Plateau-Mont-Royal and Mile-End Food Walk — Bagels, Smoked Meat and the Québec Identity

There is a war in Montréal that has been running for decades and it is about bagels. St-Viateur versus Fairmount. Both wood-fired, both smaller and denser than a New York bagel, both formed by hand and dipped in honey water before baking. The difference is real but both camps will claim the other has fallen off. I take groups through the Plateau and Mile-End starting at St-Viateur Bagel (which has been baking around the clock since 1957 — you can watch through the window at any hour), through the neighbourhood that produced Leonard Cohen and the Dépanneur Café culture that makes this neighbourhood different from any French city in France or any Canadian city in Canada. We eat smoked meat at a counter that is not Schwartz's — Schwartz's line is real and the experience is inflated. The place I take you has been doing the same brisket cure for 40 years and nobody has been writing about it. We finish with a poutine from a chip truck that does it the Quebec way: squeaky cheese curds, not mozzarella.