How Restaurant Pearl Morissette Became a Two-Michelin-Star Destination

The first visit to Restaurant Pearl Morissette (RPM) can be a tad disconcerting. There’s no signage telling you when to turn off the road that crosses the flat Ontario farmland outside Jordan Station, just a painted wooden cardinal on a post. The long, unpaved driveway is potholed and rutted by tractors, and trees moodily mask utilitarian farm buildings.

Open a door on the side of one monolithic black barn and climb an ugly industrial staircase. Suddenly, everything changes. Like when Dorothy enters Oz, black-and-white turns into technicolour. The greeting is warm and sincere, with no sense of pomp or formality. Someone leads you into a room filled with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and past a promising display of crusty freshly baked loaves and intriguing bottles with handwritten labels. Finally, you arrive at a table made from a slender polished-concrete slab inlaid with a sinuous river of metal.

In no time, the first canapés appear from the kitchen: a carrot-crisp tube filled with scallop roe pâté set on a mound of dried chilies and a dainty tartlet of Dungeness crabmeat and B.C. rice dressed with dill fronds, yellow flowers and a circle of whitefish roe. The flavours are luminous, the textures sublime, and there are still 15 more courses to come — each one perfectly judged and exquisitely executed, a delectable surprise. No wonder it recently ranked #3 in North America on the North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

RPM is co-owned by its two chefs, Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson, but the formative vision was Hadida’s. Growing up in Toronto, he started working in restaurants after high school, ending up as chef tournant at David Lee’s renowned Nota Bene for two years before heading off to Paris to cook at Le Châteaubriand and do pastry at the Michelin-starred Septime.

His chefs were always bragging about their suppliers, swapping the names of artisanal farmers like they were trading cards. Hadida, ever curious, set off to see what was happening, working for nothing at farms in France and Belgium, absorbing the philosophy and systems of sustainable agriculture.

There, he first met Robertson, another restless Ontarian chef, who was honing his skills at the top Belgian restaurant In De Wulf. They kept in touch, even after Hadida returned to Canada. Back home, he spent a happy year at Edulis in Toronto, but he grew tired of Western ingredients and set off to South America, ending up at the soon-to-be-world-famous Central in Lima. “I didn’t love it,” Hadida remembers. “The food was quite conceptual and not particularly delicious, and I got fed up with the egotistical, super-machismo attitude in the kitchen.”

He returned to Toronto in 2015, where he was pondering his options when a friend tipped him off that a winery in Niagara called Pearl Morissette was looking for a chef to cater special events and occasional dinners. Hadida took the job.

The winery was co-owned by François Morissette, a sommelier and vigneron from Montreal who learned how to grow grapes and make wine in Burgundy. With financial backing from Toronto developer Mel Pearl, he opened his winery near Jordan in 2007. Morissette was determined to produce wines with minimum intervention that would express the ever-changing nuances of his property’s terroir.

Hadida appreciated Morissette’s unconventional, spontaneous, open-minded attitude to winemaking and enjoyed working with the team. But his own ambitions went beyond catering. “They had this barn space above the winery that they were thinking of turning into a tasting room,” he recalls. “But I saw an opportunity and suggested it could become an actual restaurant. Everyone was keen. By the time we all realized what we had got into, we were too far along to change our minds.” 

With construction under way, Hadida took a month off to work at Kadeau in Copenhagen, a stage that proved revelatory. The wildly creative tasting menu there was inspired by ingredients foraged or grown in the garden of Kadeau’s sister restaurant, Pony, on the island of Bornholm — a notion that echoed Hadida’s passion for ultra-local produce. And the ambience of the now-two-Michelin-starred restaurant was just as intriguing as the food.

This was no temple of gastronomic mysteries. Diners could watch the chefs working quietly in the open kitchen while the entire service team was calmly intent on making them feel unintimidated, joyful and cherished.

Hadida returned to Niagara newly motivated. “Eric was back in Canada,” he explains, “and he was one of the few people here who could appreciate the level I was aiming for. He quickly got involved.” Another key member of the creative team was Deirdre Fraser, a forager and grower who supplied top Toronto restaurants with plants and flowers. She agreed to move her business from Lake Erie and set up annual and perennial gardens on Pearl Morissette’s property.

The restaurant opened in November 2017 without a great deal of fanfare. Its governing precepts were already in place: a totally open and collaborative mood in the kitchen; ingredients sourced from its own regenerative farm and gardens or from local artisanal producers, with nothing imported from outside Canada; a single tasting menu capable of changing from one night to the next. Some customers didn’t get it at all. “For years we heard ‘Wow this is dumb!’” says Hadida. “Then suddenly it changed into ‘Wow this is cool!’ Winning EnRoute magazine’s Best New Restaurant in Canada the following autumn helped speed up that volte-face.

RPM has been evolving ever since, growing in confidence and refining execution. The team survived COVID-19 by pitching a tent on the property during the summer months. In 2022, they opened RPM Bakehouse on Jordan’s main street, which earned a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand in 2026.

Two years later, the restaurant earned its first Michelin star; a second came in 2025. Now, winters are as sold out as summers. Hadida and Robertson are no longer bashful about their love of experimentation and risk-taking in the kitchen. “It’s just how we operate,” says Hadida. “If we mess something up, it’s still part of the plan.”

Spontaneity is actually the last piece of the creative puzzle. When a new ingredient arrives in the kitchen, the team takes time to understand it deeply and then begins to free-associate ideas, drawing on their knowledge of global cuisines while being guided by the item’s inherent flavours and textures.

The dish may not be finalized until the very last minute. Faced with superb Raspberry Point oysters from PEI, for example, the chefs improvised a stunning little appetizer using lemon verbena panna cotta, morsels of peeled red walnut, parsley and begonia. It prompted thoughts of a Japanese chawanmushi (savoury egg custard) braided with classic French and modern Scandinavian notions. The temptation to analyze the dish was quickly overwhelmed by its sensual mouth feel and the sheer deliciousness of every spoonful. 

And so it goes at Restaurant Pearl Morissette. Guests can’t help but honour the extraordinary commitment, artistry and expertise behind every dish and detail of the experience. But the lasting memory is of surprise and delight. “And that is our central function,” says Hadida. “To give people pleasure and have them walk out the door feeling rejuvenated — like with a spa experience. ” 

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