Source: Mark Wiens
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Montreal food tour: What You Need to Know
THE TL;DW
- Mark Wiens and Luke Martin take a Montreal food tour spanning 100+ years of the city’s signature dishes in a single day.
- The stops include dueling Mile End bagel bakeries (St-Viateur since 1957 vs. Fairmount since 1919), 1938 fèves au lard, and the rule-bound 1932 Wilensky’s Special sandwich.
- The tour closes at Schwartz’s famous 1928 smoked meat deli and a tiny 1958 diner serving old-school Quebec poutine with house-brewed spruce beer.
The Jupiter Take
This is a straightforward food travelogue, not breaking news — Wiens and guest Luke Martin are simply tasting their way through Montreal’s most historic restaurants. The appeal is in the century-spanning storytelling: each stop ties a specific dish to a decades-old family business still run the same way today.
Context
Montreal’s food identity is built on immigrant-run institutions that have barely changed their recipes in generations, which is exactly the thread this video follows. Schwartz’s, the deli anchoring the tour, was founded in 1928 by Romanian-Jewish immigrant Reuben Schwartz and is still considered the oldest deli in Canada, with its meat cured for ten days using a recipe staff say has stayed consistent for decades, as detailed on Schwartz’s Wikipedia page. The St-Viateur vs. Fairmount bagel rivalry referenced in the video is one of Montreal’s longest-running food debates, with Fairmount’s 1919 founding predating St-Viateur by nearly four decades, giving the city two competing claims to bagel supremacy.
