syben's Profile
Montreal Jewish Food [Split from Toronto]
The known world of genuine deli began in the early 50's and was dominated by Bens, Schwartz, Chenoy's, Dunns, and Snowdon deli. (Brown Derby came in a few years later with the development of the Van Horne/ Victoria community). The only Montreal deli worthy of any mention lasting today is Schwartz. Hands down, no contest, without doubt the smoked meat stands above any others in existence today. Its taste is to die for, and you will from clogged arteries, but its quality has declined. (Drier meat, under trimmed). All others generally purchased sm meat from Coorsh and were similar. Brown Derby was the first to (copy) introduce "old fashioned" but it still evolved into an over-pumped, over spiced copy of Schwartzs. Dunns is today a poor copy of the original store; Bens no longer exists, Snowdon's nostalgic reputation plods along as todays client knows no better, Chenoys is a far cry from the "Famous Chenoy Boys" of the 60's (Dave, Sam, Joe, and Morty), but pretends its past reputation is a falsely inherited legacy of the original. It's not, but now heavily panned in reviews as a greasy dump with poor service, stale food and lousy sm. meat. Owned by Greeks who purchased the restaurant more than 20 years ago from the late Mort Chenoy, they have unsuccessfully tried to franchise the name but failed miserably. The real Chenoy name lived on as a famous commercial product producing pickled products until merged with Coorsh in early 1978. In the USA it appears the Deli of the past is becoming a dinosaur headed for extinction.
Montreal Jewish Food [Split from Toronto]
That pain in the heart should be checked. It's the result of arteries clogged up by years of eating kishke, smoked meat, stuffed chicken, chopped liver, and much of the other unbelievably delicious "low cholesterol" deli we all knew way back when. (When we didn't know how to spell cholesterol!)
eggs rolls
Back in ancient times like 50's to the 80's the very best egg rolls were Chinatown, Yangtze, House of Wong, Dragon something on Salaberry x St. Laurent, (name escapes me now). They were all unique, worth going out of your way for and have yet to be duplicated. Why? because they made their own, no rubber stamp egg roll made by some central supply to be re-fried with little variation. But Yangtze was unique. So was the Plum Sauce; (known as Duck sauce by the avg American and tastes like it came out of the back end of a duck!). But when the store sold from original owners a few years back, it all went downhill including watered down Plum Sauce and key recipes. The original egg rolls and sauce was so unique that we couldn't return home to Fort Lauderdale/Miami without several dozen pre-frozen and, buckets of sauce for all our expatriate Canadian friends living here. Would love to duplicate THAT PLUM SAUCE. It even could make stale wet noodles taste good!! Oh yeah, all the above applies to Ruby Foos, a gem that has been lost to antiquity.
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Yangtze Restaurant
4645 Av Van Horne, Montreal, QC H3W1H8, CA
House of Wong
5255 Ch Queen-Mary, Montreal, QC H3W1Y3, CA
