef Tartare in Montreal
Where to find the best beef tartare in Montreal — each restaurant rated 4.0★ or higher. Top-rated at 9.6★. Spanning global and wine bar kitchens. Curated by TastyPals.
The best places for beef tartare in Montreal are Keela, Monopole, Nama Omakase + Sushi Restaurant, and more. Start with Keela if you want the strongest overall first pick.
Google
Top picks at a glance
Who this guide is for
This guide covers the highest-rated spots for beef tartare in Montreal. Whether you're a local hunting your next regular or visiting and want to eat well, these picks are sorted by quality and review depth.
Quick picks
Keela
Global • Montreal
Keela is a pandemic-era origin story that actually stuck.
Monopole
Wine Bar • Montreal
Monopole is what happens when five people with serious industry pedigree — Toqué!
Nama Omakase + Sushi Restaurant
Japanese • Montreal
Nama Omakase + Sushi is built around a premise that Montreal's mid-to-upper tier dining scene rewards: technical Japanese discipline applied to ingredients that can compete on a serious North Ameri…
Editorial details
On this page
How the restaurants compare
Keela
Montreal • Global
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
value
Best for
Hidden gems
Mood
Casual
Google
Monopole
Montreal • Wine Bar
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
$$
Best for
cocktail
Mood
Easygoing
Nama Omakase + Sushi Restaurant
Montreal • Japanese
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
splurge
Best for
Sushi
Mood
Casual
Google
Bootlegger Cocktail Bar & Cuisine Montréal
Montreal • Bar
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
moderate
Best for
Cocktails and snacks
Mood
Casual
How we chose
We looked for restaurants that feel like a strong fit for the guide topic, not just the most obvious names in the city. The shortlist favors rooms with clear mood, dependable pacing, and enough distinction to help someone decide faster. Read our full methodology →
Room tone
Lighting, pace, and general energy all need to support the reason someone clicked this guide.
Food fit
We favored restaurants that feel best suited for the moment, not just restaurants with broad reputation.
Useful range
The final list tries to give readers enough variation in neighborhood, price, and style to compare real options.
6 ranked picks
Keela — Keela is a pandemic-era origin story that actually stuck. Johnny and Kristin opened this 1237 Rue Atateken address in 2020 — he came up cooking fish and sushi at Park, they crossed paths slinging oysters at Lucille's on Monkland — and the room they walked into already had a wood-fired oven in it. That oven, by all accounts, became the entire organizing principle of the kitchen. Brick walls, wood floors, a bay window pulling in street light: this is a room that has texture because it was inherited, not because someone spec'd it out. The Village has no shortage of places to eat, but Keela keeps drawing people back, and the reason isn't hard to track down.
The menu is tight and doesn't overreach, which is its own kind of confidence. The grilled octopus is the dish that appears in every account of this place — reportedly the kind of result that only comes from live fire handled with real discipline. The beef tartare rounds out the cold side of things with the precision you'd expect from a kitchen with a fish-and-technique background. For something more substantial, the filet mignon steak frites is the anchor of the menu — a French bistro classic that reportedly holds up without apology. None of these are showy dishes. They're the kind of thing a kitchen puts on the menu when it knows what it's doing.
Tuesday dollar oysters are, by every available account, the single best reason to plan around this place mid-week. Friday evenings bring live music from Bud Rice between 6 and 9, which makes early dinner feel like the right call over anything else happening in the neighborhood. It's a small room, so the reservation math is simple: book ahead, request the window, and order the octopus. View restaurant →
Monopole — Monopole is what happens when five people with serious industry pedigree — Toqué! alumni, a wine importer, a veteran café operator — decide to build the kind of place they actually want to spend time in. Opened in May 2017 in Montreal, it operates as a café through the day and pivots into a proper wine bar come evening, a dual identity that gives it a flexibility most spots in this city can't pull off. The wine program, curated by Gabriel Gallant (who did his time at Kitchen Galerie and Toqué!), leans hard into small producers, private imports, and organic and biodynamic bottles sourced partly through François Larose's own importing operation at the Thirsty Agency. That's not a marketing angle — it's structural. The list reflects access and conviction, not a distributor's catalogue.
The kitchen, run by Julien Coulombe-Morency, builds a small-plates menu that changes with the seasons, which means specific dishes come and go, but the gravitational center stays consistent: precise, European-leaning preparations that work with the wine rather than competing against it. The salmon gravlax with fennel and whipped herb cream is the most consistently documented dish on the menu — clean, restrained, the kind of thing that makes sense at 9 PM with a glass of something natural. Beef tartare, confit tuna, and duck confit risotto have appeared as evening staples, though the menu's seasonal rotation means availability varies. The 'potato of the day' — listed where most places put fish or meat — is a minor act of personality, the sort of detail that signals the kitchen takes vegetables seriously rather than treating them as afterthoughts. At price level two, this is genuinely good value for the provenance of wine and the caliber of kitchen background behind the food.
Monopole seats just over thirty in the main room — wooden tables, colorful chairs, floral banquettes — with a private back room that fits about a dozen. The room is small enough that it fills fast on weekends (Saturday service runs 5–11 PM; the place is dark Sunday and Monday). The move is to go midweek when the kitchen is fully running and the bar has breathing room — Tuesday through Friday from 5 PM onward gives you access to the full evening menu without the Saturday crunch. Book the back room if you're coming with a group. Ask Gallant's team what's just come in on private import; that's where the list gets genuinely interesting. View restaurant →
2
Google
Wine Bar•Montreal•$$
Monopole
Monopole is what happens when five people with serious industry pedigree — Toqué!
wine barcocktaildate night
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.4 Google
9.4
465 Google reviews
Nama Omakase + Sushi Restaurant — Nama Omakase + Sushi is built around a premise that Montreal's mid-to-upper tier dining scene rewards: technical Japanese discipline applied to ingredients that can compete on a serious North American scale, delivered through an omakase format that removes the burden of decision-making from the diner. At price tier three, the room's value argument is structural — the format and the sourcing do the work, without the kind of theatrical performance that inflates the bill elsewhere. What the kitchen appears to prioritize, based on consistent diner reporting, is precision over showmanship, which is a particular kind of confidence.
The four dishes that surface most reliably in accounts of Nama tell you what this kitchen is actually reaching for. The Futomaki Bluefin & Uni de Hokkaido is understood to be the kitchen's clearest statement of intent — a traditional futomaki format pushed into premium territory by Hokkaido sea urchin, a combination that diners report as surprisingly coherent rather than competitive. The Kinoko Mazemen signals genuine range: a brothless noodle format that, by its nature, has to carry itself entirely on fat and umami, and the mushroom composition here is reportedly the reason the dish holds its own on a menu otherwise anchored in raw fish. The Miso Chilean Seabass is where the kitchen's awareness of Montreal's French-leaning instincts seems to surface — miso applied as a lacquer rather than a background note, yielding a preparation diners describe as restrained and deliberate. The Ora King Tartare rounds out the menu's commitment to premium salmon handled with minimal interference.
Counter seating is consistently recommended for the full experience, since preparation is reportedly a meaningful part of what the format offers. If you want to test the kitchen's range beyond the raw program, the Kinoko Mazemen is the dish to order. Earlier in the week, pacing is said to be more considered and the room less compressed — worth factoring in when you book. View restaurant →
3
Japanese•Montreal•splurge
Nama Omakase + Sushi Restaurant
Nama Omakase + Sushi is built around a premise that Montreal's mid-to-upper tier dining scene rewards: technical Japanese discipline applied to ingredients that can compete on a serious North American scale, delivered through an omakase…
Sushidate nightdinner
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.4 Google
9.4
454 Google reviews
Get the App
Save these spots to your Montreal list
Keep the shortlist handy in the TastyPals app and find similar restaurants across Montreal.
Personalized city picksCleaner shortlistsBuilt for iPhone and Android
TastyPalsTonight
Your taste. Our picks.
Smarter follow-through after the guide: better restaurant context, quicker narrowing, less second-guessing.
For tonight
Date night spots with warm rooms and polished service
Next step
Keep exploring in the app when you want a tighter shortlist
Bootlegger Cocktail Bar & Cuisine Montréal — Up a flight of stairs on Saint-Laurent, Bootlegger leans hard into its speakeasy bit — 600-plus bottles of spirits, rare whiskeys, absinthes, and a team of mixologists who've apparently been hauling their cocktails to competitions. That's the headline. But here's what I respect: the kitchen isn't an afterthought propping up the bar. This is a cocktail joint that actually cooks. The pulled pork nachos — homemade corn chips, signature pulled pork, smoked BBQ sauce, that red cabbage slaw — get called the best nachos people have had, and I believe them. The beef tartare draws raves, and the Bootlegger burger is the kind people swear they'll reorder. Then there's the $1 oyster happy hour, which is the whole reason this place earns a spot in my back pocket. Yes, the cocktails run pricey — that's the cost of admission to a bar that makes its own syrups, juices, and bitters and runs damn near zero-waste. Come Sunday for live jazz, Friday or Saturday for DJs. Just remember to eat while you drink. View restaurant →
4
Google
Bar•Montreal•moderate
Bootlegger Cocktail Bar & Cuisine Montréal
Up a flight of stairs on Saint-Laurent, Bootlegger leans hard into its speakeasy bit — 600-plus bottles of spirits, rare whiskeys, absinthes, and a team of mixologists who've apparently been hauling their cocktails to competitions.
Cocktails and snackscocktailsdate night
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.2 Google
9.2
3,271 Google reviews
Foxy — Foxy sits on a quiet NDG block and operates in deliberate contrast to its surroundings — a wood-fire restaurant that, by most accounts, has no interest in playing the neighborhood's residential modesty card. The room, designed by MO Design Workshop, is hand-built and intimate in a way that reads as intentional rather than incidental, reportedly free of the raw-concrete posturing that plagues so many Montreal dining rooms of its generation. Under owners Véronique Dalle and Bruno Lesieur, who took over in 2024, Foxy has landed on Canada's list of top hundred restaurants and kept a clear identity: Quebec terroir, open fire, and a bar program serious enough that Dalle received a Michelin Exceptional Cocktails recognition in 2025. That last detail tells you something about where the priorities land.
Head chef Brian Thibodeau, who came up through Park and Vancouver's Blue Water Café, has built a menu that uses wood fire as a throughline rather than a gimmick. The maitake mushrooms glazed with maple and black garlic are consistently cited as a standout — the kind of dish that converts people who don't think they care about mushrooms. The grass-fed Angus beef is a recurring fixture that diners apparently dispatch without much deliberation. The East Coast oysters and beef tartare read as the menu's cooler counterpoint, clean preparations that balance everything the fire touches. Start with the homemade feta and pita while you're still deciding; by all reports it earns its place as the right opening move.
Book Thursday or early Friday if you want conversation — the room reportedly gets loud on weekends. Dalle's cocktail list deserves real consideration before you default to wine. If you're two people and want a direct line to what the kitchen is doing, the bar is where to sit. View restaurant →
5
Global•NDG•value
Foxy
Foxy sits on a quiet NDG block and operates in deliberate contrast to its surroundings — a wood-fire restaurant that, by most accounts, has no interest in playing the neighborhood's residential modesty card.
dinner
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.2 Google
9.2
926 Google reviews
Buvette Nicole — Old Montreal has a particular weakness for its own mythology — the cobblestones, the vaulted ceilings, the sense that history alone justifies the bill. Buvette Nicole, operating inside a building that has stood since 1850, appears to refuse that bargain. By all accounts it has chosen to build a room that feels like a Tuesday night in the 11th arrondissement rather than a heritage-site performance: low light, the particular hum of a room mid-wine, tables spaced at a distance that implies the conversation happening beside you is not your concern. The menu names — La Vie en Rose, Padam-Padam, Hier encore — are not kitsch decoration but a thesis statement about the register the room is playing in: nostalgic, warm, unembarrassed about romance. This is, by reputation and by design, one of the better rooms for a date in the city, and not simply because candles are involved. The pacing, which diners consistently describe as unhurried, is the actual argument.
The kitchen centers its reputation on a short list of verified dishes, and the beef tartare is among its most discussed anchors — reportedly dressed with truffle aioli and prepared with the kind of classical confidence that reveals whether a French bistro trusts its own instincts. The gnocchi is the other marquee act, known for landing on the pillowy side of a debate that sinks lesser versions. At a price point that sits at a genuinely accessible level for what the room delivers, the value proposition is part of the pitch, not a footnote. The Bartender's Special functions as the fastest shorthand for signaling that you are not treating this as a tourist checkpoint — order it and let the bar make the call.
Book later in the week; the room is said to reach its correct temperature around 8 p.m. on a Thursday or Friday when pacing loosens and the wine-to-conversation ratio tips favorably. The suggested progression — tartare first, gnocchi to follow, Signature Cheesecake to close — tracks with how the kitchen appears to sequence its strengths. Reservations are the move; this is not a room that owes walk-ins a table. View restaurant →
6
Google
French•Montreal•moderate
Buvette Nicole
Old Montreal has a particular weakness for its own mythology — the cobblestones, the vaulted ceilings, the sense that history alone justifies the bill.
French bistrodate nightdinner
Read restaurant page
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
9.0 Google
9.0
370 Google reviews
Explore next
Related guides
Get the App
Save these spots to your Montreal list
Save these spots to your Montreal list in the TastyPals app, then explore similar restaurants when you want a tighter shortlist for the night.
Personalized city picksCleaner shortlistsBuilt for iPhone and Android
TastyPalsTonight
Your taste. Our picks.
Smarter follow-through after the guide: better restaurant context, quicker narrowing, less second-guessing.
For tonight
Date night spots with warm rooms and polished service
Next step
Keep exploring in the app when you want a tighter shortlist