Nora Gray and the joy of Italian cooking

Nora Gray was the last restaurant I worked at before I left restaurants for good. I try not to write reviews of places where I’ve worked in the past because I know too much — it’s an unfair bias that most diners won’t have.

That said, since 2020, Nora Gray has changed substantially, and it’s now as new to me in many ways as it would be to anyone else. Following the departure of Kira German, Andrew Korstvedt ran the kitchen rather successfully, with Nora Gray finding its way back onto the Canada’s 100 Best list. During that window, however, Nora Gray felt like it had taken a back seat to its sister restaurants Elena and Gia. After Korstvedt concluded his tenure, Emma Cardarelli and Ryan Gray made the decision to bring in Dmetro Sinclair (ex-Salle Climatisée and Willow Inn) as head chef. With that in mind, I had the opportunity to eat at the new Nora Gray, and let me say — it’s the best it’s been in years.

Like all of Gray and Cardarelli’s restaurants, Nora Gray’s location is somewhat off the beaten path. Tucked away on a nondescript part of St-Jacques, it’s easy enough to miss. I like that about the restaurant, though — it’s a place that requires you to seek it out and rewards you with one of the most comfortable and welcoming dining rooms in the city. The combination of soft lighting, pitch-perfect sound and wrap-around wood panelling makes for an entirely intimate space, the kind of room that invites you to linger over a slow meal and an excellent bottle of wine, which is exactly the type of thing on offer here. Seated at one of the three banquettes, my dining companions and I tucked into a round of quality cocktails and perused the menu.

Service at Nora Gray has always been an area of focus. In my time working there, there was always an insistence that the experience should feel like a dinner party — welcoming and effortless yet highly professional. Our server, Shelby Skaberna (who also oversees the wine list), was the epitome of that style of hospitality.

Nora Gray’s wine list is storied — an early buyer and reputed elder statesman of Montreal’s natural wine scene, Gray’s cellar is a collection of the finest natural wines available in the city. Decidedly less wild (meaning slightly more traditional in profile) than the lists of Elena and Gia, the wines here are from many of the most sought-after Old World producers and frequently feature back vintages. For our part, we selected a bottle of 2019 Le Feu from the late Savoyard winemaker Dominique Belluard. Spectacularly elegant, this alpine wine (made of 100% Gringet) is a complex combination of salinity, white flowers and warm yellow fruits — a perfect accompaniment to our first course of salty fennel sausage from Aliments Viens and some slices of Flemish Beauty pear.

It’s hard to call that a dish, per se — nothing here has been manipulated save for a bit of slicing, but it feels entirely Italian in its simplicity, and I, for one, am happy to see this level of restraint from Sinclair. These are exceptional products, and they don’t need anything more to be delicious. A gentle poaching of the pear might have made it feel more intentional, but it’s inarguably a tasty combination. We happened to be dining during a time when a lot of freshly caught Nova Scotia Bluefin tuna was making a brief appearance on menus around town. Served raw, the fatty fish was sliced thin and dressed in peperoncini (a piquant chilli spread) and bright, peppery olive oil. Yet another simple but effective plate of food.

In its simplicity yet abundant generosity of taste, Sinclair’s food feels precisely Italian. The popularity and ubiquity of Italian cooking often lead chefs to either become dogmatically prescriptive — choosing to cook only the Roman classics as articulated in a textbook, for example — or feel compelled to make their personal mark. Unlike the often formulaic rigidity of French cooking, Italian food is more emotional. While Sinclair’s food freely uses ingredients and techniques outside the traditional Italian canon, it’s done in a way that feels more aligned with the spirit of Italian cooking than a cook who just plays the standards.

This is perhaps best expressed by my favourite dish of the night and a dish I suspect will become a staple of the new Nora Gray: maltagliati with chicken liver ragù. It’s not much to look at — maltagliati is a pasta shape whose name translates to scraps, and the ragù is a homely sauce of browned bits of liver flecked with rosemary and black pepper — the epitome of the Italian expression brutto ma buono (ugly but delicious). It’s deeply flavourful and unctuous, the way liver ought to be, but somehow it never breaks toward liver’s overpowering metallic tendencies. Instead, it captures all the meatiness of a proper ragù, enlivened by both the bright, herbaceous rosemary and the floral spice of black pepper. To me, it is the dish among all dishes in recent memory that most reminds me of eating in Italy.

Another pasta, the spinach rotolo with tomato, is a much more beautiful dish to look at: two tidy spinach-filled coils set neatly in a puddle of rustic tomato sauce. It’s the Italian tricolore on a plate and, while less evocative for me, it’s nonetheless a very good dish and something sure to please the table.

The cooking, across the board, is deft, generous and unafraid to do a bit less when less is called for. It’s a confident approach to food that is deliberate and demonstrates that good ingredients and thoughtful cooking result in delicious food — and it needn’t be more complicated than that.

Take the Berkshire pork chop, for example. Sourced from Ferme d’Orée, the Berkshire pig is pasture-raised and considered to be among the best breeds in the world. At Nora Gray, the chops are perfectly seasoned, grilled over charcoal until they turn a blushing shade of medium, and are dressed, still hot, with paper-thin strips of lardo and fragrant oregano. The dish, when seasonally appropriate, is also served with a bit of braised quince and a healthy glug of Pacina olive oil. A mix of smoke and fat, the tender meat and silky-salty lardo marry beautifully, while the sweetness of the quince and freshness of the oregano offer relief. It’s a magnificent plate of pork that reaffirms how noble the pork chop can be when handled with care.

A bit of attention needs to be paid to the contorni (side dishes). The blistered Tokyo turnips with smoked butter were excellent, but all the praise is owed to the cipollini braised in reduced whey — I’ve never had anything quite like it, but it’s a spectacular sweet-savoury combination.

We ended the meal with a bit of amaro, as is the custom at Nora Gray, and also with a lovely slice of torta di riso. A luscious cousin of rice pudding, this custardy rice tart comes with a bubbly brûléed crust, stewed cherries and saba — a sweet syrup made from “grape must” leftover from the winemaking process. Personally, I’d like to see the desserts take the leap to the next level, but I can’t imagine anyone finishing their meal with this dessert and leaving disappointed.

When Nora Gray opened in 2011, it was a restaurant obsessed with a certain Italian identity. Over the years, it took many different shapes. As its more specialized sister restaurants opened, Nora’s identity became, in my view, less clear. Today, its identity is clearer than ever: It’s the unbridled joy of the Italian appetite, the sincerity and generosity of Italian cuisine and the collective vision of a group of Italian obsessives crystalized over time in an intimate dining room. ■

For more on Nora Gray (1391 St-Jacques), please visit their website. This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Cult MTL.

For more on the food and drink scene in Montreal, please visit the Food & Drink section.