The Deli and the Bagel: Mile End's Jewish Food Map

Montrealers argue about smoked meat and bagels the way other cities argue about sports teams. The argument is fun, but it misses what those foods actually are. Schwartz's, Wilensky's and the wood-fired bagel bakeries of Mile End are not just excellent lunches. They are the last working institutions of a Jewish Montreal that has otherwise almost entirely dispersed. Each dish preserves a different fragment of that vanished world, and Roamer's Mile End history walk reads them as archaeology, not as a food crawl.

The wave the food remembers

To understand the food you have to understand the demographics. Greater Montreal counted about 7,000 Jewish residents in 1901, roughly 28,000 by 1911, and about 60,000 by 1931, according to Louis Rosenberg's Canadian Jewish Population Studies (Canadian Jewish Congress, 1955). In the 1931 census, 99.6 percent of Montreal Jews gave Yiddish as their mother tongue, and the wards straddling Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the Main, were more than half Jewish. That world has since scattered across the city and the suburbs. What is left in place, on the original blocks, is mostly food. For the wider map, read how to read Montreal along the Main.

Schwartz's: the deli as institutional anchor

The most famous fragment is Schwartz's, the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen at 3895 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, founded in 1928 by Reuben Schwartz, a Romanian-Jewish immigrant. Montreal smoked meat, its signature, is beef brisket cured with a peppery spice blend, smoked, steamed and hand-sliced onto rye. It descends from Romanian pastrama, which is why it tastes distinct from New York pastrami.

The Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network listed Schwartz's in its 100 Objects project as one of the institutional anchors of Jewish-Anglophone Montreal. That phrase is exact. The deli is a stop on the Plateau history walk precisely because it anchors a community whose people have moved on but whose storefront has not. The signage has stayed put through ownership changes; the queue is almost always there.

Wilensky's: the lunch counter that Richler fixed in fiction

Two streets north, Wilensky's Light Lunch preserves something narrower and stranger. Founded by Moe Wilensky in 1932, it serves the Wilensky Special, a fried bologna-and-salami sandwich on a kaiser-style roll with mustard and Swiss, under a painted "no substitutions" rule. Mustard comes unless you say otherwise before it is grilled. That rule is the artifact. Mordecai Richler put Wilensky's and its rigid house customs into his 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and the 1974 film adaptation shot there. Where Schwartz's preserves a community, Wilensky's preserves a sensibility, the unbending, unsentimental corner-counter world that Richler wrote his way out of and never stopped writing about. His four blocks are the subject of the streets Richler wrote.

The bagel: the last thing still warm

The closer is the bagel, and it is the most alive of all these fragments. The Montreal bagel is smaller, denser and sweeter than its New York cousin, boiled in honey water and baked on wooden boards directly over a wood fire. Saint-Viateur Bagel opened on the twenty-first of May, 1957, founded by Myer Lewkowicz, a Holocaust survivor from a shtetl near Krakow, who learned the trade from a baker whose own lineage runs back to Isadore Shlafman's Montreal Bagel Bakery of 1919. Four blocks south, Fairmount Bagel is that 1919 lineage directly, family-run from Isadore to Jack to Irwin Shlafman.

Two wood-fired bakeries, four blocks apart, founded by Eastern European Jewish immigrants thirty-eight years apart, both still hand-rolling, both still family-connected, both still arguing about the correct boil time. The rivalry is not marketing. It is the surviving twentieth-century form of the corridor's Jewish trade economy, running twenty-four hours a day.

Eat the map in order

The reason to do this as a walk rather than a food tour is that the order matters. Schwartz's is the community anchor, Wilensky's the preserved sensibility, the bagel the living continuation. Walk them south to north and you are moving from what was memorialized to what is still being made. The food is not the point of the neighborhood. It is what the neighborhood left behind when everything else moved away, and it is the reason you can still stand on these blocks and taste 1931. Compare all six routes in the best walking tours in Montreal overview.