This Exciting Home-Style East Asian Spot is Coming to Mile Ex Soon

A promising new pan-East-Asian restaurant is on its way to Jean-Talon West from a caterer and cook with skills spanning Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cuisines.

It’s called Jiep Jiep, and Shammy Chan is the woman behind it — it’s set to open in the former Marché Soupson location on the boundary of Mile Ex and Villeray (Soupson moved down the street a little while back).

Speaking to Eater, Chan says she doesn’t want to be a restaurant with a 200-item menu — rather, she wants to focus in on a few constantly-rotating items, with high-quality counter service akin to casual eateries in her home city of Hong Kong.

“I want to do an in-your-face Asian restaurant — I go [to East Asia] every year and I see how people serve food in Japan and in Hong Kong (where I come from). And it’s really efficient, and it doesn’t mean the food is bad.”

Chan, who is self-taught and has built up her skills through years of catering gigs, says the food will lean healthy and will be more homestyle, making it something novel for the city.

“I just like to eat healthy most of the time. It’s simple and tasty home cooking that people don’t get to taste most of the time.”

To start with, the food will lean Korean, according to Chan. That’s because she wants to produce a lot of fermented food such as kimchi or pickles, and needs to build up hosts (or “mothers”) for that — she anticipates some 20 different types of kimchi will be available to take home, and the spicy Korean staple will figure into many dishes.

“I’d like to be the first kimchi house in Montreal,” Chan adds.

Chan says items like takoyaki (Japanese octopus balls), bibimbap, Japanese curry, Taiwanese beef noodles could all appear, but it’ll also skew seasonal. Feast your eyes on some of Chan’s creations below.

“If pumpkin is in season, Japanese pumpkin soup, or maybe Chinese stewed pumpkin, that’s going to be the special.”

Shammy Chan

Shammy Chan

Shammy Chan

Chan is also planning some sweets (including Japanese cakes and mochi), centred around flavours like ginger, persimmon, red bean, yuzu, and matcha, as well as fruity Taiwanese snowflake ice in the warmer months.

It’ll be mostly a counter service affair, open mostly in the daytimes (possibly with early evenings later on), in a space with 29 seats — a terrasse is in the works for summer, too.

Expect Jiep Jiep to open sometime in the coming weeks.

• Jiep Jiep [Facebook]