Deville Dinerbar – Great American Diner food in Downtown Montreal

Deville Dinerbar is a new American style diner located on Stanley and Ste-Catherine serving high quality large portion sandwiches, salads, burgers, pastas and cocktails.  A great option for a lunch with friends downtown or drinks after work!

Deville Dinerbar
1425 Stanley
Montreal, QC
H3B 5K2
514-281-6556

Good ++

Good places for lunch with friends downtown are surprisingly difficult to find.  The range of options usually goes from food court to business lunch.  There are exceptions, but they are usually very poor in my opinion   – St-Hubert (sorry – I don’t love it!), Cage aux Sports, Trois Brasseurs… you get the picture.  I was therefore pretty excited to try out this new restaurant for lunch with the girls.

This is an American diner type restaurant.  I immediately cringe when I hear that, as I think we all expect something extremely kitsch, and it was a little bit kitsch but I definitely did not feel embarrassed walking into the place.   In fact, it is pretty smooth and upscale and actually fairly spectacular.  Perhaps this was due to fairly low expectations!

Reservations are only taken for groups over 5, and as this restaurant has only been open for 4 weeks the three of us were promptly seated.  The menu is pretty large with mains coming in between $19 – $30, pasta from $16 – $29, Burgers from $16 – $35 and Sandwiches from $15 – $23.  They also have a salad section but I forgot to write prices for that.  They have an extensive cocktail menu which includes wines by the glass between $8 – $15.  I didn’t see any wines by the bottle but I can’t imagine that this isn’t offered?  Cocktails were around $12.

Our drink order and food order were promptly taken.  We were short on time so all just took a main dish.  We were in complete awe once they were delivered to us.  I order the Deville Burger which is their basic burger coming with two patties, and it’s pretty much fully loaded.  It’s so big, I had to remove a patty and a tomato just to get it into a more reasonable eating size.  I tried to eat it by hand but it was so big I gave up and turned to a knife and fork.  It was excellent but I thought the patty seemed a bit dry?  Needless to say I ate the entire thing.  (BTW – I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Lew the great Montreal Burger Reviewer has to say on this one!)  The fries are mini and were great.  My friend had the club which was MASSIVE with fresh pulled chicken, and avocado.  It looked amazing but I don’t know how you could even attempt to eat that thing.  The third plate was a huge salad which was also very good.  The food was so impressive looking I actually took photos of it which I never do!

Service was prompt and we were very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food.  It is a tad expensive, but considering my club sandwich (with questionable chicken) and salad from a food court comes to $10.75 I’ll gladly pay $16 for a burger there.

Other fun stuff I just have to mention includes an option to choose the music played in the restaurant through your iphone!  In addition, they have a really nice looking terrace in a courtyard so it is out of the traffic and commotion.  It is going to be covered, heated and fully licensed so come spring I think I know where I will be heading for lunch (oh yeah… I’ll have a newborn.. nevermind!)

Decor: Americana diner which sounds horrible but isn’t so bad.
Service: Friendly, knowledgeable, and brisk.
Prices: I think they are fine for downtown.  I would gladly pay for the quality of food here considering what’s on offer downtown.
Food: Surprisingly good!  I guess we were just expecting average stuff because of the type of restaurant but it was really good!  Massive portions!
Good For: Lunch or drinks with friends.  I would only go for a business lunch here if you really knew your contact and you were OK with them seeing you struggle to stuff a massive sandwich in your mouth!

ps sorry about the quality of the photos at the end…. iPhone at work.