Rebirth of Art Deco icon Le 9e restaurant

A Montréal icon is reborn

Inspired by the dining room in the Île-de-France transatlantic ocean liner and designed by French architect Jacques Carlu, Le 9^e restaurant (Le Neuvième, for the “ninth floor”) was originally called the Île-de-France restaurant when it opened in 1931.

Lady Flora Eaton, whose family owned Eaton’s department store, was a passenger on the 1927 maiden voyage of the Île-de-France liner and commissioned Carlu – a leading practitioner of Art Deco in North America who helped design the interiors of the Île-de-France ocean liner – to recreate the Art Deco décor of the ship’s elegant dining room.

By the time the ninth-floor restaurant closed in 1999 after Eaton’s filed for bankruptcy, the space – which by then had become a buffet – was still lovingly called Le 9^e by Montrealers. It was also the subject of the 1998 Galafilm documentary Ladies of the 9th Floor which looks back over more than 60 years of the beloved restaurant. 

“For many people, (its closure) marked the end of an era and the beginning of a period of uncertainty,” explains Heritage Montréal historian Maude Bouchard Dupont in her McCord Stewart Museum essay about Le 9^e. “Thankfully, however, groups like Heritage Montréal were paying close attention. With Eaton’s bankruptcy looming, the organization convinced Québec’s Minister of Culture, Agnès Maltais, to take immediate action to classify the department store’s ninth floor restaurant and its exceptional décor—including furniture, cutlery, works of art, lamps, etc.—as a heritage site. Though no one knew whether the restaurant would ever reopen, it was important to save this unique heritage.”

The iconic Art Deco space was classified as a heritage property under Québec’s Cultural Heritage Act in August 2000. Le 9^e was then basically mummified for nearly a quarter-century before it was meticulously restored and reopened in 2024.