Montfort Mediterranean Cuisine

Few Oakville kitchens are still turning out full mixed grills at three in the morning. Montfort Mediterranean Cuisine is one of them — a Middle Eastern and Mediterranean grill on Iroquois Shore Road that runs from weekday lunch straight through to four in the morning on Friday and Saturday. The draw is not the hours alone. It is a broad grill-and-mezze menu anchored by a plate the restaurant put its own name on: Montfort Chicken, grilled breast meat finished with pineapple and a house seasoning, a signature that sits a step apart from the shawarma and souvlaki that anchor most menus in the category.

That house chicken turns up in both a pita and a salad, but it shares the menu with a deep bench of grill standards. The Chicken Shawarma comes spiced and cooked on a vertical rotisserie; the Deluxe Mixed Grill gathers shawarma, souvlaki and kafta onto a single plate; the souvlaki itself is cut from Grade AAA meat. The same grilled breast tops the Montfort Chicken salad for a lighter order, and chicken souvlaki rounds out the skewers. Hummus arrives the traditional way — chickpeas, tahini, lemon, garlic and olive oil — beside baba ghanoush, falafel and the combination plate the kitchen calls Cleopatra's Love Affair. A Shawarma Poutine folds the grill into a Canadian idiom, and a pork shashlik pita sits a few lines down from the falafel.

The pricing tells its own story. Hummus runs seven dollars, the Montfort Chicken pita ten and a half, an order of fried calamari fifteen — mid-range figures that hold across the board. Around them the restaurant keeps a standing rack of buy-one-get-one deals: a second baklava at half price, a second falafel sandwich, a second hummus, a second bowl of lentil soup, each available any day of the week. The rack reaches from the baklava at the end of a meal back to the lentil soup at the start of it. None of it reads as a discount scramble. It reads as a kitchen that treats being affordable and being generous as the same decision.

The bar keeps its own following. A weekday happy hour, four o'clock to half past five, sets a twelve-ounce draught at six dollars, Classic Caesars and mango-guava cocktails at seven, and martinis at eleven, with a rotating wine and a few plates folded into the same window. It is a modest, well-placed hour — built less to pull a crowd than to give the after-work table a reason to sit down before the dinner service takes hold.

That range shows up in how the place gets used. Montfort reserves through OpenTable and runs takeout and delivery, seats families through the dinner rush, and stays open late enough to feed the after-hours crowd a full plate rather than a slice on the way home. Combination platters and mezze spreads suit a shared table; the pitas and single plates cover a solo lunch; the delivery app carries the same food to a household that would rather not cook. It has been doing a version of this on Iroquois Shore Road since 1992, long enough to become part of the small Montfort Restaurants group that now carries the name beyond Oakville.

Strip away the late nights and the standing deals, and what remains is the plate with the restaurant's name on it: grilled chicken, pineapple, a seasoning the kitchen keeps to itself. Plenty of suburban Mediterranean grills run the shawarma-and-souvlaki standards well and stop there. Montfort built one more dish, put its own name on it, and then made sure the neighbourhood could order it at nearly any hour of the day or night — a full mixed grill at midnight, a house chicken pita at noon, the same kitchen either way.