Eating through Montreal’s Jewish history
Explore neighbourhoods, take in the tastes of babka and spiced smoked meats
MONTREAL— In 1938, a lucky poker win turned one-time busboy Moishe Lighter into a restaurant owner.
Lighter’s son, Lenny, tells the story before chopped liver, filet poutine and sliced rib steak is served on the white linen-covered table at the place his dad won and turned into the legendary Moishes Steakhouse.
Stories add flavour to the feast in exploring Montreal’s traditional Jewish neighbourhoods of PlateauMont-Royal and Mile End.
You can taste and wander on your own, but a food tour is a better bet, like the one we took with chef, blogger and Round Table Tours founder Melissa Simard. She took us on a 31⁄ 2- hour walking tour of Jewish Montreal, teaching us about the community’s long history through food.
We started at Lester’s Deli, familyrun since 1951, for spiced smoked meat ringed with a thin ribbon of pepper-flecked fat, piled on chewy rye with a smear of yellow mustard. And how about some house-smoked salmon and creamy chopped liver?
Simard explained kosher Montreal smoked meat is neither pastrami nor corned beef. Made from brisket cured with a spice rub, it’s smoked and finally steamed.
The hunk of cured meat is hand-cut on the board. The rapid tick-tick of the knife against the meat fork signals an expert at work. Swollen tendons are a testament to the carver’s dedication.
“There’s so many long-standing Jewish food establishments and institutions that are still around when you visit here. It’s like being transported back to something 100 years ago in some of these places,” says Zev Moses, director of the Museum of Jewish Montreal.
While food isn’t the only way to learn about Jewish Montreal, “it’s a great way to do it,” he says.
Consider the three foods synonymous with the city: poutine, smoked meat and bagels. “And two of them are Jewish.”
The storefront museum is on the main floor of a former garment factory on St-Laurent Blvd.where many Jewish immigrants worked a century ago when they arrived in Montreal.
Known as the Main, the street is the heart of historic Jewish culture in the city. In addition to walking tours, including food-themed Beyond the Bagel, the museum sells books and hosts rotating exhibitions.
Fletchers Market, the museum’s tiny open kitchen, is a place for eating and education.
Over tender-sweet maronchinos, a Moroccan-Jewish cookie made from almond flour, cardamom and rose water, we learned about Sephardic Jews in Montreal.
Walking down an alley behind apartment buildings helped us imagine life 100 years ago, when Jewish families lived in cold-water tenement flats.
A gifted storyteller, Moses pointed out a yard where Esther Witenoff started making what became Montreal mainstay Mrs. Whyte’s pickles. He handed out crunchy dills and we agreed Mrs. Whyte deserved her reputation as the pickle queen.
Whether fresh and pale green or cured to a leathery, deep spruce, you can’t have a smoked meat sandwich without a salty pickle on the side. They’re the first thing to hit the table at Moishes, a favourite of beloved locals Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.
Like Richler, Cohen, who died in 2016, lived in and wrote about the neighbourhood and frequented many of the eateries we’d visit.
Cohen now seems to watch over the Main in a dramatically realistic mural by Kevin Ledo.
He frequented Main Deli Steak House, where we ate the night before our Jewish food tour, feasting on smoked meat, thin-sliced smoked tongue on rye, chopped liver and crisp, saucer-sized latkes with thick sour cream.
Server Anastasia Xenos has been working at the restaurant for 23 years and proudly showed us the booth where she used to bring Cohen his smoked meat sandwich and black cherry pop.
The next day, we continued what Simard called our “smoked meat throwdown” at Schwartz’s Deli on The Main, founded in 1928.
We had a different but no less famous sandwich at Wilensky’s Light Lunch, a one-time variety store opened by Moe Wilensky in1932 and familiar from the 1974 film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
We drank egg creams (house-made chocolate syrup, seltzer from the soda fountain and milk) with the Wi- lensky Special: Moe’s invention of kosher baloney and salami on a round roll, heated in a flat press. No, they won’t cut it in half or hold the mustard. Never have; never will. Who has time to make custom orders?
Of course there were hand-rolled bagels, first boiled in honey water, that we ate hot from the wood-fired ovens at St-Viateur and Fairmount.
We found an interesting bliss in an alley, devouring multi-layered, yeasty babka slathered with rich chocolate from Cheskie Heimishe Bakery as Simard read from Yiddish poet Rokhl Korn.
Jewish Montreal is also hip and contemporary. In St-Henri, Instagram darling Arthurs Nosh Bar draws a young crowd and long lineups with its fresh spin on deli classics.
Jeff Finkelstein is earning raves for his new takes on traditional Jewish breads and pastries. His bakery, Hof Kelsten, was our final food tour stop. We eyed the plate of bialys topped with caramelized onions and strawberry-walnut rugelach pastries and wondered if we could eat anything more. Who were we kidding? Of course we could.
The next night at night at Moishes, Lenny Lighter gave us perpetual permission to indulge by quoting an old Jewish saying: “When in doubt, eat.” Linda Barnard was hosted by Tourisme Montréal, which didn’t review or approve this story.