Minnibar, a 160-square-metre restaurant and café in downtown Montreal, is Ivy Studio‘s latest project. The studio has been making Montreal’s commercial interiors more interesting for nearly a decade, and Minnibar might be their most disciplined outing yet.
The restaurant and café occupies the ground floor of a downtown high-rise, with roughly six-metre ceilings and full-height glazing wrapping two sides of the corner unit. The menu is contemporary Italian, built around meticulously crafted pizza and pasta.
The interior looks east—to the atmospheric principles of Japanese minimalism. The near-square plan is organised around an enclosed central core containing the kitchen, bar and pizza counter.
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Guests enter into the daytime café, and as they move around that volume the room slides—without ceremony or signage—into the restaurant. A long counter runs the front window, bridging the morning coffee crowd and the evening dinner service.
Beyond the counter: movable tables, a single banquette, and an angled, monolithic DJ booth squared up to the entrance sightline. The designers explain that Minnibar works with its raw shell, with concrete floor, formidable columns, walls and ceiling slab left untouched.
The palette is strictly monochromatic—off-white and grey, punctuated by sharp black—and given depth through hand-plastered walls, heavily textured stone, opaque stained timber and translucent textiles. A triangular motif is threaded through the millwork with real persistence, creating a sense of continuity throughout the space.
The custom furnishings do the heavy lifting. A cream stone bar counter in a heavy leather finish sits on an angled stainless steel footrest, backed by black timber and a wine cellar glimpsed through triangular windows.
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In the dining area, black-stained tables on triangular bases meet Ivy Studio‘s first in-house chair design: ashwood stained a bespoke opaque soft yellow, its heavy curved legs resolving into a delicate backrest.
Lighting tempers all that volume. A dropped, wrap-around structure of white-stained timber rods and backlit rice paper glows above the central counters and reads from the street after dark, while the upper glazing gets the same treatment to soften the daylight.
A central art screen with controllable light sources lets the room be recut by mood, and slatted panels conceal secondary lighting while quietly fixing the acoustics. Raw downtown shell, refined Japanese calm, a pizza oven and a turntable—the combination works together surprisingly well.
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