I was walking along St-Viateur St. one evening in June when I saw an intriguing sign for a new eatery opening on the already saturated strip. In capital letters was the name, CROSTA — and underneath were the words “sourdough pizza.”
As a sourdough bread aficionado and a pizza lover, my mind was momentarily blown at the thought of these worlds colliding. To add to the mystery, the place was closed and there was a hand-written note on the window that said, “sold out.”
I passed by on a few other occasions to see the same note, before finally finding the door open one afternoon. As a vegetarian, I was disappointed to learn my options on that day were limited to the cheese slice (they have since added a spinach and ricotta pizza to the menu); but what a slice it was. The crust was crisp yet impressively chewy and light, with a surprising tang that complemented the San Marzano tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, the whole sprinkled with pecorino cheese and olive oil. Wowza.
Turns out, Crosta is not alone. A sourdough pizza evolution has been rising up through Montreal for the better part of a decade.
Restaurant Elena’s thin-crust pizzas are a master class in crisp, feathery neo-Neapolitan pies. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette
Our pizza scene experienced a changing of the guard in 2006 with the opening of Bottega, marking the transition from old-school pizza to the thin-crust Neapolitan-style that turned our city into a pizza mecca.
The next jump occurred in 2018 with the arrival of Restaurant Elena, the brainchild of chef Emma Cardarelli and sommelier Ryan Gray (both of Nora Gray and Gia) and Marley Sniatowsky (also of Gia), tucked into a quiet corner of Notre-Dame St. at the west end of Saint-Henri.
“My pizza-crust connoisseur friends swore Elena’s is the best in town,” former Gazette casual-dining writer Maeve Haldane wrote at the time. “Not only was the thin crust tender, it was not soggy. The resilience meant you could fold it up in your hand without any disappointing floppiness. … No commercial yeast or baking powder — just a good sourdough starter and the gift of a full day’s worth of time to rise.”
Elena was created from an obsession with Italian cuisine and, Gray said recently, a question: “Why couldn’t Montreal have an Italian restaurant that was more regional, that felt like eating in Italy?”
He and Cardarelli learned the virtues of terroir cuisine — using seasonal, locally sourced ingredients — from the team at Liverpool House, where they met and first worked together.
“We were like, wouldn’t it be cool to apply that to Italian food?” Gray said.
The idea of sourdough pizza made a lot of sense to us.
Ryan Gray
Co-owner, Elena
They wanted to introduce “something we felt the city didn’t have: a seven-day-a-week operation that focused on the Roman idea of the trattoria with a menu of pizza and pasta.”
Gray had been an early adopter of the natural wine movement, which led Elena’s owners to think differently about their pizza.
“We were trying to find a more pure expression, to get closer to authentic, very simple Italian food,” Gray explained. “The idea of sourdough pizza made a lot of sense to us. The wines we were obsessed with had an incredible digestibility and drinkability to them, much like the concept of sourdough bread, where you ate and felt better than after eating commercial, yeasted bread.”
They were inspired by friends Mike Fadem and Marie Tribouilloy, who had opened Brooklyn pizzeria Ops in 2016.
“They were doing the same thing — sourdough, naturally leavened pizza and natural wine,” Gray said. “They became our weird partner in crime in this adventure.”
From left: Lori, Jackson, Carmen and Chloë Morris enjoy sourdough pizza at Restaurant Elena on Notre-Dame St. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette
Sourdough bread has existed for thousands of years, while commercial yeast as we know it is a mere century old. Instead of baker’s yeast, sourdough relies on a starter — a mixture of water and flour passed on from person to person, that develops a population of wild yeast through a natural fermentation process.
Sourdough is said to have a lower glycemic index, be easier to digest for the gluten-sensitive as much of the gluten in the flour is broken down into amino acids during the preparation process, and produce higher levels of beneficial lactic acid and healthy bacteria.
“We became shocked more people weren’t doing this,” Gray said. “We’re still shocked. The benefits are astronomical.”
Elena’s initial starter came from a focaccia one used at Nora Gray. “We took the same starter that had never seen commercial yeast,” Gray said. “That’s the original starter we have used since 2018.”
Elena executive chef Christopher Cameron was hired four months after opening. He had learned to make sourdough pizza at a restaurant in Kelowna, B.C. and began slowly taking over the pizza station.
“When I got here, it was a one-day fermentation,” he said. “Then we started to go to two-day, then three-day. We found the Goldilocks amount with a 48-hour” cold fermentation process.
Elena adds a mix of flours to their sourdough starter, including local organic flour from Moulin des Cèdres combined with touches of spelt and whole wheat.
Cameron describes it as “more of a bread take on sourdough pizza. There was a bread perspective with how everything was run as far as making the dough, treating it and creating a recipe where the intention is to make almost a bread dough that works for pizza, with a more complex flavour and structure. The crust on the pizza has this baguette quality, where it’s shiny and crunchy on the outside but the inside is chewy; that’s the fun of it.”
The seed for an Elena offshoot was planted in 2022 when the restaurant was asked to create a pop-up pizza station for Artist World, the backstage catering area for all the acts performing at the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival.
Three pizzas cool as they come out of the oven at Pizzeria Elena, an offshoot of Restaurant Elena. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
“For that event, we decided to do pizza by the slice,” Gray explained. “Doing wood-fire Neapolitan pizza doesn’t translate well for that event. It doesn’t have the same structure as a New York slice baked in a deck oven, which is breadier, firmer, easier to walk with and heartier as a portion. So we developed a different kind of pizza which was a slight evolution on the dough recipe we used for our Neapolitan pizza.”
The reaction?
“Everyone loved it,” Gray said. “We did it the first year and were blown away by what we created using the sh—iest rental deck ovens that didn’t keep a consistent heat. We honed it more in year two and by year three we were like, ‘Wow, we need a venue for this product.’”
Enter Pizzeria Elena, a New York-style slice shop that opened in fall 2025 in Griffintown, with Cameron coming on as co-owner. Where Restaurant Elena’s thin-crust pizzas are a master class in crisp, feathery neo-Neapolitan pies, the pizzeria’s sourdough crust is chunkier yet chewy and amazingly flavourful, the sourness of the dough playing off against the top-notch toppings.
It feels like they aged it a bit, like sourdough; it’s got more taste and good ingredients.
Yann Bonato
Pizzeria Elena customer
On a recent visit, Cardarelli enjoyed her favourite, the delectable mushroom slice, while this writer fell hard for the special, an in-season zucchini slice with mozzarella and dollops of ricotta. Other varieties include pepperoni, soppressata, spinach (a.k.a. the Dany, with mozzarella, sesame seeds and spicy honey), margherita and rossa.
“What’s great in Quebec is we have access to really good quality ingredients all the time, especially with the restaurant,” Cameron said. “If we had opened the pizzeria on its own, we might not have had access to such good purveyors.”
He believes Elena’s pies are in a class of their own.
“I don’t think everyone else out there has the background and experience of all of us as restaurateurs, along with our pizza experience,” he said. “Sure, there’s great pizza out there, but with our fine-dining background and intention of making sourdough with good flour that is flavour-first — it’s pretty unique in Montreal.”
Walking out of Pizzeria Elena with two pepperoni slices on a recent weekday lunch hour was government worker Yann Bonato, who described the pizza as “awesome. It feels like they aged it a bit, like sourdough; it’s got more taste and good ingredients.”
Informed that it is indeed sourdough, Bonato grinned. “There you go. My tongue was right.”
After trying her first Elena slice, Sabir Amin said: “The crust is really good — thin and crispy, with Italian-style sauce. It has a super taste: 10 on 10.”
Former actuary Udir Saïdani and his sister plan to open their own sourdough pizzeria, Vivant, on the Plateau later this summer. He had just enjoyed lunch with his pizzaiolo, Vladimiro Barbato, who moved to Montreal from Naples and has worked at Bottega and Moleskine.
“Elena is an inspiration,” Saïdani said. “There are not a lot of sourdough pizza places in Montreal. We’re going to try to be a part of that.”
Crosta’s yeast-free dough goes through a three-day cold fermentation, which provides a challenge in terms of keeping up with demand. Once they’re out of dough for the day, they’re out. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
Shawn Giannone and Andrew Hanna had always wanted to throw themselves into the restaurant business, but it wasn’t until they met chef Joshua Michael that they knew just what to do.
The cousin of a friend, Michael had worked at Club Chasse et Pêche and a number of other restaurants. Like many people, he had become obsessed with sourdough during the pandemic.
“Bread-making itself is complicated,” Michael said. “When you add the other level of sourdough, it becomes an art form with all the textures, flavours, aromas and the science behind it.”
Around the same time, he fell in love with pizza. Once the three got to talking, it didn’t take long for the idea for Crosta to come together. Giannone and Hanna were frequent visitors to New York, where they were amazed by the quality of the slice shops.
“Once we started telling Chef (Michael) our favourite spots, he was like, ‘Those are all sourdough,’” Giannone recalled.
Giannone’s top New York pizzeria is Ceres, opened in early 2025 by Julian Geldmacher and Jake Serebnick, who met in the kitchen of triple-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park.
Michael got tips from Elena concerning equipment setup.
“Chef is a bit of a perfectionist and, for lack of a better word, a nerd when it comes to food,” Giannone said. “So regular dough is too simple for him — it would have been too cookie-cutter of a product.”
The potato pizza at Crosta is topped with fresh cream, leeks and bacon jam. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
“It’s just what I wanted to do because I know it’s going to be hard to replicate if we could get it down,” Michael said of sourdough. “It’s really light in your stomach; you don’t feel sick after eating it. You eat a whole pie. It’s crushable pizza.”
He uses a mix of starters, including one from a sourdough Facebook group member who got it from someone who said it had been in their family for over 100 years.
“It’s a very strong starter,” Michael said. “That’s how I know it’s pretty old and it’s been taken care of for many years.”
Crosta’s yeast-free dough goes through a three-day cold fermentation, which provides a challenge in terms of keeping up with demand. Once they’re out of dough for the day, they’re out.
It’s really light in your stomach; you don’t feel sick after eating it. You eat a whole pie.
Joshua Michael
Crosta’s chef
The menu includes a potato pizza with fresh cream, leeks and bacon jam; the rossa, with tomatoes, bagna càuda (anchovies, garlic and olive oil) and pepperoncino; pepperoni, with tomatoes, mozzarella and spicy honey; and the Nduja, with sausage, tomatoes, stracciatella cheese and saba syrup.
Slices are topped off with combinations of olive oil, parmesan, pecorino, fresh basil and other extras. For a surcharge, you can get a container of the house ranch dressing for dipping your slice.
“The quality of the ingredients is what makes it,” Michael said.
“It’s a pact we made: quality over everything,” Giannone added.
“It’s very labour-intensive,” Hanna noted. The process can lead to longer waits before customers get their slice. “It sucks to wait but we want people to really enjoy the product.”
David Reilly works the sourdough as he begins a pepperoni pizza at Maps in Villeray. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
A couple boroughs to the north, at the upper end of Villeray on the corner of St-Denis and de Liège Sts. is Maps, stylized as maps. Opened in 2024, David Reilly and Percy Carrière’s humble neighbourhood pizzeria is named after a soulful 2003 anthem by New York indie-rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Which is fitting as they too were inspired by the Big Apple slice, though they sell their pizza by the pie.
“Both of us spent many years working in bakeries, making sourdough bread, so we transferred that knowledge to pizza,” Reilly recounted.
They chose sourdough “for the taste,” according to the former architect. “We did several tests of different doughs, tried many types of pre-ferment and we kept going back to sourdough. It has more depth, a light taste of acidity or sourness but not too much.”
No sourdough purists, they add a “mini-mini” pinch of yeast to their recipe. “Without yeast it’s too sour,” Reilly said. “It gives more complexity to the dough.”
“Both of us spent many years working in bakeries, making sourdough bread, so we transferred that knowledge to pizza,” said David Reilly, left, with Percy Carrière at Maps. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
He and Carrière do a 24-hour pre-ferment followed by a 48-hour cold fermentation with a mix of high-gluten flour, Italian type 0 flour and a Quebec whole wheat. They also make bread, which they sell on Saturdays.
Their pizzas are topped with local mozzarella and mostly organic ingredients. Customers can choose between seven affordably priced pies, from classic cheese to margherita, marinara, bianca, potato and two meat options: pepperoni (with spicy honey) and homemade pork sausage with marinated hot peppers.
This writer tried the bianca, which boasts garlic cream, fresh and grated mozzarella, plus pecorino and parmesan, sesame seeds and chives, and comes with lemon wedges for extra zip. The slim crust was crisp yet airy with a satisfying chewiness. Before I knew it, I had eaten my way through four slices. Did someone say crushable?
Redipizza, in LaSalle, specializes in sourdough al taglio pizza. Owner Michele Casale takes pride in his rectangular thick-crust slices. Tim Snow / Montreal Gazette
Nestled in a non-descript strip mall on Thierry St. in LaSalle, Redipizza specializes in sourdough al taglio pizza. Affable owner Michele Casale takes pride in his rectangular thick-crust slices generously covered with an array of toppings.
He moved to Montreal from Italy nearly 30 years ago and worked in the restaurant business before opening Redipizza in 2016. In preparation, he returned to the motherland, where he studied the Roman al taglio style. He won chef of the year in the Open category at the 2020 Canadian Pizza Summit.
The dough is unbeatable. Nobody makes dough like this in Montreal.
Alessandro Monteferrante
Redipizza customer
“Most bakeries, to speed up the process, add to the dough sugar,” Casale explained. “The reason is because the yeast eats the sugar to stay alive. They add sugar to activate the yeast but the process is not good; flour contains its own sugar so we need to break down the sugar.”
Sourdough enzymes “break down the sugar from complex to simple,” he said, “so you need to give them time to work.”
He uses a 72-hour leavening process and adds a dash of yeast to his recipe to help it along. He also makes sourdough bread which he sells on Saturdays.
“All I can say is my sourdough and my pizza — gluten-(sensitive) people can eat it and diabetic people can eat it,” he said.
Customer Alessandro Monteferrante is a chef with his own vegan catering service, Verdi Montreal. He drives in regularly from St-Laurent borough to Redipizza to savour a few slices. Tim Snow / Montreal Gazette
Casale used to make 26 different varieties of pizza. He has since trimmed that down to 20. For carnivores, there are prosciutto, mortadella, la gricia (pancetta) and sausage, as well as tuna and smoked salmon pizzas.
Vegetarian options include everything from tomato and oregano to the mozzarella-saturated margherita slice, vegetable- and olive-laden varieties (including a Greek pizza with feta cheese), potato, caprese, zucchini and goat cheese, and for dessert a Nutella slice.
Casale gets his mozzarella and many vegetables locally but uses Italian flour, tomatoes and cold cuts.
He buys quality ingredients “to be different from the others,” he said. “If not, you don’t see a difference between one guy and the other guy.”
Customer Alessandro Monteferrante is a chef with his own vegan catering service, Verdi Montreal. He drives in regularly from St-Laurent borough to have a few of Casale’s slices and bring some home for the family.
“This is the best pizza, vegan or not. It’s incredible,” Monteferrante said. “The dough is unbeatable. Nobody makes dough like this in Montreal. He’s an amazing baker. Too bad I couldn’t get a bread — I didn’t reserve one. The softness, the crust, everything. It’s just so light and fluffy. It’s incredible. I really wish I lived closer.
“I don’t know why others don’t follow suit with sourdough,” he added. “It’s healthier for you, it’s lighter, everything about it is fantastic.”
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