Jean-François Moreau

📍 Montréal, Canada

🗣 French, English

My family has been on the Plateau-Mont-Royal for four generations. I grew up on St-Denis and I have watched this neighbourhood become fashionable while its old bones — the depanneurs, the spiral staircases, the joual dialect, the late-night poutine after last call — have stayed mostly intact. Montréal food culture is genuinely its own thing: it is not French, not American, not like anything else in Canada. The smoked meat debate (Schwartz's versus the upstarts), the bagel war (St-Viateur versus Fairmount, wood-fired and never boiled), the question of who invented poutine and why it matters to Québécois identity — these are things I can argue about for hours. I take visitors through the Plateau and Mile-End with proper coffee and food at every stop.