La Guilde Culinaire Inc

Who doesn’t dream of elevating their culinary chops to a professional’s level? Of having access to high-quality equipment to, if only for a moment, feel like a bona fide chef? Well, there’s a culinary school on Boulevard St-Laurent where you can make these dreams come true.

At La Guilde Culinaire, owners and brothers Jonathan and Benjamin Garnier offer cookery classes in a posh setting that would make any restaurant owner jealous.

"My brother and I wanted to create a company that would allow us to work together and to mesh together our passions for restaurants and cuisine. The idea for the school quickly came to us," Jonathan explains, referring to the brothers’ motivation for their decision: the need for direct interaction with customers. "When you work in a kitchen, even in an open-concept one, the contacts you have with clients are limited. I wanted to create a company that allowed this type of interaction."

La Guilde Culinaire is also the brothers’ answer to a specific shortcoming of Montreal’s culinary scene; before they opened, there weren’t any high-end cookery schools that were affordable to the general public. Plus, one doesn’t need to be well-versed in cooking to attend their classes.

"We don’t target a specific type of customer. Generally, our clients are people interested in honing their culinary skills or their knowledge of a specific topic," says Jonathan. "We offer a great variety of classes: some are on pizza, others on fresh pastas, foie gras, fine chocolates, you name it! Groups often include 12 to 14 individuals, and they are led by a specialist of the theme at hand."