Perch Restaurant

Koji, dashi, and birch sap do as much work at Perch as any protein that reaches the plate. The kitchen ferments, ages, and marinates its way through a nine-course Canadian tasting menu, treating technique — not luxury garnish — as the thing that earns an ingredient its seat. All of it happens in plain view. The Preston Street dining room seats twenty-two, every chair faces an open kitchen with no wall between the guests and the line, and chef-owner Justin Champagne-Lagarde works the pass a few feet from the tables. Plating and the handoff of each course become part of dinner rather than something staged out of sight.

The menu is reservation-only and changes course by course, but its anchors recur. Dinner opens with house-baked rye bread, a daily bake tied to Amanda MacIntosh's sourdough program and served as the first act of hospitality rather than filler before the real food arrives. From there the meal moves through the water and the fermentation cellar in equal measure: Fogo Island snow crab in koji butter with roasted pork broth, daikon, and kohlrabi; smoked Acadian sturgeon with an XO-style sauce, yuzu gel, and a marrow foam; West Coast black cod marinated as if it were unagi and finished with chickpea miso. A Matane shrimp cone holds charred venison tartare, shio koji, and Acadian sturgeon caviar. Birch-marinated walleye agnolotti arrives in a sake beurre blanc, and smaller bites thread through the sequence — a savoury Dijon macaron filled with Acadian sturgeon mousse among them. The savoury run usually lands on koji-aged, seaweed-wrapped duck breast — a deeper finish after the seafood-heavy middle — and dessert has run to caramelized parsnip ice cream with chestnut cake and maple verjus.

The clearest read on the kitchen is the chawanmushi. A koji-dashi custard is one of the quietest things a kitchen can send out, and Perch keeps some version of it on the menu as a matter of course — a deliberately restrained course set among louder plates to prove the technique is the point rather than the spectacle. The through-line is Canadian: sturgeon, walleye, snow crab, and birch drawn from domestic waters and forests, then run through fermentation instead of imported luxury. Fermentation is the house language — koji butter, koji aging, chickpea miso, a birch marinade — and it turns humble domestic catch into the centre of a serious meal. It is cooking that reads as disciplined rather than showy, which is why the tasting menu holds together as a single argument instead of a parade of courses.

Champagne-Lagarde and MacIntosh opened Perch in 2021 and built it around more than the cooking. The restaurant's stated identity leans on ethical sourcing, sustainability, and a healthier kitchen culture — a thread independent coverage has returned to as often as the food itself. MacIntosh's bread program anchors the front of the meal; Champagne-Lagarde's fermentation-driven direction carries the rest. Both owners still run the floor and the pass in a dining room small enough that they can, and Canada's 100 Best has taken note.

Dinner runs Wednesday through Saturday only, a single evening's worth of careful pacing, and the tasting format is not built to be rebuilt mid-service — dietary needs are worked in with notice rather than on the fly. Reservations run through the restaurant's own booking, and a night here is planned around rather than stumbled into. What it adds up to is a restaurant with a narrow footprint and a long reach: twenty-two seats on a Little Italy strip better known for espresso and pizza, turning out a menu that argues Canadian ingredients and fermentation can carry a full tasting without a single import to lean on. The rye comes out of the oven before the first guest sits down, and the rest of the night follows from there.