On a spring afternoon, John Winter Russell wel-comes me to Candide, the restaurant he founded in November 2015 in the basement of an old church in Griffintown, Montréal. The wooden communal tables, the open kitchen and pantry, and the chef’s frank smile all give Candide its welcoming, homestead feel. Around this time of day, the staff welcomes deliveries from local producers. Today is cheese day, so around us are boxes and boxes of Clos-des-Roches raw, organic cow’s milk cheese from La Fromagerie des Grondines. “Life is good when you can order cheese by the kilo,” Russell says. His remark is disarmingly simple, but infinitely revealing of his outlook.

At Candide, Russell has built a small team of talented cooks and sommeliers who serve hyperlocal, vegetable-centric cuisine. And I mean hyperlocal: Lemon, pepper, white sugar, and olive oil are all on the list of “foreign” staples that don’t even make it through the front door. Fish and meat are used as garnishes—for the sake of the planet. Everything that diners find on their plates is pesticide and herbicide free. And perhaps most importantly, every single ingredient is intimately tethered to a producer from the St. Lawrence Estuary and the Province of Québec. There are only three exceptions: Russell’s friends from his native province of Ontario will send one batch of cherries and peaches per year, his mom’s friends from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick will bring seafood when they visit, and another friend from Newfoundland harvests the restaurant’s salt.

Evidently, Russell sees his producers as part of the restaurant’s extended family. But supporting them throughout the seasons is a daunting task, especially when Candide also strives to live up to their reputation for serving one of the brightest, freshest, and most diverse menus in the country. To achieve a year’s worth of dynamic flavour profiles (and to avoid the dreadful “beets four ways” in winter), Russell and his team have to stock up on fresh ingredients between May and December and transform them using a multi- tude of traditional preservation methods. As a result, no matter the season, dishes at Candide may confidently feature fresh or transformed local ingredients such as edamame, lovage, green strawberries, smoked yogurt, edible flowers, oyster mushrooms, herring, blueberries, scallops, bottarga, parsnips, fiddleheads, smelt eggs, guinea fowl, pickerel, trout lilies, plums, malted wheat . . . you get the idea.

As Russell delves into explanations of his salting, drying, canning, and fermenting techniques, I begin to grasp the full complexity of his cooking operation. While he might confidently declare that “life is good,” that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. For the past few years, Candide’s chef-owner has been pushing boundaries that few restaurants have even approached. By doing this, he’s come up with a blueprint for a new kind of hyperlocal gastronomy.