Smoked meat on rye at Schwartz's at midnight, St-Viateur bagels at 4am, and the Jazz Festival from your balcony in June
Montreal is the second-largest French-speaking city in the world (after Paris, before Abidjan) and the most bilingual major city in North America. The food identity is distinctive in ways no other North American city can claim: Montreal smoked meat (beef brisket dry-cured for 10 days in black pepper, coriander, garlic, and mustard, cold-smoked, then steamed — distinct from New York pastrami in every dimension of salt, fat, and spice intensity), the Montreal bagel (smaller, sweeter, denser, and wood-fired, hand-rolled at Fairmount Bagel since 1919 and St-Viateur since 1957), poutine (Québécois…
Montreal was established as Ville-Marie by French colonists in 1642 on an island in the St Lawrence River. The fur trade made the city the commercial capital of New France — the departure point for the voyageurs who paddled canoe routes through the Great Lakes. The 1763 Treaty of Paris transferred New France to Britain; Montreal's subsequent history is one of parallel societies — the French Canadian majority in the east and north, the English-speaking Protestant merchant class in Westmount and the Square Mile, separated by Boulevard Saint-Laurent (The Main), a social boundary that still opera…