Royal, 34, has worked in top restaurants in Montreal, Whistler, B.C., and London, and did his stage at Thomas Keller's New York City haute temple of gastronomy, Per Se. His last Montreal gig was as the original chef at the now defunct Brasserie Brunoise. Like many of the city's young chef-owners, Royal avoided the high rents of the downtown core in favour of his own neighbourhood, Ahuntsic, where rents are affordable and residents are eager to have a restaurant to call their own.

The unglamorous space he chose, a former fruit store, was transformed into a 48-seat dining room with a smart banquette along the wall, an open kitchen at the back, and a huge blackboard listing the nightly specials. The food is superb, service is sharp, and dinner here does not come cheap. But it's the Paris-bistro ambience that is a big draw. It's also the envy of many a restaurateur. Even at lunch, Royal's resto is crackling.

"This whole experience has been way more than I expected," says the chef in a phone interview last week. "We're four times busier than I ever dreamed we'd be. Right now we're booked until mid-February, and we're planning on opening a bakery/patisserie next door."

Royal's team now counts nine in the kitchen and eight waiters. He has just finished building a wine cellar and staff lounge in the basement, and an upgrade on his china and tableware is imminent. "Because my rent is low," he says, "profits are funneled into staff and food cost."

As for the food, Royal is not relying on bistro fare to bring in the bucks. Scan the menu and you'll see upscale ingredients like guinea hen, Arctic char, scallops, sweetbreads, duck, wild mushrooms and foie gras. Fish and meats are smoked in-house, and the wine list is fairly priced and well-chosen (private imports one and all), with all selections also available by the glass.

"We use a lot of modern cooking techniques," says Royal. "We cook meats sous-vide (in vacuum-packed bags) but we don't mention it to the customers for fear of making it sound pretentious. But we're always kicking it up a notch. In the next six months we want to do even more. But we've been so busy that we haven't had time for big changes."

With so much going Royal's way, here's the question: What's the secret of his success? "Well, I was never scared. My girlfriend was, but I believed in it. It's really all about the business part of it. If you're not on the ball, on the accounting side, you're in trouble. You have to pay your bills and know what's going on in your restaurant. I also took pride in the fact that we know what we're doing. We have the cooking skills. But the restaurant business isn't just about chefs having fun."

Talk to the chef about his schedule and it doesn't sound like he has the time for fun, either. He averages 150 tasting menus a week and it's not unusual for this 48-seat restaurant to do 200 customers a day. As Le St-Urbain is booked solid at lunch and dinner, Royal works seven days a week, a minimum of 10 hours a day, which doesn't leave much time to spend with his 11/2-year-old daughter.

But when asked to name a down side of the success, he only has one: "crunching numbers!"

But all the number crunching has paid off. His team still counts all the original staff members and is getting "bigger and better." And as for customer satisfaction, the number of regulars attests to the fact that Ahuntsic is now on the foodie map.

"Our customers are close to us," says Royal. "They like the staff, and they feel like they're in our gang. We know them well."

Perhaps yet another secret of Le St-Urbain's success?