Chariot
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The terrasses along Crescent and Peel are stacking their chairs, which in our experience means dinner season has begun. Not the celebratory kind — the working kind. September through November is when the year's remaining business gets settled over a table for four, and every week someone walks into the store on Decarie Boulevard with a version of the same question: what to wear to a business dinner? Usually asked on a Tuesday. Usually about a reservation on Thursday.
It's a better question than it sounds. A business dinner sits in a gap nobody has properly named — dressier than your own office, looser than a wedding, governed by a dress code written down nowhere. After a great many of these conversations at the counter, we have a firm answer. Here it is.
First, put down the suit
The instinct, if you've been in meetings all day, is to arrive in the same suit you've worn since eight in the morning, tie folded into a pocket somewhere around five. We'd talk you out of it. A worsted business suit with the tie pulled off doesn't read as relaxed — it reads as unfinished, like you came straight from the office. Which is true, and is exactly the thing you don't want the table to notice. Dinner is a different register, and the change of register should be visible.
Nine evenings out of ten, our answer is a dark sport jacket instead. This fall the one we keep reaching for is Corneliani's navy textured hopsack sport coat, cut on their Academy Light model — half-lined, easy through the shoulders, with a basket weave that has real depth to it. That texture matters more than you'd think. Restaurant light is low and warm, and it flattens smooth, faintly lustrous cloth into nothing. A textured weave is what actually reads across a table.
What to wear to a business dinner: the formula
A dark textured jacket. An open collar with real structure, or no collar at all. Gray flannel trousers that are not your suit trousers. Dark loafers. That is the whole formula, and it has not yet failed a client of ours.
On the shirt: an open collar only works if the collar can stand on its own. A soft, unstructured collar without a tie collapses by the appetizers, and no amount of adjusting it over the bread basket will fix that. The alternative we're pushing hard this fall is skipping the collar entirely. A fine wool crewneck under a tailored jacket — Eleventy's navy Platinum crew, with its sand-tipped seams, is the one sitting on our front table right now — solves the problem outright. We'll say it plainly: a navy knit under a navy jacket is the most quietly authoritative combination in the room. It shows you didn't come straight from your desk, without announcing that you tried.
Below the waist, mid-gray flannel, hemmed properly, a slight break at most. On your feet, we'd take a loafer over a lace-up after dark — suede while the sidewalks stay dry, calfskin once they don't — with socks that belong to the trousers, not to the gym. And in a Montreal September, the jacket is the coat: until the first real cold snap, you should be able to walk from the parking garage to the table in exactly what you'll sit down in.
The half-step rule
Then there is the question of rank. If you're hosting — or you quietly outrank everyone at the table — dress better than the room by half a step, never by three. Enough that your guest registers the effort; not so much that dinner starts to feel like a fitting. This is also why we'd leave the pocket square at home with clients you don't yet know. And if you know perfectly well the other side of the table is a fleece-vest man? Keep the jacket, keep the flannels, trade the shirt for the knit. You can meet casual halfway without conceding your half of the table.
If the reservation is Thursday, come Tuesday
The most common mistake we see isn't the wrong garment. It's the right garment fitting wrong at seven in the evening — sleeves a half-inch long, trousers puddling onto the loafer. Our tailors work in the store, and a hem or a sleeve is usually a two-day turnaround, not a two-week one. Come by Decarie Boulevard with the jacket in question, browse the jacket wall, or book a fitting and we'll put the whole evening together in twenty minutes. The dinner is the hard part. This isn't.
