Schwartz’s

The owner’s hand on the counter

The brisket is sliced to order, thick enough to hold its steam, then set on rye with mustard. Paul Nakis, Chef at Schwartz’s in Montréal, keeps that exchange moving from kitchen to counter, where the house is judged one sandwich at a time. Since 2012, Nakis has held the owner and Executive Chef role here, a station built less around authorship than continuity. The deli’s language was set long before him: Reuben Schwartz opened the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in 1928, serving a Jewish immigrant corridor that read the counter by pace, smell, and repetition. Later owners carried that charge in their own ways. Maurice Zbriger, a violinist and composer, held the house from 1971 to 1981. Hy Diamond refused franchising in 2004, protecting the single-room character of the place. Nakis entered that lineage when he acquired the restaurant with Celine Dion and Rene Angelil in 2012. His brief is practical and exacting: keep the smoke, the slicing, the room, and the customer’s memory in working order.

Ten days before the knife

The smoked meat begins with beef brisket, cured for 10 days in the house spice blend, then smoked, steamed, and cut by hand. The house has long made its reputation on that sequence, and on the refusal to turn the sandwich into a loose interpretation of itself. The meat is not a garnish for nostalgia. It is the method. The cure sets the seasoning deep into the brisket; the smoke gives it its frame; the steam brings it back to tenderness before the slicer works at the counter. The sandwich lands on rye with mustard, built for heat and pace rather than display. The deli also serves poutine, but the smoked meat sandwich remains the central signature, the dish through which most people read the place. The old brick smokehouse remains part of the story, though the smoking has been electric for more than 50 years after city restrictions on wood smoke. Staff have credited the flavor, in part, to more than 90 years of buildup in that room.

A narrow room on The Main

The room is small, communal, and loud with service. Tables sit close. Black-and-white photographs hold the walls. The smell of curing meat and steam moves through the counter before the plate arrives, and the line outside can become part of the room’s weather. Nothing about the setting asks for ceremony. It asks for attention. A sandwich comes, someone reaches for a pickle, another order is called, and the slicer returns to the brisket. Saint-Laurent Boulevard has changed around it, with boutiques, theatres, and the Plateau’s newer rhythms pressing in, but the deli still carries the older grain of the Jewish Quarter. Its rusticity is not styled. It has been worn in by service.

The part that must stay legible

Schwartz’s received Recommended status in the Quebec Michelin Guide in 2025, recognition attached to the address rather than to a plated reinvention. Nakis’s own line for the work is plain: “There are just a few things that remain. Most important of all: the signing.” That is the operating discipline here, to let change happen around the counter without losing the signs regulars already know. The next service still returns to brisket, rye, mustard, and Paul Nakis.