The ninth-floor restaurant in the Montreal Eaton Centre harkens back to the heyday of Canadian department stores, when every city’s downtown was anchored by one.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
When the debonair neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wanted to treat his wife to a nice meal in 1930s Montreal, he knew just where to take her.
“Welcome home girl,” he wrote in one letter. “I’d like to have lunch with you at Eaton’s.”
The Penfields were not planning to dine at a food court Manchu Wok, ordering something fried and served on a plastic tray under fluorescent lighting.
No, this was the golden era of Canadian department stores, when palaces of commerce served up a vision of the good life to the nation’s middle class. In Montreal’s jazz age heyday, the ninth-floor restaurant of Eaton’s was the epitome of class, an Art Deco marvel with white tablecloths and escargots on the menu.
It was arguably the most spectacular restaurant that Lady Flora Eaton championed. She had been inspired by a memorable trip on the trans-Atlantic liner Île de France and hired the French architect Jacques Carlu to design a space that felt like a cruise ship for the masses.
The dining room, sitting more than 500 guests, was a temple of accessible opulence where store employees ate roast beef for lunch alongside groups of society matrons. From its opening in 1931 until its closing in 1999, it was a cherished Montreal institution that hovered above the city as a reminder of the finer things.
Then, for 25 years, it was mothballed. Quebec language laws had already deprived the store of its anglophone apostrophe, and some of its English-speaking clientele, but Eaton now became a casualty of the whole retail empire’s bankruptcy. Once a nation-bestriding behemoth that employed tens of thousands of people and insinuated its catalogue into every corner of Canadian life, Eaton’s was now sold for parts.
But last spring, something unexpected happened: The ninth-floor restaurant reopened. As department stores collapse all over North America, especially Canada’s venerable Hudson’s Bay Company this spring, a group of developers and restaurateurs have made a bet on reviving their glory days in one elegant cocoon amidst the Montreal skyline. Le 9e, as it’s now known, is a bittersweet reminder of the bygone era of democratic luxury that these stores embodied.
Men had their private clubs, and department store restaurants played a similar role for upper-middle-class women, history professor Donica Belisle says.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
When ground broke on the flagship Eaton’s store in 1920s Montreal, Canadian department stores were at the height of their clout. The economy was booming, customers hadn’t started migrating to the suburbs yet, and five-and-dime stores weren’t chipping away at their fat margins.
Every Canadian city’s downtown was anchored by a Simpson’s, a Morgan’s or, more often than not, an Eaton’s. Canada’s dominant retailer would soon become its third largest employer, after the government and the railways; it was the eighth largest retailer in the world, said Donica Belisle, a history professor at the University of Regina.
Lady Eaton, the driven wife of the owner, funnelled her energies into establishing a series of top-of-the-line restaurants at the family’s stores. Art Deco was in the air after a landmark Paris exposition and came to Montreal earlier than most North American cities because of its cultural ties to France.
Inside the final days of Hudson’s Bay
The bombastic mayor Camillien Houde was building a series of public works to combat the Great Depression, many of them marked by the angular lines and decorative whimsy of the era’s most distinctive architectural style.
The ninth-floor restaurant of Eaton’s would become one of the city’s Art Deco masterpieces. With a soaring nave, haute relief plaster panels of Canada’s natural bounty, luminescent alabaster urns, Monel grillwork and Belgian black limestone, the dining room felt more like a cathedral than a cafeteria.
The soaring Amazonian murals painted by Natacha Carlu, the architect’s wife, signalled that this was in many ways a female space. Men had their private clubs, and department store restaurants played a similar role for upper-middle-class women, allowing volunteer groups to host fundraisers and social teas, said Prof. Belisle.
Architect Georges Drolet, who was part of the preservation effort, helped revive Le 9e for its new era.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
That did not mean the venue was equally open to all women. Eaton’s was known to discriminate against just about anyone who wasn’t an English-speaking Protestant. In Montreal, this took the form of snubbing French-speaking clients – a slight that many Quebeckers still remember today.
The restaurant was also influenced by the Eaton family’s strict Methodism through the absence of alcohol on its menu. It would remain a dry institution into the 1980s, said Sandra Cohen-Rose, author of Northern Deco: Art Deco Architecture in Montreal, who is now working on a book about the restaurant.
Despite its quirks, this astonishing space floating high above the city came to occupy a special place in the collective consciousness.
“It was exotic; it was unlike anything you went to in Montreal,” said Ms. Cohen-Rose. “It had a sacred feel.”
The city mourned when the restaurant closed in 1999, dragged down by the Eaton’s bankruptcy. The province quickly gave the space heritage protection and the building’s new owner, Ivanhoé Cambridge – the real estate arms of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec – hired an architect to perform a preservation study. Plans came and went for reviving the iconic ninth floor, but nothing stuck.
Le 9e, as the restaurant is now known, is a bittersweet reminder of the bygone era of democratic luxury that department stores embodied.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Finally, in 2023, the announcement arrived: a group of businesspeople would revive it as a restaurant. They hired Derek Dammann, former owner of gastropub Maison Publique, as culinary director. The architect Georges Drolet, who had been connected to the preservation effort from the beginning, began nursing Le 9e back to life.
There was a lot of dust to clear, and other challenges: The swirling Brèche d’Escalette marble in the entryway isn’t quarried any more, and a couple panes of decorative frosted glass had to be reproduced.
But much of what was opened to the public in May, 2024, was original to 1931. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like a museum piece. The Île-de-France restaurant is located in a foyer that once housed the tearoom, a more intimate space that also has magnificent views of downtown. The kitchen serves excellent modern versions of classic French brasserie fare. (The steak frites and martini are a potent combination.) The dining room always seems to be packed, even on bog standard weekdays.
When my book about Wilder Penfield and his career as a brain mapper was published in May, there was only one place for me and my wife to go for a celebratory lunch: chez Eaton.
