The new Mon Lapin cookbook is a guide to exquisite flavours – and a good time | Canada Voices

Any restaurant’s allure is the accumulation of fleeting gestures: the alchemy of combined tastes, the particular shiver of a wine glass, the timbre of laughter from a neighbouring table.

Enter The Mon Lapin Cookbook, a newly published compilation of recipes that resembles a collected aide-memoire of a legendary night out. It pulses with the first dazzling years of the Montreal restaurant’s life.

If you wandered to Rue St-Zotique at Avenue Casgrain in March, 2018, you would have likely found eager diners congregating at a narrow storefront. On that corner in Little Italy, a darling had just come into existence.

Vin Mon Lapin was a wine bar of roughly 35 seats where the bottles inclined toward natural wines with character and backstory. The mood was jovial. The menu was as capricious as the weather dictated, with offerings that belied their complexity. An opening night salad that looked like a simple monochromatic study of claret and blush tones was actually a dappled mound of radicchio beneath shavings of house cured foie gras, anointed by a pumpkin seed praline vinaigrette woodsy with smoked vinegar. The lineups were immediate and long.

How a Montreal sommelier runs her widely acclaimed restaurant, Mon Lapin

Led by sommelier Vanya Filipovic and co-chefs Jessica Noël and Marc-Olivier Frappier, it was part of the Joe Beef family of restaurants and simultaneously a departure from it. Not only distanced across the city from their landmark addresses in La Petite-Bourgogne, Vin Mon Lapin landed philosophically between Joe Beef’s famed gastronomic extravagance and sister restaurant Vin Papillon’s sprightly fondness for vegetables. Plates were small, meant for sharing and seasonal. Their interpretation of salt and vinegar nestled buckwheat-dredged oysters amongst fermented potatoes, both golden-crisped, in a swath of savoury custard.

In the eight intervening years, Mon Lapin – sans the titular “Vin” now, though wine is still at its fore – has progressed. In 2019 the original three, along with co-sommelier Alex Landry and front-of-house manager Marc-Antoine Gélinas, took over sole proprietorship. A year later, they expanded again, this time physically, stretching to the space next door and doubling the restaurant’s size. Accolades stacked up: back-to-back firsts on Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants for 2023 and 2024, second on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025, and Filipovic named top sommelier nationally and internationally. The cooking grew more ambitious. They started taking reservations.

It’s all chronicled in the book. Photographs from Dominique Lafond and evocative illustrations by Raphael Labrie Dion are rich with intimacy and charm. Three hundred pages, 100 recipes, wine essays, conversational asides on brown butter and snow crab, chapters such as “What is a wine bar, anyway?” (a considered title for the book) and “Primi, a love affair” (tied to Frappier’s high-school exchange to Cesena, Italy).

Stories are shared from a trove of memories: an offhand mention of Rois de Mais Sucré, their favourite corn seller at Marché Jean Talon, or detailing the last of what had been somewhat routine expeditions by Landry and Frappier to a secluded cabin in Abitibi-Témiscamingue for whitefish caviar.

Recipes preserve classics from the Mon Lapin kitchen, codified for the first time. Their slim Croque-Pétoncle, a sandwich of scallop farce – a light-as-air mousse Noël based on the puréed base of fish quenelles she learned while working at Michelin-starred Restaurant Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France – here she spreads it between milk bread and fries until burnished. There are deboned, stuffed chicken wings dubbed “croq’ailes,” which were part of their COVID-era takeout barbecue pivot and have since starred at their second restaurant, Rotisserie La Lune. Fans will delight to learn how to make the beloved buckwheat cake, complete with its shingles of fracturing tuiles.

Beyond the hits, the trio includes recipes that were one-night-only wonders and a few that have yet to star in their dining room. Some are breezily simple, and others are technically meticulous and specific. The pursuit is what’s consistent, a conviction of the nobility of the humble ingredient and an ambition toward the extraordinary.

On the bottom corner of each gilded page is an illustration of a bounding rabbit that works as a flipbook. That is the Mon Lapin way: exploring the high and the low, seriousness and humour, all at once. (Their ode to Champagne precedes the recipe for Kitchen-Ade, Frappier’s version of Gatorade cheekily made with a mix of sweetened citrus juices, sparkling water and salt.)

How the French bistro is reinventing itself for today’s diners

They’re releasing the book in French and English concurrently, and neither is a translation. Mon Lapin exists in a dual register, what they describe as a Montreal gesture, voiced by its staff and community and now in writing.

At its heart, The Mon Lapin Cookbook is an invitation into their ethos of saying yes, often. That while structure is a necessary foundation, stringency should not get in the way of opportunity. Or be the source of worry. If the tomatoes are extraordinary, change the menu to include them. If your guest brings a friend, the more the merrier. Hospitality and cooking are rooted in joy and generosity, not rules. And most importantly, the secret of a good time, of finding beauty, is to go with the flow.

Recipe: Maple Rice Pie from The Mon Lapin Cookbook

Serves: 4 people

This dessert is the product of the people in our kitchen. One day, stumped for new dessert ideas, we asked our team what people craved from the places they grew up. Max Hoffman, a Belgian cook in Mon Lapin’s early years, piped up and said – with no elaboration – “rice pie,” as if he’d solved the problem with two words. Turned out he was right. Max made us a rice pie from his family’s recipe, and we still feature it at Mon Lapin during maple season. Rice pie is like a rice pudding and pastel de nata mash-up. Something about its deep, homey flavours also calls up many classic Québecois desserts, like tarte au sucre. So, we finish this rice pie with a generous glug of maple syrup from our cook Xavier Desjardins’s family sugar shack, to bring this bit of baked Belgian genius home to Canada.

INGREDIENTS

For the pie dough

• 340 g all-purpose (plain) flour, plus extra for dusting
• 230 g very cold butter, finely diced
• 2.5 g salt
• 125 ml ice-cold water

For the rice pudding

• 65 g arborio rice
• 500 ml whole milk
• 1 vanilla pod, split and scraped
• salt, to taste
• 75 g maple sugar
• 1 whole egg, lightly beaten

For the pie

To serve

• A generous amount of the best maple syrup (we use the Desjardins family maple syrup)

DIRECTIONS

Pie dough

Combine the flour, butter and salt in a large bowl and work the butter into the flour with your fingers, flattening each piece to create large, visible flakes. Add the water and mix until the dough starts to come together. Turn it out onto a work surface and, using a rolling pin, roll it into a rough rectangle. Fold it like an envelope: Bring one third of the dough to the centre, then fold the opposite third over the top. Rotate 90 degrees, roll it out again into a rectangle, and repeat the process. Complete three roll-and-fold turns in total. The dough should look streaky with butter but hold together. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap (cling film) and chill overnight, or minimum 1 hour.

Rice pudding

Put the rice, milk and vanilla pod and seeds in a small pan, bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat. Cook for about 1 hour, stirring regularly to prevent it sticking to the base of the pan. Once the rice is very tender (we’re not looking for al dente, this needs to be well cooked) add the sugar. Pour into a heatproof container and place a piece of plastic wrap directly onto the surface. Once completely cool, remove the film. Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl, pour them into the pudding and combine with a spatula. Chill until ready to use.

Pie

Whisk the egg and cream in a bowl to make egg wash. Roll out the dough on a floured work surface to a thickness of 3 mm (⅛ inch), and cut out four circles 20 cm (8 inches) in diameter. Place into four 15 cm (6 inch) aluminum pie dishes. Cut off the excess, leaving a 2.5 cm (1 inch) edge for folding. Fold the edges (we like an empanada-style fold) and brush the edges with egg wash. Pour in the rice pudding (the pie dishes should be three-quarters full). Place the pies in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, so you get the best puff on the crust. Preheat the oven to 450 F. Bake the pies for 8 minutes, then reduce the heat to 405 F and bake for another 6 minutes. The pudding should look like leopard print, the crust golden.

To serve

The pies are delicious at room temperature, but feel free to warm them in the oven briefly. Pour warm maple syrup all over the pies when ready to eat!

Excerpted from The Mon Lapin Cookbook: From Montreal With Love © 2026 by Marc-Olivier Frappier, Jessica Noël, Vanya Filipovic and Mireille Silcoff. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved