One evening in 2008, Pascal Poilbout landed in Toronto from Paris with his family and 13 pieces of luggage.
It was the dead of winter and his twin 14-year-old sons and 10-year-old daughter were nervous and miserable. Nobody talked on the cab ride from the airport.
Poilbout, who trained in charcuterie, wanted to open a crepe shop in Toronto. The taxi driver took the Jarvis exit off the Gardiner, on the way to their new home downtown, and pointed out St. Lawrence Market as they passed by. If the family was ever looking for comforts from home, the driver said, that was the place to find them.
A few days later, Poilbout brought the family for a visit. Walking through the market, he could see himself at working there, running his own business.
“Everybody told me, it’s impossible,” he said.
He opened a creperie on Queen St. West instead, which lasted a few years. He and his older brother, Martial, a trained chef, started catering for French school boards and other Francophone institutions in the city. Eventually Poilbout opened a French specialty grocery store in Richmond Hill, selling house-made pastries, prepared meals, and imports from France.
Two of his now-adult children, Pierre-Yvan and Marie-Steren, help him run the Richmond Hill shop, now called Marché Marie. Then, last year, they got a tip from a customer.
“She said, ‘Oh there’s an available spot at St. Lawrence Market,’” Marie-Steren recalled.
The market was going through a significant shakeup. Veteran butcher Leila Batten, who ran Whitehouse Meats at the centre of the market, closed down in September 2023. Another butcher, Sausage King, closed a month later.
The closures in 2023 set off a game of musical chairs at the market that dragged on for two years. Blackbird Baking Co. took over the Sausage King shop. Scheffler’s Delicatessen & Cheese left its location, in the thick of the action on the main floor, to take over the Whitehouse location — a prime anchor tenant space with foot traffic on three sides. Scheffler’s spent months renovating the space before opening last month.
With all the vacancies, some vendors worried the market was at a dangerous turning point. Tourists have steadily become a larger and larger part of the audience at the market. But tourists don’t buy meat and fish and produce. Some worried that the city, which owns the market and acts as landlord to the shopkeepers there, would cave to demand and bring in more businesses catering to tourists, not locals, turning the historic food market into another fancy food court selling sandwiches and souvenirs.
But at the time, the market’s manager Daniel Picheca promised in the Star that he wouldn’t let that happen.
“He’s done good so far,” said the butcher Spiros Spiropoulos, owner of La Boucherie, in an interview this month.
With Blackbird firmly ensconced and the Scheffler’s renovations complete at the new store, the last question was: Who will take over the old Scheffler’s spot?
Earlier this year, Marie-Steren and her brother pitched the market’s board of directors on opening a new Marché Marie location.
“Why don’t we just try?” Marie-Steren remembered thinking. “It’s such an iconic spot.”
The siblings won the bid for the open stall and signed a lease this month. The shop is expected to open at some point this winter. The lease typically prohibits food vendors from selling hot food for on-site consumption, as part of the city’s strategy to preserve the market and limit any creep toward a tourist-trap food court. But Marché Marie negotiated special dispensation to sell two hot items for visitors to eat at the market: vol-au-vent and croque monsieur.
The shop will also sell tourtière, some bread and cheese and pastries like eclairs, canelés and a type of cake called kouign-amann from Brittany, on the western edge of France, where the family is originally from. In the freezer, they’ll have things like Coquilles Saint-Jacques, duck confit, potato gratin and sausages, all made at the sprawling kitchen at the Richmond Hill shop.
“We want to make a Little France within the market,” said Pierre-Yvan.
The first time the elder Poilbout heard they they’d won St. Lawrence Market, it was May and he was at the shop in Richmond Hill. His daughter came out from the office and read him an email from Picheca, confirming they were in.
“On l’a fait,” he said to her.
