A bike tour with Fitz Montreal. (photo © Fitz and Follwell Co)
There’s nothing like a weekend in Montreal, whether you’re in the mood for a classic bagel, a mouthwatering babka dripping with chocolate, or a heaping smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz’s Deli. Now that Porter Airlines has launched direct daily flights between Vancouver and Montreal, it’s a great time to explore this fabulous city, which oozes with personality, culture, history and great food.
We joined a fast-paced bike tour to see the city’s highlights, pedaling 15 kilometres through green alleyways, busy boulevards and along the Lachine Canal to get a broad overview of Montreal’s history. We rode through the Old Quarter, with its ancient stone buildings, following the canal past factories and warehouses reincarnated into swanky apartments. We puffed up the hill to the base of Mount Royal and zipped back down past the austere buildings of McGill University.
At Place d’Armes, we stopped to gaze at a pair of statues called “The Two Snobs.” On one side, a Francophone woman holds her poodle, looking with contempt at the head office of the Bank of Montreal, a symbol of English power. On the other, an Anglophone holds his pug, looking with similar disdain at the Notre-Dame Basilica, a symbol of the Catholic Church in Quebec. The statues hint loudly at the enduring, simmering tensions between English and French in Montreal.
We escaped the tourist crowds in the Old Quarter by heading to Mile End to join a food and history tour offered by the Museum of Jewish Montreal. Our guide, Avery Monette, a 23-year-old master’s student at Concordia, led us on a gastronomic feast as she described the city’s Jewish origins in 1760. That’s when Jews first arrived in Montreal to work as fur trade merchants. The community stayed small until the 1880s, when pogroms drove Eastern European Jews to the safety of Montreal’s Mile End. Over the next 90 years, it would become the largest Jewish community in Canada.
We bit into a sweet, rich cheese crown from Boulangerie Cheskie, a small kosher bakery in the neighbourhood, and then braved the cold wind to line up outside St-Viateur Bagel, one of Montreal’s two most famous bagel shops. Established in 1957 by Hyman Zeligman and Myer Lewkowicz, the store never closes. Ever. “In April 2023, there was an ice and snowstorm that knocked out all the electricity in the area,” Monette recalled. “Even then, this place was open!”
We strolled along rue Jeanne-Mance in Mile End, where frum families pushed strollers alongside us and a man wearing a shtreimel strode by, headed for the synagogue with his tallit tucked under his arm. The Jewish influence was easily spotted, with most houses having mezuzot on their doors and many with the skeleton of a sukkah in their front yard.
By the 1950s, Jews in Montreal had migrated to the middle class, and many left Mile End for larger homes in Côte Saint-Luc, Hampstead and Côte-des-Neiges. We passed the College Français, once the home of the B’nai Jacob Synagogue, which was known as the Carnegie Hall of cantorial singing in its heyday.
Our Vancouver jackets were feeling pretty inadequate in Montreal weather by the time we arrived at Fairmount Bagel, where the line out the door was even longer than at St-Viateur. Once inside, we were surrounded by garlic, pumpernickel, cranberry and muesli bagels, as well as matzah with sesame, onion and poppy seeds. While none of it is kosher, the store is still owned by the same Shlafman family that first opened it in 1949.
A few doors away is Wilensky’s, a small restaurant with origins in 1932 and family members still at the helm. With its Formica counters, bar stools and what could easily be the world’s tiniest washroom, the store feels like a 1930s time capsule. Monette orders the Wilensky Special, an original family recipe featuring beef salami, beef bologna and mustard on a grilled roll. No special requests or modifications are allowed, not for us or for Anthony Bourdain and Mordecai Richler, both of whom were customers.
On Boulevard Saint-Laurent, new stories mingle with the old. We picked up a babka at Hof Kelsten, where Jeffrey Finkelstein is turning heads with his challah, rugelach and rye. We passed Leonard Cohen’s grey-stoned triplex, a house he lived in from 1968 and that’s still owned by his family. “He was well known for padding around the streets in the slippers he bought right here,” Monette says, gesturing at J. Schreter, a shoe shop on the corner.
Between the bagels, the babkas and the Wilensky Special, it’s hard to make room for more food, but the length of the line outside Schwartz’s Deli tells us this one is not skippable, so on we go. Famous for its smoked meat sandwiches since its inception in 1928, the deli is now owned by Celine Dion and her partners, who have kept things much the same, adding a smoked meat poutine to the menu. Take a bite of one of Schwartz’s sandwiches, which literally bulge with hefty portions of meat, and you understand precisely why the little deli is such a cultural icon in the city. Quite simply, it’s unforgettable. It’s a fitting symbol for the city of Montreal, which is bursting with flavour.
Whether you come for the food, the history, the arts scene or the culture, Montreal is charmingly seductive, and so vastly different from Vancouver that it feels like an entirely different country. Now just four-and-a-half hours away, it’s an easy decision to put this sophisticated French city on the itinerary.
If you go …
• In April, Porter Airlines launched its daily round trip service between Vancouver and Montreal (flyporter.com)
• A bike tour with Fitz Montreal is a great way to explore Montreal’s highlights, with many sights packed into an exhilarating, fast-paced ride (fitzmontreal.com)
• Museum of Jewish Montreal offers regular Beyond the Bagel Tours in the spring, summer and fall. The three-hour tours include food and range from $79-$95 per person (museemontrealjuif.ca/beyond-the-bagel)
• Humaniti Hotel offers sophisticated accommodation in the heart of the city, steps from Old Montreal, the Palais des congrès and the Quartier des Spectacles (humanitihotel.com)
Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond.