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GuideUpdated July 15, 2026

6 Best Places for Fried Calamari in Montreal

Where to find the best fried calamari in Montreal — each restaurant rated 4.0★ or higher. Top-rated at 9.6★. Spanning american and contemporary kitchens. Curated by TastyPals.

The best places for fried calamari in Montreal are Ooh! Crabe, Chez BOSS & Fils, Restaurant Le Saint-Jacques, and more. Start with Ooh! Crabe if you want the strongest overall first pick.

By Sophie Laurent•5 ranked picks•Published July 15, 2026•Updated July 15, 2026
Methodology•Editorial team
Ooh! CrabeChez BOSS & FilsRestaurant Le Saint-Jacques
6 Best Places for Fried Calamari in Montreal
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Top picks at a glance

#1Ooh! CrabeAmerican • Montreal • value#2Chez BOSS & FilsContemporary • Verdun • value#3Restaurant Le Saint-JacquesFrench • Hochelaga • value

Who this guide is for

This guide covers the highest-rated spots for fried calamari 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

Ooh! Crabe
American • Montreal
Out in Pierrefonds-Roxboro — which operates on its own West Island logic, largely indifferent to what downtown is doing — Ooh Crabe has staked out a pretty specific position: Louisiana-style seafoo…
Chez BOSS & Fils
Contemporary • Verdun
Verdun has been running its own culinary conversation long before the resto-tourism crowd thought to join it, and Chez Boss & Fils is precisely why locals tend to keep the reservation details to th…
Restaurant Le Saint-Jacques
French • Hochelaga
Le Saint-Jacques is the kind of place Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has always produced quietly and without fanfare: a family-run room blending French technique with Italian muscle, operating seven days a…
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Editorial details
Published: July 15, 2026
Last updated: July 15, 2026

On this page

  1. 1. Ooh! CrabeView →
  2. 2. Chez BOSS & FilsView →
  3. 3. Restaurant Le Saint-JacquesView →
  4. 4. Bistro AmerigoView →
  5. 5. Grillades Amira ( Lasalle )View →

How the restaurants compare

Ooh! Crabe
Montreal • American
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
value
Best for
dinner
Mood
Casual
Chez BOSS & Fils
Verdun • Contemporary
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
value
Best for
Wellington night out
Mood
Verdun
Editorial restaurant image stand-in for Restaurant Le Saint-Jacques
Google
Restaurant Le Saint-Jacques
Hochelaga • French
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
value
Best for
hidden gem
Mood
Hochelaga
Bistro Amerigo
NDG • Italian
9.9/10
TastyPals Score
Price
value
Best for
dinner
Mood
NDG

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.

5 ranked picks

Ooh! Crabe — Out in Pierrefonds-Roxboro — which operates on its own West Island logic, largely indifferent to what downtown is doing — Ooh Crabe has staked out a pretty specific position: Louisiana-style seafood boils, done without apology, at a price point that makes you feel like you're getting away with something. The concept is deliberately un-fussy. You pick your seafood, you pick your sauce, you eat with your hands over a plastic-lined table. Reviewers consistently flag the owner's hospitality as a genuine differentiator — the kind that apparently converts first-timers into regulars in real time. If your dining criteria include linen napkins or a sommelier, this is genuinely not the place. If your criteria include generous seafood and a room that doesn't take itself too seriously, the case builds quickly. The menu centers on a build-your-own boil format — shrimp, mussels, lobster, crab, snow crab, mix-and-match across the range — with the house lemon pepper sauce drawing the kind of devoted repeat mentions that usually attach to much more expensive cooking. The Jumbo Mix is reportedly the way to get the full scope of what the kitchen is arguing for, all at once, in one bag. Alongside the boil program, the Dynamite Shrimp and Fried Butterfly Shrimp represent a different register entirely — diners describe them as crunchier, snackable, and shareable in a way that complements rather than competes with the main event. The Alfredo Shrimp is the outlier on the menu, and by most accounts it earns its place once the table is already deep into the meal. Practical intel: arrive hungry, bring people who are comfortable eating communally, and consider a weeknight if you want a more relaxed pace. The Jumbo Mix paired with the Dynamite Shrimp is the two-item combination that most consistently comes up when regulars talk about how to order here. View restaurant →
Chez BOSS & Fils — Verdun has been running its own culinary conversation long before the resto-tourism crowd thought to join it, and Chez Boss & Fils is precisely why locals tend to keep the reservation details to themselves. Louis Boutin — the Boss — and Félix Dauvet-Lainesse — the Son — opened the room in 2015, and the name is less branding than declaration: these two operators run their own floor every service, which diners consistently describe as immediately felt. The open kitchen is cited as the architectural centerpiece of the space, less a design gesture than a statement that the cooking here is meant to be watched. This is an operator-driven neighborhood room built for people who eat out seriously, not for people documenting that they do. The menu rotates seasonally, and the dishes that have built the restaurant's reputation give a clear sense of the kitchen's priorities. The Trout Tartare is reportedly the anchor order — ginger mayonnaise, fried capers, and puffed rice are its known components, a combination that suggests brightness, crunch, and textural contrast where most tartares settle for none of those things. The Fried Calamari is known for arriving without the grease fatigue that makes the dish forgettable elsewhere, and the accompanying sauce has a following of its own. The Grilled Octopus is described as restrained and deliberate: hummus below, sun-dried tomato vinaigrette alongside, nothing competing with anything else. For a price-level-one room in Verdun, the ambition of that lineup is notable. If the kitchen is running them on your night, the Scallop & Black Tiger Shrimp Duo with Foaming Butter and the Lamb Shoulder are the dishes the restaurant is most consistently praised for. Service runs Tuesday through Saturday, dinner only from 5 pm — walk-in optimism on a Friday is not a strategy. View restaurant →
Restaurant Le Saint-Jacques — Le Saint-Jacques is the kind of place Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has always produced quietly and without fanfare: a family-run room blending French technique with Italian muscle, operating seven days a week out of a residential stretch that has no interest in being a dining destination but somehow becomes one anyway. The kitchen is run by the owner Danny's daughter and son-in-law — not a corporate chef rotating through, but people with something personal to prove every service. The menu reads as a genuine hybrid rather than a fusion hedge: French finesse applied to Italian foundations, with Mediterranean brightness running through the whole thing. That specific triangulation is rarer than it sounds, and it gives Le Saint-Jacques a clarity of identity that outlasts trends. The covered terrace and the reputation for a room where you can actually hold a conversation complete the picture: this is a neighbourhood restaurant in the best sense of that word, which in this city means regulars who come weekly and recommend it to nobody, then recommend it to everybody. The dishes diners circle back to tell you about are instructive. The fried calamari is a crowd benchmark — reviewers consistently flag the crunch and the spicy accompanying sauce, which suggests a kitchen that treats the appetizer course as seriously as the mains. The fettuccine with lobster is the room's signature pasta: a creamy, seasoned preparation that diners describe as threading the needle between Italian comfort and French restraint, neither swamped in butter nor stripped of richness. The rack of lamb appears most frequently as the dish people mention first when recommending the place, and given the French-Mediterranean axis of the kitchen, that tracks — it's the kind of cut that rewards a brigade that actually knows classical technique. The veal scallop rounds out the protein list and is noted for generous portioning, which matters when the price point is as accessible as this one. The move here is to let Danny or Antonio guide you — both are flagged repeatedly by reviewers as engaged and genuinely knowledgeable about the menu, not just hospitable in a scripted way. Book ahead for the covered terrace, especially on weekends; a room with this kind of neighbourhood loyalty fills on reputation alone. If you're coming for dinner, the rack of lamb and the lobster fettuccine together map the kitchen's range better than anything else on the verified menu. The hours run daily until 11 p.m., which makes this a legitimate late-weeknight option in a part of the city where that's not a given. View restaurant →

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Bistro Amerigo — Bistro Amerigo has been doing its thing in NDG since 2014, and the backstory does a lot of explanatory work: owner Steve Marcone named the place after his father and his son, his daughter Naira and his niece work the floor, and manager Mike Lamenta has reportedly been there since opening day. That kind of continuity is not an accident. It produces a room that feels genuinely settled in itself — no concept deck, no mood board, no imported anxiety about whether the restaurant is saying something. Chef Alex DiPrima runs a kitchen that, by all accounts, knows exactly what it's cooking and why. At price level 1, this is not a budget compromise. It's a considered argument that the most satisfying table in Montreal doesn't require you to perform enthusiasm at a tasting menu. The Fried Calamari has built a reputation as the benchmark against which other versions get quietly measured — light, clean, and apparently free of the heavy batter that makes lesser renditions forgettable. The Polpette carry specific weight: these are meatballs still reportedly made by Steve's father, which means they belong to a different category than anything optimized for a food photo. The Gnocchi Funghi e Tartufata is the dish regulars are said to redirect you toward when you're scanning the menu too long — take the hint. The Nero di Seppia Pescatore and the Ossobuco represent the room's range together: Italian by temperament, global by permission, and never confused about what it's doing. Practical reality: Bistro Amerigo does not take reservations, so a weeknight arrival ahead of the rush is your best positioning. Friday at 7pm means a wait outside, which is fine if you're prepared for it and less fine if you're not. Come with patience and without a hard timeline. View restaurant →
Grillades Amira ( Lasalle ) — Grillades Amira landed in LaSalle in 2023 with a clear identity and hasn't wavered from it: this is a halal grillhouse built around generous platter culture, top-quality meats, and a room on Avenue Dollard that signals it takes itself seriously. The space — renovated, clean, with considered lighting and a cozy modern feel — sits a cut above the typical fast-casual halal spot, which is part of what has diners informally crowning it the number-one halal steakhouse in Montreal on social media. That's not an official designation, but when a two-year-old restaurant earns that kind of street-level consensus across multiple neighbourhoods (LaSalle, Pointe-St-Charles, now Laval), the concept is clearly doing something right for its audience. That audience is families, groups, and anyone who believes that halal cooking in Montreal deserves the same platter-and-grill ambition as any other grillhouse tradition. The menu orbits large-format grilled proteins — lamb chops, steak, chicken — but the dishes that keep turning up in diner reviews are telling. The fried calamari is repeatedly singled out as the table's best bite: diners describe the exterior as exceptionally crispy and the interior as tender, which is a harder ratio to achieve than it sounds and clearly lands consistently here. The Hussainia Platter is the group move — a spread that arrives with salads, potatoes, and grilled vegetables alongside the meat, and the format that best represents what Grillades Amira is actually about: abundance without pretension at a price point (budget-tier by Montreal standards) that makes it genuinely accessible. The souvlaki pita also surfaces in reviews as a solid, flavorful option for solo diners not ready to commit to a full platter. The practical intel: come with a group if you can — the platters are priced and sized for the table, and the value math shifts in your favour the more people are splitting. LaSalle is open until midnight, which makes this a legitimate late-night option in a borough that doesn't have many. A staff member named Haider/Shaah gets called out by name in reviews for hospitality, so if you're trying to navigate the menu on a first visit, ask. Start with the calamari, build toward the Hussainia, and book ahead on weekends — the room is cozy, not cavernous. View restaurant →

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HochelagaVerdunNDGItalianFrenchHalaldinnerGroup Dinnerhidden gem

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