L’Orygine experience is a refined culinary journey. Offering both vegan and omnivorous cuisine the restaurant prides itself on its sustainable approach to food, root to spring, snout to tail, everything is thoughtfully consumed. The restaurant’s website places enormous focus on locality and sustainability, listing out regional partner producers by name while a slow moving video shows Chief Sabrina Lemay gleefully carrying fresh leeks through a farm field.
The restaurant is one of four preprties in the La Tanière Group, people behind the 2-star Tanière 3, 1-star Légende, and Vieux Carré cocktail bar. This year, L’Orygine received a Michelin mention.
Much like the rest of the restaurants in the La Tanière Group, L’Orygine is a beautiful property with a spacious dining room and garden-like enclosed terrace in Old Québec City. Diners have an option of ordering a la carte or enbarking on the Discovery tasting menu – a 6-course dining experience optionally paired with wine or cocktails. The signature cocktail pairing, which can be non-alcoholic, takes on a similar approach, using local, seasonal ingredients, perfectly matched to each course. A healthy portion of the wine selections are also local, further reinforcing the idea of staying close to home.
The mastermind behind the menu is Chief and co-owner Sabrina Lemay, who brings her years of culinary experience to this kitchen with constant passion and a uniquely creative eye.
On the left, Chief and co-owner or L’Orygine, Sabrina Lemay. On the right and below: interior images of the restaurant. Images courtesy of L’Orygine.
Kateryna Topol: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Sabrina, let’s start at the beginning – when did your culinary interests first start?
Sabrina Lemay: At a young age, three or four years old, I always loved cooking with my mother. When I was a little kid I told everyone I wanted to be a chef and a businesswoman. Mix them both. My mom is a really great cook, she always let me play in the kitchen without any boundaries. So not only with Play-Doh, but real food, [fostering this love of cooking].
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Sabrina did a year of culinary school and upon completion enrolled into a program with Fairmon Hotel which allowed her to learn and travel. For a month and a half she staged at Restaurant Marcon, a 3-star restaurant in Saint-Bonnet-le-Froid, France. The travel expereinces made her realise she was more interested in restaurants, not hotels, so she returned to Québec and joined Saint Amour, in Old Quebec, working her way up to sous chef.
SL: After that, I spent two years working at La Tanière, where I met my future business partner. Two years later, I was looking for a change and went to work at Le Baluchon in the country. My job was to [revive the restaurant] and put it on the culinary map. After that I returned to Québec City and worked at a family restaurant, Les Sales Gosses, it is closed now sadly.
It was a small restaurant, maybe 60 seats, and it was a really fun lunch and dinner menu, no boundaries for where food comes from so I was able to cook with exoctic spices and so on. I stayed in touch with my contact at La Tanière. They were looking to move the restaurant to a new location, which is where Tanière 3 is now, and needed a concept for upstairs, where L’Orygine is. At the time, I didn’t want to be a part of anything big, because I wanted to travel, but they asked if I wanted to make vegan and vegetable-forward food. In Québec, you don’t see that a lot, so I got butterflies thinking about it. The boundary they set was not to use anything outside of Canada, focusing on Québec, so it was a great challenge. We are celebrating our seventh anniversary this year.
KT: L’Orygine, it’s not fully vegan though …
SL: No, but there is a lot of vegan-friendly food, I don’t like to exclude people because of their dietary restrictions. At L’Orygine we want to include everyone at the same table. We have a 50/50 split menu, vegan and omnivore, they go hand-in-hand. There are a lot of options for both, and when we have to work with allergy restrictions, we embrace it. We like to work with less butter and less cream, to be able to serve more people with allergies but without compromising the taste.
KT: How would you describe your menu?
SL: We have our own garden, all of the produce comes from farms within 200 km radius, our mushrooms are grownd downtown by La Botte Champignonnière. I like to work with vegetables and so all menus start with one [seasonal] vegetable, we cook a lot with the season. I love to work with nostalgia, I think we can reach everybody with a souvenir of food, play with the available ingredients, play with food. I don’t push to far with … spectacular, I prefer comfort food, like food in my home, and like the idea of changing people’s mind. I like having a client who is apprehensive about vegan food and will leave our restauranting thinking “wow, that was amazing,” and will be open to eating vegan over meat.
KT: You call it homey comfort food, but all of your dishes are pretty spectacular when it comes to plating
SL: [Laughs] For me it is simple, but because we are at La Tanière, which is a big show when it comes to food, we [elevate our food as well]. I think for me, it’s more about art and soul, everything on the plate is there for a reason, not just to look good. I know we eat with our eyes but I think everything should taste good too.
I love to use the same ingredient in two-to-three ways. Let’s look at leeks for example, from the bottom, to the white, and the green. A lot of people think only the white is good, and everything else is trash or compos. I think everything on the vegetable or the meat can have a second or third life. We will use all of the ingredients, but maybe not on the same menu. Sometimes we’ll keep a lot of green of the leeks to dry and use them in pasta two seasons later.
We try to have less waste in the kitchen, to waste almost nothing.
L’Orygine summer 2025 menu. Images by Kateryna Topol.
KT: That’s really cool and something I’ve been thinking about a lot at home as well, like when it comes to carrot stems and making carrot pesto instead of just tossing them
SL: Yes, it’s true. Like, when it is crab time (it’s a really small window) we do a menu of all crab, from amuse-bouche to dessert – all crab. It’s a little bit funky, but we love it so much. We’ll use the shell, dry it, and put it on salt and on the menu. So we really use the whole thing.
KT: Coming into the winter season, Canadian vegetable availability is quite limited, do you pickle and so on?
SL: Yes, we do a lot of conserves, freezing and drying fruits, a lot of vegetable powder that we keep from summer. But we also have access to a greenhouse for tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, and so on. There are a lot of fun ingredients in Québec and we use some root vegetables like beets, rutabaga, potatoes… But we need to be creative, because an abundance is not there.
We have a partnership with a farmer, about 45 minutes out of the city, they grow a lot of herbs in the greenhouse. I love fresh herbs in my dishes and now we can have chives and tarragon, kale and spinach, it’s really great.
KT: How often do you change the menu?
SL: Four times per year, and sometimes in the summer we’ll have a pop-up menu or change certain ingredients throughout the season, like peaches and melons.
KT: You have cocktail pairings available for Discovery menu, do you work with the bar team on those creations?
SL: Absolutely. When I do the menu, we sit down and do a bit of a brainstorm, discussing the ingredients. So if you eat the lobster, for the non-alcoholic drinkthey use the green of the fennel, we juice it and they put it in the cocktail. We do a lot of things like that. On the autumn menu, it’s apricots. There’s a small window of apricots in Ontario, like two weeks, so we buy a lot, we dry them to use as a garnish on the cocktail… We also work together with the sommelier, they pair the wine to our food, and sometimes they bring wine that they want to work with, and we do dishes to pair with the wine.
KT: You mentioned you used to travel a lot, do you still?
SL: I have a three-year-old girl now and the restaurant, so traveling is a bit difficult. My last trip was to Argentina, I do miss it, going with my bike, my backpack, my plane ticket, and just go. Maybe soon.
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Learn more and book dinner reservations at lorygine.com.
Non-alcoholic cocktail pairring for L’Orygine’s summer 2025 menu. Images by Kateryna Topol.
