Maison de Soma

The restaurant glows with the warmth of golden hour. Though rooted in Quebec terroir, the à la carte menu surprises with East Asian inspiration: okonomiyaki and tsukune, but also walleye gravlax. The guinea fowl used for the tsukune, Lortie points, comes from friends living in the mountain chain nearly within view of the dining room. The confit meat is wrapped in shiso leaf sticky with housemade tare sauce (sake reduction and tomato shoyu), speckled with kimchi dust and gone before Lortie is back behind the counter.

With most ingredients sourced from the surrounding fields and forests, the culinary lab – led by Lortie and Édouard Lacouture – had to create a new flavour index. Under “umami”? For the okonomiyaki, dulse seaweed from Océan de Saveurs in the Gaspé and lacto-fermented shiitakes from nearby Champignons du Versant. Four years in the making, the restaurant first got into the swing of things with picnic lunches. Those evolved into an autumn tasting menu, winter brunch service and buvette and spring cabane à sucre. We browse the à la carte menu and skip the robust wine list in favour of a kimchi martini and wild pineapple weed-infused sour.

As the orange sun sinks on the horizon, we slip into a cake made with carrots harvested this morning, topped with miso frosting made nutty with pumpkin seed. A truck arrives and slowly passes by out front, children waving from its windows. We wave back, but they’re looking past us, to where their father, Lortie, works in the open kitchen. They’re home.