Changing of the French guard: Mount Pleasant’s Mogette is the latest Toronto bistro to call it quits

For years, Toronto’s bistro scene has been relatively immune to the foodie fickleness that’s seen other restaurants’ popularity soaring one week, then plummeting the next. Traditional steak-frites experts like La Palette, or Delux on Ossington, have a timelessness that seems to ensure steady longevity. Lately, though, a culinary French revolution has been simmering: places like Edulis, Café Boulud and Ici Bistro—soon to take over a plush new home at the Windsor Arms—are reinvigorating bistro standards, baking whole hens in nests of hay and topping slabs of foie gras with snarls of fried chicken skin. Meanwhile, longstanding French eateries are closing. In the past year alone, The Corner House, Didier and Tati have all called it quits, as have the pretty Patachou bakeries and the downtown location of Petite Thuet.

The latest to close is Mogette, the little Mount Pleasant bistro run by Daniel Muia, a Didier Leroy protégée. “I think the old-school French style of cooking is becoming sort of passé, in my personal opinion,” Muia told The Grid. “There’s the misconception that French food makes you fat. And the trends are changing, I think the people that used to be the clientele at these restaurants are getting older and not going out to eat as much.”

The restaurant’s new owners reportedly plan on keeping the current name and concept, at least for the time being. Mogette’s existence in its current form ends March 29th. Muia gave a heartfelt thanks to the bistro’s fans over Instagram, plus an invitation to gorge: “Come on up and help me get rid if all this good and wine.”