Canada
Montreal
Does a city frozen half the year take ice cream more seriously, or less?
Montreal freezes for five months a year, and its ice-cream trade has organized itself around that fact rather than apologizing for it. Kem CoBa spent years of trial and error calibrating a soft-serve machine before it would sell a flavour, and still won't announce next month's twist in advance. Havre-aux-Glaces roasts its own pistachios and distills its own vanilla extract from Papua New Guinea pods, and has kept its own maple grove since 2009. Les Givrés makes roughly 200,000 waffle cones a year from scratch and stays open eleven months, closing only in January because, as co-founder Alexandre Deslauriers puts it, everyone in the trade takes that month off. Crèmerie Meu Meu's staff bought the shop from its retiring founder in 2023 rather than let 33 years of recipes lapse. The short season has not produced a casual trade: it has produced one that treats the months it has as the whole argument for existing.
Last checked 2026-08-21
The selected spots
6 selected
- 01
Kem CoBa
soft serve · Vincent Beck and Ngoc Phan, chefs and owners (both trained as pastry chefs)
Kem CoBa is credited by La Presse as the shop that made inventive soft serve a Montreal category rather than a Dairy Queen afterthought, and its founders speak on the record about the years of failed batches behind a single flavour. It is the clearest case on record here of a maker explaining, specifically, what artisanal production costs.
- 02
Havre-aux-Glaces
ice cream · Robert Lachapelle (co-founder, tax professional by training) and Richard Lachapelle (co-founder, self-taught; now runs day-to-day operations)
Havre-aux-Glaces is a rare case of a maker on the record explaining why he refuses novelty flavours as a matter of principle, backed by two decades of continuous operation from the same market stall and a self-produced ingredient (maple syrup from the shop's own grove) that most competitors buy in.
- 03
Crèmerie Dalla Rose
ice cream · Michael Dalla Libera and Nicholas Rosati, co-founders; both previously worked together at the restaurant Nora Gray (Dalla Libera in the kitchen, Rosati in the dining room); Dalla Libera also worked at Manitoba
Dalla Rose is the clearest example found of chef pedigree (two Nora Gray alumni) applied directly to a neighbourhood ice-cream counter, with a founder willing to describe on the record exactly how the business survives Montreal's short season rather than treating it as incidental.
- 04
Ca Lem
soft serve · Stephanie Le, founder (a marketing graduate with no prior ice-cream background who hired a chef to help develop the base recipe)
Ca Lem is a specialist who built technical skill from zero, on the record, and now uses that skill to run flavours (Vietnamese coffee-and-condensed-milk, cereal-milk) no chain would attempt, all built around a single soft-serve machine she had to learn to calibrate herself.
- 05
Crèmerie Meu Meu
ice cream · Founded and run by an unnamed original founder from 1989 to 2023; since the founder's 2023 retirement, run by 'un petit groupe d'employés de la crèmerie' (a small group of the shop's own employees) who took over the business
Meu Meu is the strongest longevity and continuity signal found in Montreal: a 36-year-old shop whose staff bought it from its retiring founder specifically to keep making it the same way, stated as such on the shop's own site.
- 06
Le Bilboquet
ice cream · Founded 1983 by Carole Lavallée and Yves Lebuis; the pair sold the company in 2004 to Pierre Morin, a longtime customer, who has owned it since; in 2016 the company merged with four other ice-cream brands (Solo Fruits, Hudson, Essence and Lambert) under the name Top Glaciers Inc.
The 1983 founding, Outremont flagship and stated no-additives mission are real and well documented on the company's own site, but that same site discloses the founders sold in 2004 and the company merged into a five-brand industrial group, Top Glaciers Inc., in 2016. That is a materially different production model from the specialist-maker signal GelatoSpots looks for, even though the original storefront still trades under the Bilboquet name.
Research notes
City boundary
The Ville de Montreal, on the island.