A French bakery on Montague Street is turning its walls into a love letter to Montréal’s restaurant scene this week, pairing ink drawings of the city’s beloved eateries with a pastry made in collaboration with one of its most respected chefs. Starting Friday, L’Appartement 4F in Brooklyn Heights will display hand-drawn illustrations of Montréal restaurants, cafés and bars by New York-based artist John Donohue, running through November 5.
An Artist Who Draws Restaurants From Life
The exhibit, called All the Restaurants: Montréal, features 51 illustrations of the city’s dining spots, according to seed reporting from PIX11, which noted Donohue typically illustrates around 50 restaurants per collection. As Eater NY reports, the show and an accompanying pastry collaboration run from Friday, October 30, through Thursday, November 5. The collection includes drawings of Schwartz’s Deli, St-Viateur Bagel, Mon Lapin and Restaurant Beba, per PIX11, with each illustration aiming to capture a restaurant’s character and atmosphere.
Donohue has described his process simply: he draws by hand in ink on paper, working on-site and from life, according to his own account on All the Restaurants. He launched the project and its accompanying website in New York City on January 1, 2017, and the same source notes his drawings have since taken him to Paris, London, Napa, Philadelphia, Montréal and Las Vegas. His signed Giclée prints are limited to editions of 365 copies, per the same account.
A Pastry Built With a Montréal Chef
The exhibition isn’t just visual. L’Appartement 4F will also sell financier au thé des bois — a wintergreen tea financier — developed with Restaurant Toqué chef Normand Laprise in Montréal, Eater NY reports. PIX11 adds that the pastry incorporates wintergreen, a fragrant wild plant native to Québec’s boreal forests, and that Laprise demonstrated the financier and discussed Montréal’s reputation as a culinary destination on New York Living. The collaboration ties the city’s culinary traditions directly to the artwork on the walls.
L’Appartement 4F operates as a Brooklyn Heights French bakery at 115 Montague Street, according to its listing on All the Restaurants, and PIX11 reports the space includes an upstairs wine bar called L’Apéro. The bakery will serve Laprise’s limited-edition financier during the run of the exhibition, per PIX11.
Art for a Cause
Select prints from the exhibition will be available for purchase, with proceeds benefiting City Harvest, according to the Cobble Hill Collective. PIX11 identifies City Harvest as New York City’s hunger-relief organization and notes that the featured artwork is available for purchase online. Cobble Hill Collective’s report corroborates the show’s dates, describing how Donohue will showcase his hand-drawn illustrations of Montréal’s restaurants, cafés and bars from October 30 through November 5.
A Long-Running Project Across Cities
Montréal is only the latest stop for Donohue, whose restaurant-drawing project has grown into a string of books and gallery shows over nearly a decade. He has published All the Restaurants in New York, A Table in Paris and A Taste of London, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which also reports that he typically spends about 20 minutes drawing a restaurant’s facade, working as a freehand sketch in black ink with a splash of a single color.
Donohue began the project in 2017 as a self-taught, Brooklyn-based artist drawing restaurants across New York City’s five boroughs, according to Untapped Cities. Accounts differ slightly on the scope of his first book: Untapped Cities reports that 2019’s All the Restaurants in New York featured 100 restaurants, while Forbes has described it as featuring 101. His Paris collection, A Table in Paris, contains more than 100 drawings, per Untapped Cities, and a Philadelphia exhibition last year displayed 76 of the 93 sketches he had created of that city’s restaurants, benefiting Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, according to the Inquirer.
The Brooklyn Heights show arrives against the backdrop of a dining industry that has weathered real upheaval. New York City’s dining scene included roughly 23,600 establishments in 2020, according to Forbes, which also reported that the pandemic forced some of the most iconic restaurants in New York and around the globe to close, scale back or substantially alter their business models. For New Yorkers who can’t easily hop a flight to Québec, PIX11 frames the Montague Street exhibit as a way to experience Montréal’s food culture — its restaurants, delis, neighborhood cafés and broader culinary scene — without leaving Brooklyn Heights.
