Vanya Filipovic on The Mon Lapin Cookbook: From Montreal, With Love

“I’m so bored of the ‘natural versus conventional’ wine debate,” says Vanya Filipovic, wine director and co-owner of Mon Lapin, which is considered by some to be the best restaurant in Canada right now. It’s without question one of the hardest-to-score tables in Montréal. “There is a vibrancy and lift you’ll find in wines that are made with less manipulation and chemicals,” she continues. “And it makes me so sad that the term ‘natural wine’ has now been equated with flaws—we need a reset.”

Mon Lapin’s dining room is packed and Filipovic is running between tables carrying multiple bottles—nearly every guest is drinking wine. It’s a warm evening in early fall, and the restaurant’s large windows are lined with a rainbow of tomatoes in an ascending color palette, from deep garnet to orange, brilliant yellow and green, illuminated by the golden late-day sun. It’s a rare moment of seasonal bounty in cold-climate Québec—one that Montréal’s chefs lean into hard.

Pappardelle at Mon Lapin, where most guests are drinking wine on any given night. (Dominique Lafond)

Unfazed by the dining room buzz, Filipovic is calm and reflective, eager to explain why it’s time for the wine world to move into its post-natural era. Mon Lapin’s award-winning wine cellar, with more than 1,000 references, is as much of a draw as the food, and she is adamant that her list defies the dichotomy. “Yes, we’ve become a hub for wines made in a more artisanal way, but our cellar also holds many well-known great wines of the world—I don’t feel like I have to pick a side. And I find the wines that can straddle both universes are usually the best ones.”

Filipovic shares thoughtful wine reflections like this throughout her new book, The Mon Lapin Cookbook: De Toute Beauté: From Montreal, With Love (out Oct. 7 from Phaidon), a treatise on food and wine that she co-wrote with the restaurant’s chefs, Marc-Olivier (Marco) Frappier (who is also her husband) and Jessica Noël. Alongside more than 100 recipes, each chapter features Filipovic’s essays on wine, deeply personal ruminations on regions, winemakers and pairings. The book also includes the authors’ love letter to their favorite ingredient: brown butter.

The new cookbook from Filipovic and the Mon Lapin team combines recipes for the home chef with thoughtful reflections on food and wine. (Phaidon)

In the pasta chapter, Filipovic writes about the “signature energy” of wines grown on volcanic soils, how their combination of “rock, salt and smoke” makes them perfect partners for pappardelle and ragù. Filipovic has thought a lot about vin de légume and makes a convincing case that we’ve got it all wrong when we pair salads and vegetables with high-acid whites. Less piercing wines “containing sunshine” and a bit of richness—like a Xarel-lo or Palomino from Spain, or a Macabeu from the Roussillon—are a far better fit.

In the chapter called “Steamy Windows in February,” she describes the “vertical” nature of mountain wines, how drinking wines grown in Alpine places like Savoie or Trentino can have a “clarifying effect” in cold weather. In Montréal’s snowy winter, when it gets dark at 4:30 p.m., the “bracing energy of a wine that began with people harvesting crops in full snowsuits feels just right.”

The restaurant embraces seasonal ingredients, including the white asparagus showcased in this recipe. (Phaidon)

Montréal’s increasingly dynamic food and wine scene is having a moment, and the city’s restaurants have racked up Michelin stars and other awards. (There are 14 Wine Spectator Restaurant Award winners in Montréal, including Best of Award of Excellence winners Restaurant La Chronique and Annette bar à vin.) The Mon Lapin book brings the hyperlocal, Québécois ethos driving the scene authentically to life. “Not everyone gets to live in this weirdly poetic Franco-Anglo medley of Montréal, with its romantic preoccupations, its slightly Old World ways, and its knack for art and joy,” the authors write.

You’ll find home cook–friendly recipes for some of Mon Lapin’s beloved fan favorites—the Croque-Pétoncle, a grilled scallop mousse finger sandwich, and “Leeks like Mussels,” leeks presented like a seafood conserva with a side of smoked mussel sauce and potato chips.

Despite its serious food credentials—Canada’s 100 Best ranked Mon Lapin No. 2 in 2026, and World’s 50 Best named it the Best Restaurant in East Canada for 2026 and named Filipovic the Best Sommelier in North America—the restaurant’s dining room retains the casual, convivial spirit of its wine bar origins.

Mon Lapin has risen from casual wine bar to one of Canada’s leading restaurants. (Dominique Lafond)

Mon Lapin began in 2018 as an informal 10-table bar à vin in Montréal’s Little Italy neighborhood before morphing into a full-blown restaurant in 2021, when the team of five friends took over the next-door space and doubled in size. Chef Frappier led the kitchens at Montréal’s esteemed Joe Beef restaurants, where he met Filipovic, for 10 years prior. (The Joe Beef group remains an investor.)

He’s in the kitchen with co-owner and chef Jessica Noël, whose résumé includes a stint at Wine Spectator Grand Award winner Blue Hill at Stone Barns. (Today, the empire has expanded with Rôtisserie La Lune just down the street, which offers an elevated take on the Québécois tradition of barbecue chicken, fries, coleslaw and gravy, plus a killer wine list overseen by partner Alex Landry.)

“We have an adventurous spirit; I really think that’s what defines the Québec wine scene. We are curious and willing to go outside the box.”—Vanya Filipovic

“Marco and Jess’s food is not overly busy ingredient-wise, overly fussy, heavily garnished, or molecular,” says Filipovic, who grew up in a restaurant family and spent her childhood polishing silver, folding napkins and eating the staff meal. “It’s product-first cooking, and wine is really meant for this kind of food. We want conscientious wines with the same kind of energy that you’ll find on the plate.”

Which brings us back to natural wine. Spend time in Montréal and you’ll notice how natural wine has come to dominate many of the top restaurants’ wine lists—which leads those of us who remain skeptical of the category to proceed with caution.

As I see it, the movement earned its dubious reputation because many self-proclaimed natural wines are terribly flawed with bacteria and brettanomyces masquerading as terroir. “Absolutely,” Filipovic agrees. “I understand why this happened—the movement became trendy and there were a lot of poorly made wines and people had bad experiences. We have to talk about precision and rigorous winemaking and clean cellars; all of those things that were always important and have always defined the great wines of the world.”

Much to her disappointment, she’s found that the confusion around natural wine has bled over onto terms like organic and biodynamic farming in the minds of many wine drinkers. “We’re jumbling it all together—I don’t think people want wines made with chemicals and pesticides—and I don’t think that’s what they mean when they ask for a ‘non-organic’ wine.”

Diners won’t be surprised to find rabbit starring prominently in several dishes at Mon Lapin. (Dominique Lafond)

For many natural wine purists, the addition of sulfur (a preservative used in small amounts, particularly at bottling, to avoid spoilage) is a deal-breaker. Yet Filipovic sees this litmus test as just another unhelpful distraction. “I understand some winemakers’ desire to eliminate as many additives as possible, but I would much rather focus on avoiding wines that have added things like acidity, oak chips, color—we’ve focused so much on sulfur and not the rest.”

Fortunately, you won’t find wines at either extreme on her list. Plenty of classics—Jean-Louis Chave, Simon Bize & Fils, Domaine Leroy, Paul Pillot, Château Haut-Brion, Giuseppe Rinaldi—are woven in with many far less familiar names. “We have an adventurous spirit; I really think that’s what defines the Québec wine scene. We are curious and willing to go outside the box.”

At Filipovic’s suggestion, I ordered a bottle from a new Burgundy producer I’d never heard of: Maison Gautheron d’Anost, a young estate in Meursault founded by Bastien Gautheron, who trained at Leflaive. The wine was a revelation—elegant and energetic, with depth and length—and a terrific complement to chef Frappier’s roast pork with morels.

Discovery like this is what makes wine endlessly fascinating and fun, and Mon Lapin’s list is full of similarly little-known gems, plus a full section of Québec wines. (Try the Domaine l’Espiègle.) I imagine these local bottles would be ideal to pair with the Montréal winter—a season the team proudly claims as its own. “It’s the snowstorm nights when we really come alive,” Filipovic writes. “We never close our restaurant because of weather.”

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