[ GUIDE · THE DISPATCH ]

Where to Eat in Montreal: Bagels, Smoked Meat, and the Mile End Brunch Wars

I have opinions about Montreal bagels that have cost me friendships. Here's where to eat in Montreal, block by block, with the smoked-meat pecking order settled once and for all.

Planning the trip? Start with the our full Montreal itinerary, with maps — it lays out exactly where to go, and when.

If you want to start a fight in Montreal, you don’t talk politics. You ask where to eat in Montreal and then say one of the two bagel bakeries out loud. I’ve watched a dinner table genuinely turn on a man who admitted he preferred grocery-store bagels. He’s fine now. Mostly.

I lived off Avenue du Parc for two winters, the kind of cold that makes your nose hairs crunch, and I ate my way through this argument so you don’t have to ruin a holiday over it. So here’s the honest map. Bagels first, because that’s where the blood is.

St-Viateur and Fairmount sit a few blocks apart in Mile End and they have been at this since the 1950s. Both wood-fire their bagels, both hand-roll, both boil in honey water, both are smaller and sweeter and denser than the puffy New York kind. People will tell you they’re basically the same. They are not.

Fairmount’s are a touch sweeter and a little chewier. St-Viateur’s char a bit darker, and the sesame ones — get the sesame, always the sesame — have this nuttiness that I think about at odd hours. The thing nobody mentions: St-Viateur (263 Rue Saint-Viateur Ouest) is open 24 hours. Twenty-four. So at 2 a.m. in February, when the city is a snow globe and nothing else is open, there’s a warm bag of bagels and that, friend, is the whole case.

My actual answer? I walk to St-Viateur for the late-night and the sesame. I make the pilgrimage to Fairmount (74 Avenue Fairmount Ouest) when I want them with lox because their texture holds the cream cheese better. A dozen runs about C$13–15. Eat one in the street, immediately, before it cools. That’s not a suggestion.

Okay. Schwartz’s. The 1928 deli on The Main (3895 Boulevard Saint-Laurent) with the line out the door. Is it good? Yeah, it genuinely is. The medium-fat brisket, hand-sliced, on rye with yellow mustard and a pickle and a cherry coke — it’s a great sandwich. But you’re also paying a line tax and elbowing tourists at a communal table, and the magic wears off around sandwich number two of your life.

Here’s the move. Go to Schwartz’s once, off-peak (2:30 p.m. on a weekday), order the medium-fat, and tick the box. Then for every smoked-meat craving after that, go to Lester’s Deli up in Outremont (1057 Avenue Bernard Ouest) where it’s calmer, the meat is arguably juicier, and a local will actually make eye contact with you. There’s also the takeout counter at Schwartz’s two doors down — same meat, no line, eat it on a stoop. Nobody tells you about the takeout counter. I just did.

A word on the smoked-meat-vs-pastrami thing: Montreal smoked meat is brined and smoked, less peppery than NYC pastrami, more about the brisket itself. Get it medium-fat. Lean is for people who don’t trust joy.

Mile End brunch culture is fierce and the queues are not a meme. Two camps.

L’Avenue (922 Avenue du Mont-Royal Est, technically Plateau-adjacent) does the towering, photogenic, eggs-everything plates with a line that forms before they unlock the door. Beautiful food. Brutal wait. Then there’s Arts Café in Mile End proper — smaller, artsier, the kind of place where the latte art is good and the room smells like cardamom. Both are great. Both punish the late riser.

My system: be standing at the door at 8:45 a.m., not 11. Brunch crowds in this city peak hard around 10:30 to 1, and the difference between a 5-minute wait and a 50-minute one is literally forty-five minutes of your morning gone to standing on a frozen sidewalk pretending you’re not cold. You’ll thank me.

And if the line at the famous spot is insane, the the move is to bail to Cafe Olimpico (124 Rue Saint-Viateur Ouest) for a proper espresso and a pastry. No brunch plates, just the best old-school Italian coffee bar in the neighborhood, full of locals reading the paper. Sometimes that’s the better morning anyway.

Mile End gets all the press, but Montreal’s food sprawls. A few I’d send my own family to:

• Jean-Talon Market (Little Italy) — a proper outdoor market, open year-round, where you can graze Quebec cheeses, fresh oysters, and apple cider. Go hungry, go in the morning. The cheese counter at Qui Lait Cru will change your week.
• Schwartz’s competition aside, for cheap-and-perfect there’s a tortière and poutine angle most food guides skip. La Banquise (994 Rue Rachel Est) does poutine 24 hours, like thirty variations, and yes it’s touristy now but at 3 a.m. it remains correct.
• Chinatown off Boulevard Saint-Laurent for late dumplings and the kind of unfussy noodle soup that fixes a hard day.

Montreal is bilingual and the food vocabulary is too. A dépanneur is a corner store. “Deux oeufs” is two eggs. Nobody minds if your French is bad — they’ll switch to English faster than you can apologise, which is its own small Montreal kindness.

If I had one Montreal day with a stomach to fill: hot St-Viateur sesame at sunrise, Jean-Talon Market mid-morning to graze, Schwartz’s takeout for a smoked-meat lunch on a bench, espresso at Olimpico, and La Banquise poutine at an hour you’ll regret but won’t. That’s the city. Cheap where it counts, fierce about the things worth being fierce about.

One last thing. The bagels really are better here than New York. I know. I’ve said it. I’ll see myself out.

Eat the hot one in the street. Argue about the rest. That’s Montreal.

This article contains affiliate links marked rel="sponsored". We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.