Travel
A second-generation Haitian chef is using food to tell a story of heritage and identity in Canada
It’s late spring in the Village, and a Thursday night’s just getting started at the pan-Caribbean Montreal restaurant Palme. Guests representing a cross-section of the city’s diversity take up seats at a rhum-forward wraparound bar for cocktails. The invited veteran DJ Blaster starts to build a groove with soca rhythms of the West Indies, and the music spills onto Sainte-Catherine Street from the restaurant’s open garage-style frontage.
Like the music, the plates here — griot, jerk chicken, accras, ceviche — pull from across the tropics, each one reworked with unexpected touches drawn from the chef ’s own inspirations. Hence the name: Palme is an homage to countries where palm trees can be found, from the Caribbean to South America, parts of Africa and Southeast Asia — all regions that shape the restaurant, and the communities it’s grown to serve.
The restaurant’s atmosphere and culinary leanings form a point of cultural exchange that reflects the second-generation reality of its Haitian chef Ralph Alerte Desamours and his Bahamian-French Canadian partner Lee-Anne Millaire Lafleur: how their heritage, upbringing in Montreal and travels coalesce to create something new. For Desamours, culture was always close. Born in Montreal to Haitian parents, home was where he first learned to cook.
“My Haitian roots begin with my family, my grandmother and the way she taught me how to cook a Caribbean cuisine,” Desamours says. “My mom is a great cook as well, and I learned a lot from her, too. It’s how I learned all the basics.”
But while his own culture was always close, so was everything else. Growing up in the Montreal borough of Saint-Léonard, myriad cultures and the polyphony of their languages surrounded his own: Québecois, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Portuguese. That early exposure set the tone for his career later in life, including stints at everything from French restaurants and high-capacity arena kitchens to a four-star Westin resort in the Cayman Islands.
When Desamours and Lafleur returned to Montreal in 2017, however, they wanted a space of their own to build on the legacy of the places they knew growing up. For the chef, that meant long-standing Haitian institutions like Méli-Mélo in Villeray and Restaurant Steve Anna in Saint-Michel, both fixtures since the mid-1980s. Instead, Palme would be more than a place to eat. It would be an experience — a space to gather, exchange, and reflect on the lives they’d lived.
Having spent seven years turning dining rooms into dancefloors, DJ Blaster (real name Sherwin Cumberbatch), originally from Trinidad, says Palme is a “home away from home” for him as well as many other members of Montreal’s Caribbean communities.
“Back in the day, with my family, we would always get together to eat. It feels like that here,” says the DJ. “There aren’t many places to meet… To have your own, it’s a whole different meaning.”
Finding that balance of familiarity and modernity was always Desamours’ intention.
“I didn’t want to do the same thing everybody was doing in the Caribbean community, and it didn’t make sense to simply recreate my grandma’s cooking,” the chef recalls. “What I do is a fusion of Caribbean cuisines, but with my own personal touch.”
Desamours’ cooking reflects the experience of being Caribbean in Montreal, where heritage and home intersect.
“At the end of the day, it’s who you are and where you come from — that’s what will make a difference in the dish,” he says.
When asked which dish best embodies his combination of heritage and lived experience, he says it’s his own griot: enhanced with a fragrant hot honey, Palme’s signature pork is accompanied by riz aux pois, plantains and a mixture of watercress, cauliflower, carrot and radish — far more vegetables than is traditional.
But it’s not about reinventing tradition for the sake of it; it’s about showing what tradition can grow into: Palme’s menus have seen everything from Alsatian flammekueche studded with jerk shrimp to homespun pasta with earthy Haitian djondjon mushrooms and conch to a Chinese-inspired pineapple fried rice.
Desamours doesn’t have grand machinations about changing how Haitian Montrealers understand and communicate their culture. “I’m just living day to day,” he says, though he does relate to the sense of possibility others in his community have felt — that being Haitian in Montreal doesn’t have to be fixed or nostalgic, and can instead be alive, evolving and personal.
“When we were opening Palme and looking at Caribbean restaurants in Montreal at the time — especially the canteens where we went as children — we knew we could build something different,” Desamours says.
It’s restaurants like Palme that give a glimpse into how new cultural third spaces — ones where inherited memory and lived experience converge — are being created.
“Sharing culture is a bona fide element of life, and food is the best way to break barriers. With food, you create bonds and bridges,” the chef says. At Palme, those bridges stretch from Saint-Léonard to the tropics — and back to the table.
This story is from the September/October 2025 Issue
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