The best Korean restaurants in Montreal, from fried chicken to fine dining

With its downtown location (and a superb terrasse in the summertime), Omma has the city’s needs for Korean food covered. Omma has all of the classics down pat, and its chef and matriarch Mykium Kim is among the best making them in the city. They also blissfully offer some lighter, more vegetable-focused fare that can be hard to find at other Korean restaurants. Some of their best dishes fall into this category, from their sweet potato noodles in a soothing red curry sauce, but carnivores are covered with succulent bulogogi and beef-filled mandu.

This is one of the best restaurants in the city for exploring Korean cuisine outside of bibimbap, BBQ and fried chicken (though they'll knock it out of the park with some of those dishes as well). Owners Jun Beom Lim and chef Young Ui Hong prepare deeper cuts such as naengmyeon and japchae-bap with delicious implications. The decor and music here are much more gentle than other Korean restaurants around the city as well, making it ideal for some date night noodles.

It’s a shame that many of the city’s Korean restaurants have food that pairs so well with a wide range of beverages, but they'll generally have small drinks lists that don’t do the food justice. Thankfully, restaurants like La Maison de Seoul have solved this problem by offering a BYO style of service. Do like we do and grab a bottle of something from the SAQ down the street before heading in for a bowl of spicy noodles, kogos, seafood pancakes, and smoking hot dolsot bibimbap.

There are few foods as satisfying as the tender pull of Korean rice dumplings, or tteokbooki. They look like large gnocchi and are usually lapped in a dayglow orange sauce, brimming with loads of chilli. The rice dumplings prepared at Haru Hana are some of the city’s finest, and are even better when paired with the restaurants signature miso butter pork shoulder.

Consider the menu of this bar emptying bottles of beer and soju into student crowds downtown a distilled version of its original and (sadly) now-closed location on Maisonneuve Boulevard, once home to long lines of people. Originally built to be a boozy counterpart, this bar's the new home for Ganadara's amazing value and modern spins on Korean fare—think takes on whole chickens or tteobokki poutine.

Since the rise of David Chang and Momofuku, many Korean restaurants have begun to fuse some traditional dishes with classics from other cuisines. There are few better examples of this style of food than the spicy savoury dance that is the kimchi-bulgogi burger being served at Pocha da Marie; it rolls the joys of Korean BBQ and a roadside burger into one big delicious bite. Order that, or the cheese tteokbokki. Or the kimchi bokeumbap buritto with bulgogi. Really, just order anything they come up with. 

Pancakes are far from a breakfast dish, and Korean cuisine is enlightened enough to know that with crispy disc of dough is good any time of the day. The speciality at Chez Bong is their buchimgae, a zucchini and egg-based pancake, perfect for dunking in the accompanying saucer of soy sauce. Order that with their bright red and spicy jigae, throw in a couple appetizers, and it'll be a memorable meal. If you want to know how chef Madame Bong from Gwangju, in the province of Jeollanam-do, does it? They're putting up tutorials on their website.

Fried chicken is too often associated with the Colonel, and meanwhile it's Korean restaurants that are turning out some of the best fried chicken you'll ever have in Montreal. It packs a satisfying crunch of Southern fried chicken while being tossed in soy & chilli fueled sauces. Mon Ami is the gold standard holder for the dish in Montreal, and bonus: It's expansive, with numerous proper sit-down, casual, and Korean BBQ restaurants found across the city (and sometimes multiple ones in the same neighbourhood).

Le Petit Seoul is as reliable as they come, and you can bet on them serving all of your Korean favourites on a given night. They serve a gamjatang that is head and shoulders above any of their competitors—a spicy pork bone stew that is the essential dish after a day surviving the snow and cold of Montreal—but the menus popping with all kinds of easily recommended dishes like sizzling stone bowls of bibimbap, spicy yukgaejang beef stew with chewy sweet potato vermicelli, and twisted takes on local favourites like beef tartare.

It takes a lot to drum up the will to travel to Ville Saint Laurent from the city core, but Avenue Seoul’s delicious fare is more than enough to drive you. Like others on this list, Avenue Seoul has an all-encompassing menu serving many Korean favourites. Where they separate themselves from the pack is through there stews including a fantastic iteration of sudunbu. A roiling boil of a soft tofu stew into which a fresh egg is cracked at the table, slowly poaching in the brothy goodness.

Dawa is fully committed to serving chicken in as many delicious forms as possible, and nothing else. They have a wide range of exceptional sauces which pair perfectly with the oh-so crunchy fried chicken that they painstakingly prepare by the bucket. Most of the tables there are covered with a 50/50 mix of original fried chicken, and their signature Korean sweet chilli, but their range of special rice and noodles dishes should be ordered to get the full experience.

Korean restaurant menus around the city are awash with bimbimbap, but Bol Orange is one of the only ones serving the dishes lesser-known: deopbap. While bibimbap is shingled with raw vegetables & meat, deopbap is instead “smothered” with stir fry. At Bol Orange, all of the deopbap toppings are exceptional, but we recommend the flavourful 'beyond belief 'bulgogi.

From the outside of Le Cartier building in downtown Montreal, you may find the constant stream of hungry McGill students entering its basement to be a little bizarre. It;s less bizarre when you enter yourself to find Opiano, one of the city’s finest Korean restaurants serving well-priced fare. It’s one of those places where any order is good order, but their spicy chicken dosirak is particularly excellent.

Some of the best Korean food is drinking food, and few things pair better with drinking than the spiced complexity of dishes from Atti—the only catch is that you'll need to take it to go from this place, as it's found in the underground malls of the city core like Les Cours Mont-Royal and Westmount Square. Their wide array of delicious (and cheap!) food pairs exceedingly well with absurdly cheap wine and soju, but if you’re looking for a more sober meal, Atti is also a fantastic option for a workday lunch as well—just ask the office workers paying visits throughout the week to their locations below.

This Bon Appétit-featured shop in NDG is the go-to spot for one unique Korean favourite: Bingsoo. For those that have yet to enjoy bingsoo, imagine a mountain of shaved ice piled high with different sauces, confections, fruits and baked goods. The owners of Momo are nothing short of mad scientists with the crazy concoctions they whip up regularly.

This is the ultimate stop for a meal on the go. The adorable as can be grandmothers that work the counter lovingly manufacture picture-perfect kimbap and onigiri. The cooks here are incredibly detail-oriented and prepare all their products to ensure that they survive your metro transit in peak condition. Because the products hold up so well they are also perfect for grabbing for your lunch on the way into work.

Confoundingly, this restaurant proclaims itself to be “The Best Japanese Restaurant in Montreal” despite having a menu filled to the brim with Korean favourites. This airy, little spot on Prince-Arthur serves their Korean iterations of Japanese classics, such as their comforting beef ramen. It tastes like the best version ever of the stuff you’re used to microwaving from a packet.