The wood from here
Maple is a dense hardwood. That is the whole point.
A softwood — spruce, pine, fir — burns fast, hot and short. It is loaded with resin: it smokes black, it spits, and it leaves an acrid taste on food that no amount of cooking will fix. Softwoods are for lighting a stove, not for cooking a côte de bœuf.
A hardwood burns slowly. Its density lets it hold intense heat for a long time and then fall into stable, even embers with almost no smoke. That is exactly what we’re after: not a flame, but a bed of coals that radiates for two hours without asking anything of you.
Maple in particular gives a clean ember, a gentle smoke, and a flavour that doesn’t take over the room. A more assertive wood — mesquite, say — flattens a fish. Maple walks alongside it.
And then there is a reason that isn’t technical at all: it is the tree from here. The same tree that gives the syrup we fold into our meat jus, out of the same forests. Cooking over maple in the Eastern Townships isn’t an aesthetic choice; it’s a geographic fact.
Ours comes from a farmer in Ange-Gardien, 24 km from 13, rue Court. Ange-Gardien is in Montérégie and Granby is in Estrie: the wood crosses an administrative border over twenty-four kilometres. That is the only one it crosses — mesquite would be coming from Texas.
Forty cords a year. Stacked in a single run 1.2 metres high and as deep, that is 98 metres long. Brought down to one night of service: a fifth of a cord.
Embers, not flames
This is the distinction that changes everything, and almost nobody makes it.
Flames burn. Embers cook.
A flame is burning gas: unstable, yellow, dirty. It deposits soot and chars the surface before the centre moves at all. An ember is incandescent carbon: it radiates, it holds steady, it delivers a dry intense heat that seizes the surface and crisps it while the interior climbs gently.
So the gesture here is a gesture of waiting. You light the wood. You let it burn. And you cook nothing until the flame has fallen. What remains — a red bed under a film of grey ash — is the tool.
After that, everything is distance and patience. There is no knob. You don’t turn a wood fire down: you move the food, closer, further, you bank it with ash, you fan it. The grill rises and falls. The cook reads the coals with a hand and an eye, and sometimes gets it wrong.
What fire does to an ingredient
Three things, concretely.
The crust. The dry, radiant heat of a coal bed triggers browning faster and more cleanly than a flat top. A bavette takes a crust in minutes while the centre stays rare. That is mechanically hard to reproduce any other way.
Smoke, in small doses. What perfumes food is not the black smoke of a smothered fire: it is the fine vapour that rises when a drop of fat falls onto the coals and flashes off. It rises, it settles, it leaves. Octopus grilled over embers still tastes of octopus, with smoke underneath. If it tastes of the smokehouse, we’ve failed.
The truth of the ingredient. It’s the phrase we use here, and it isn’t decoration. Fire hides nothing. There is no butter-mounted sauce to rescue it, no sous-vide to even it out. A mediocre vegetable over embers stays a mediocre vegetable — only more visible. That is why this cooking forces you into the quality of the product: the fire is the judge, not the alibi.
"The dynamic in the kitchen, the calm and the efficiency in a full rush, and of course the flames doing the cooking. It’s dinner and a show — literally."
What fire costs
Since this page means to be honest, the other side has to be said too.
It’s slower. The fire has to be built before service and tended through it. Someone is on it all evening.
It’s more expensive. Dry hardwood costs more than gas, and it has to be stored, split and seasoned.
It’s harder. Cooking over embers is, in Brian Proulx’s view, the most difficult thing to master in a restaurant, precisely because there is no setting. A gas cook learns a temperature. A fire cook learns a fire — and the fire changes every night, with the moisture in the wood, the draw of the room, the heat in the room.
And it’s hot. In July, behind that counter, it is what it is.
None of these constraints is a virtue in itself. Fire doesn’t automatically make a dish better; it makes failure more visible. We chose it because, well handled, it gives something no appliance gives. Not because it looks good.
The vocabulary, so you stop mixing it up
These four words get used interchangeably everywhere, including by serious people. They do not mean the same thing.
If you remember one thing: you don’t cook in the flames, you cook after them.
What goes over the fire here
More or less everything.
The meats, obviously: the côte de bœuf to share, the bavette, the filet mignon on the bone, the wild boar chop, the wood-grilled chicken. Game, which has no fat to spare and loves dry heat.
Fish too: sablefish, whose rich flesh holds together and takes smoke without falling apart. And octopus, grilled over the coals until the tips of the tentacles crackle.
Vegetables above all, and that’s what people notice least: zucchini, corn, leeks, the tomatoes from our own beds. A vegetable grilled over embers concentrates its water and its sweetness in a way a pan never manages.
And bread. Sourdough grilled over the coals is the simplest gesture on the menu and one of the truest.
The full menu, with prices, is online.
If you want to try it at home
This page is worthless if all it leaves you with is the urge to book. Here is what we’d do in your place, on a Sunday, in a backyard.
- Buy dry hardwood. Maple, beech, oak, apple, cherry. Dry means split and sheltered for at least a year. Green wood smokes and never makes coals.
- Never burn treated, painted, varnished or pallet wood. It’s toxic. And no softwoods: they tar.
- Light it, then wait. Thirty to forty-five minutes depending on quantity. You cook when the flames have dropped and the coals wear a veil of grey ash, red underneath.
- Test the heat with your hand, palm ten to twelve centimetres above the grate. Two seconds before you have to pull away: that’s hot, for searing. Five or six seconds: that’s gentle, for finishing.
- Build two zones. Push the coals to one side. Sear on the hot zone, finish on the cool one. That is what replaces the knob.
- Salt before, rest after. Meat off the fire keeps cooking; give it a third of its cooking time to breathe.
- Start with vegetables. They forgive, they’re cheap, and they’ll teach you to read your fire far better than a good cut of beef.
None of this makes you a fire cook. It will give you an idea of what happens behind our counter — and of why it is harder than it looks.
The wood-fire moment
It should be said plainly: wood-fire cooking is having a moment.
In its 2026 Québec selection, the MICHELIN Guide awarded a star to Hoogan et Beaufort, in Montreal, whose wood oven and counter sit at the centre of the project. Four new stars were awarded in Québec that year. Fire is no longer bistro decor: it is a discipline being judged.
Maison Boire opened on 17 June 2017, with the fire in the middle of the room from the first night. We didn’t follow the movement, and we don’t claim to have started it. We simply note that what we have been doing for nine years in an 1893 house in Granby is being recognised as a way of cooking in its own right.
The MICHELIN Guide included Maison Boire in its Québec selection in 2025, and again in 2026. The plaque is on the façade of 13, rue Court. Our Guide listing · what the selection means.
Come and watch it
The chef’s counter looks straight onto the coals. It’s the best seat in the room, and there aren’t many: ask for it when you book.
The hearth is not original. The house dates from 1893; the restaurant opened on 17 June 2017, and the stone structure was drawn that year, for this. The grills were commissioned from a machine shop: none of it came out of a catalogue.
The grate itself belonged to the chef’s grandmother. It works four nights a week.
Wednesday through Saturday, from 5 p.m. The kitchen closes at 10 p.m.
Written by Maison Boire, 13, rue Court, Granby, Québec. Last updated September 2026.