by David Sax
Ironically, for many of the best delis in Montreal, low property values have eliminated the principal factor that has caused the death of the deli elsewhere . . . rent. Montreal’s delis can afford to operate more cheaply than their counterparts in other North American cities. To see this in action, one has to look no further than Wilensky’s.
Many have characterized Wilensky’s interior as a museum, but I find shrine more suitable. Everything is perfect: the lime green paint on the wood-paneled walls, the strung-up letters W-I-L-E-N-S-K-Y hanging in the window like a smile, the nine wooden stools anchored in front of the Formica-topped counter, and the hand-painted mustard jar with a smiley face in the top right-hand corner that says “We Always Put Mustard On It.”
The options at Wilensky’s are limited to one: the Wilensky Special. It is a sandwich of such fine-tuned simplicity that the Wilensky family has distilled what was once a candy store, barber shop, and full-fledged delicatessen into a brief, intense ritual. When you first walk into Wilensky’s, you lower your voice and sit at the counter. Asher Wilensky, his sister Sharon, or perhaps their elderly mother, Ruth Wilensky, wife of the late Moe Wilensky, who founded the shop in 1932, will ask “How many?” With the ease of seven and a half decades of repetitive motion, they will tilt back the lid of an electric sandwich press on the left, where the guts of the Special have been slowly warming. Invented by Moe during the height of the Depression, the Special is a pressed sandwich consisting of six slices of three different types of grilled beef salami topped by half a slice of baloney. Other delis have tried to duplicate it. Jewish caterers all over Canada have tried. My family has tried. Nothing comes close.
Mrs. Wilensky will take the warm meat, place it on the bottom of a specially baked, cornmeal-dusted pletzl bun spread with mustard, and transfer it to the other sandwich press. No mustard used to cost a nickel extra, but now they simply refuse. After a few minutes, the top is added and pressed down. The bread acquires a toasty crunch and is placed in front of you wrapped in a thin napkin. At this point you pay for the Special, regardless of whether you will have another. At $3.50 a pop, it may be the cheapest sandwich you’ve ever eaten, but it is also one of the most memorable. Biting past the scalding crust you reach a salty, greasy, and somewhat sweet multilayered stack of Jewish sausage, all blending into one soft bite so hot you often burn your tongue.
A Wilensky Special takes less than two minutes to eat and leaves you with a powerful thirst, which is when Scott, the soda guy, will take an old-fashioned soda glass from the shelf and ladle in your choice of homemade syrup—orange, cherry, pineapple, chocolate, cola, strawberry, or cream soda—pull the lever, and stir until the bubbles rise just above the rim. To those whose tongues are accustomed to the over-carbonated, high-fructose-corn-syrup wallop of commercial soda, the Wilensky’s hand-jerked concoction is pure ambrosia. Wilensky’s isn’t for lingering. It’s an in-and-out type of place. You might spend a few seconds looking at the memorabilia lining the walls, including the framed obituary to Bernard Wilensky, who worked with his family until he tragically passed away in 2000. You notice this all in passing, for as quickly as you came in, you are out the door and into the street, awash with nitrates and nostalgia.
The Wilenskys own their building so rent is not a factor. But still, at $3.50 a Special, with perhaps $1.10 for a soda, and maybe $0.50 for a small nub of karnatzel, the average customer spends roughly $5. For a restaurant that is open only during lunch hours and closed on the weekends, that meager sum is supporting five people, plus their families, all of whom live quite well. In any other city that would be impossible. “Ironically,” said Sharon Wilensky, “the separatists have helped keep our business open since we can argue that they have kept the economy slow here. Pure laine [the racist philosophy of hard-core separatists] and pure baloney is an interesting mix.”
The Wilensky family has gone the opposite route of delis in other cities. They used to sell eggs, salmon sandwiches, smoked meat, and salads. They dropped them all to focus on the Special. “Our philosophy has been the same,” Sharon told me, out of earshot of her mother, “since my father’s death we’ve almost clung to it . . . so there’s more of a sense of nostalgia for when they come back, and we’ve kept things very special. We don’t change it out of loyalty to them.”
Them. The exiles. The ones, like my parents, who sit in their houses in Toronto, cheering for the Montreal Canadians, listening to Leonard Cohen and reading Mordecai Richler novels. Returning to their favorite deli in Montreal is the best way for Montreal’s exiles to reconnect to their past. “I know Jews who are originally from Montreal who come off the plane and take a taxi directly from the airport to Schwartz’s,” says sociologist Morton Weinfeld. “Nostalgia is more powerful in Montreal. Their identity is not toward the province of Quebec, or even the city of Montreal, but to Jewish Montreal.” Everything else may have changed—their old neighborhood may be Lebanese and the street they grew up on has been renamed after a French saint—but the sanctity of their smoked meat sandwich remains thankfully intact. When Montrealer William Shatner sold his kidney stone on eBay for charity, a clause in the deal stated that the winner had to cater the Boston Legal set with smoked meat and bagels from Montreal.
“It’s a prerequisite that every expat in Toronto gets their smoked meat and bagels,” Abie Haim told me, as we sat at Abie’s Delicatessen in the suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, eating his fantastic house-cured smoked meat and grilled Romanian meditei: a homemade beef and garlic sausage. “It doesn’t fail that every single weekend I have people calling in orders for vacuum-packed briskets for Toronto,” said Haim. “I don’t have one single friend I grew up with who lives in Montreal. All of them live in Toronto. In a way it’s made those who stayed a tight-knit community. Maybe because our numbers are shrinking, it’s why we keep our traditions together.”
For each Montreal Jew who departs, the remaining community has grown closer. In the pockets where it remains, Jewish identity thrives in Montreal, but the saddest part about Montreal’s deli culture is how little of it is directly connected to the Jewish community. Schwartz’s, Wilensky’s, and Lester’s are all run by Jews but patronized by gentiles. The lone exception in Montreal is the Snowdon Deli.
The genesis of this book first came to me in 2001, when I was interviewing Ian Morantz for a term paper on delicatessen sociology. It astonished me how pessimistic the co-owner of Snowdon Deli was for the future of his business. Jews had left the city, the economy was stagnant, and his customers were dying off. Those questions led me back to his deli six years later. Opened in 1946 by Polish immigrants Abe and Joe Morantz, Snowdon Deli is now in the hands of Joe’s son Ian, who co-owns it with John Agelopoulos, Snowdon’s longtime Greek counterman. The Agelopoulos family is as much the soul of Snowdon Deli as the Morantz clan. In fact, Abe Morantz’s daughter Cheryl co-owns and operates Toronto’s Centre Street Deli with John’s brother Sam.
No other Montreal deli carries the full range of traditional Jewish dishes that Snowdon does. In a city of delis serving only smoked meat, karnatzel, and rib steaks, Snowdon’s stands out for its variety. They serve homemade knishes, kasha varnishkes, kugels, kishke, latkes, kreplach, and the cheese bagelach—a round, flat, cheese-filled sweet pastry. They bake bite-sized cocktail danish, sugar-dusted rugelach, almond mandelbrot (Jewish biscotti), and Snowdon’s wafer-thin poppy seed mohn cookies, my mom’s favorite.
Ian Morantz joined me at a booth and opened his shirt to reveal a zipper scar down his slender chest. “You didn’t know that I nearly died?” he said, chuckling as he did the buttons back up. Gone was the morose pessimism that characterized our previous conversation. His young daughter Tobi was working with him now and doing a great job, as was John’s daughter. “It hasn’t gotten worse,” Morantz told me of the business, which he’d previously predicted would end as his regular clients died out. “We’re not coasting along here. But it seems to be more or less on a status quo.” The deli had recently been featured prominently in La P
resse, which wrote that Snowdon Deli was “un classique aussi bon que chez Schwartz.” That article sent French Canadians well into the heart of Jewish Montreal for a taste of the goods. Gourmet magazine had also lionized Snowdon, and newspapers covered the deli’s sixtieth anniversary.
Bearing the label of institution meant resisting regular offers to modernize for the sake of supposed productivity gains. “[Hand-cutting’s] not the most efficient,” Morantz told me, as we watched Johnny build a smoked meat sandwich. “In the USA nobody does it because in America money drives everything. There, you want to make it as profitable as possible, often to the exclusion of quality and tradition. It’s formulaic, the exact opposite of how food should be.” It dawned on me that the simple reason Montreal’s delis tasted so incredibly good came down to this very central, very French ideal: food should first and foremost be about taste. Profit was important in order to survive, but those who ran delis like public companies couldn’t taste their dividends.
“When you turn it into a formula it becomes cold, there’s no human side to it and the human side is critical to the success of our business. It’s where we excel. You have to give up something at one point. When the customer is on the phone and wants to talk about their kids, you don’t let them go. It may cost you money to talk to them but they are important.” It was the way Montreal had been doing things all along, and the principal reason that the city exuded a certain character that Toronto openly envied. “Toronto is very much American,” Morantz said. “The city itself is a financially driven place. But there’s no tam, no culture. They make their money and buy the culture later.”
As a native Torontonian, his words stung me, but they were true. I thanked Ian and picked up several boxes of mohn cookies for Mom. I drove to Schwartz’s and grabbed a brisket, a smoked duck, and a pound of karnatzel, headed up to St.-Viateur Bagel and bought four dozen bagels for Dad. I drove to the Baron de Hirsch cemetery, tore a nub of karnatzel off, and went to find my grandfather’s grave. Standing above Samuel Sax’s plot I thanked the man who had given me this love of deli. I placed the karnatzel on top of his headstone and headed home.
Toronto: Home Bittersweet Home
When I was growing up, my family would visit Yitz’s Delicatessen on Eglinton each Friday, where I’d take particular joy in pulling back the door handle, which was made to resemble a curved salami. We’d be greeted by Mrs. Bernice Penciner, wife of Yitz Penciner, though we just called them Mr. and Mrs. Yitz. Mrs. Yitz would beam a flashy smile when we walked in, her long skirts and high hairdo lending her a grandmotherly air. Dressed in slacks and a button-up shirt, Mr. Yitz cut a striking figure, with a thick head of precisely combed silver hair and a big set of spectacles perched on a formidable nose.
Yitz’s menu was shaped like a sandwich, and on the back page Mr. Yitz’s face winked at you. Without fail, we always started with matzo ball soup, dipping hard, sesame-covered breadsticks in the dark, salty broth with an ultra dense, almost meaty, matzo ball. Daniel and I would drink mugs of bright pink cream soda. Then we’d order our favorites; Dad a hot pastrami sandwich, Mom either a hot tongue sandwich or broiled liver, Daniel a salami sandwich, and me either corned beef or salami.
On our way out, Mom would stop at the counter and get provisions for the week: a salami and sliced meats for our school lunches (I probably ate deli every day from Grade 1 to 12), a loaf of sliced challah and one of rye, a tub of coleslaw, and if we were lucky, a box of sticky buns or crackling chocolate Florentine cookies. Finally we’d head to the register, where Mr. Yitz would say, “See you next week, Saxes.” Yitz’s Delicatessen was our home away from home, a Friday night tradition that, along with the Sunday night stalwart Real Peking, completed the culinary landscape of my childhood.
Despite warm memories, Toronto is the city where I worry most about the Jewish delicatessen’s fate. It was where I first experienced the pain of delicatessens closing and the realization that delis could stray from the flock. Toronto was where I first heard about cholesterol and fat, where the words “Ewww, no way I’m eating deli, it’s fatty and guh-ross” emerged from the lips of my friends. Toronto is where I first met Jews who had never once eaten at a deli. Toronto is where I saw delis shun corned beef sandwiches for avocado wraps, and where I first witnessed children begging their parents to please bring sushi to them on visitor’s day at Camp Walden, instead of the deli we waited for in my day. Toronto is my hometown, and I love it dearly, but its deli legacy is bittersweet.
The history of Toronto’s Jewish community can be traced up two streets, first Spadina Avenue and later Bathurst Street. Jewish immigrants mostly settled into an area known as Kensington Market, a tightly packed enclave downtown wedged between Spadina and Bathurst, where some sixty thousand lived, worked, and prayed. According to Ethel Rochwerg, her father’s deli, Peter Wellts Delicatessen, was the city’s first, opening after her family came up from New York in 1911. Smaller delis dominated Toronto’s scene until 1922, when the Polish Shopsowitz family opened Shopsowitz Delicatessen, growing it into Toronto’s landmark deli, Shopsy’s.
It wasn’t until the postwar years that Toronto’s delicatessen business really boomed. With tens of thousands of Polish Holocaust survivors settling in Toronto, more than a few went into the deli business. In the decade that followed, Smith’s Delicatessen, Becker’s, Litman’s, Shapiro’s, Goldenberg’s, and the Tel Aviv Deli all opened in the streets near Kensington Market. But by the mid-1950s new suburbs had sprung up along the northern reaches of Bathurst Street, and most Jews hightailed it uptown to bungalows in North York. Portuguese, Caribbean, and East Asian immigrants moved into Kensington Market, replacing kosher butchers with fish shops and Chinese restaurants. Many delis located downtown were fortunate enough to sell their properties for hefty profits. But for each new deli that opened up in neighborhoods such as Forest Hill or Bathurst Manor, there were perhaps two or three others that disappeared forever. Today, roughly half a dozen Jewish delicatessens exist in Toronto, down from several dozen a few decades ago.
Most of Toronto’s Jews, who number roughly 175,000, live within walking distance of Bathurst, largely in its northern reaches. By the late 1980s, the common joke ran that when the fledgling Minsker synagogue in Kensington Market needed ten Jewish men to hold a service, they’d send a representative into Switzer’s Deli. Shopsy’s, which had been the anchor of the local deli scene, departed Spadina in 1983 for a downtown office building. Switzer’s, the last Spadina deli, left in 1992. The only remnant of downtown’s deli legacy is Silverstein’s Bakery, maker of Toronto’s stellar crusty rye breads. One day, when a developer offers enough, it too will likely leave downtown.
Many of these delis closed or moved just as Toronto received a population surge of deli fanatics from Montreal. When my parents first arrived in 1976, my father took my mother to a different deli every night. “After that week, I realized there was deli in Toronto and it wasn’t as good as Montreal,” Dad recalled. “I had trouble getting my mouth around a desire for corned beef or pastrami in lieu of smoked meat, and the biggest disappointment was that it wasn’t hand-cut. Even if you asked them to cut it by hand, it never tasted the same because the meat wasn’t cooked as tender.” Toronto was a corned beef town—a less aggressive meat that matched Toronto’s WASPY taste buds.
Suffice it to say, Dad did manage to put away his fair share of deli, machine-sliced and all, at long-gone downtown establishments like Mr. I’s (owned by Izzy Shopsowitz, of Shopsy’s) and Barney’s. Though my parents settled upon Yitz’s as their local deli of choice, most Montrealers felt lost without their smoked meat, and many hopeful deli owners attempted to bring Montreal smoked meat to Toronto over the years. Dunn’s, a classic Montreal deli, has made several attempts in Toronto without much success. The smoked meat I recently ate there was terrible: tough and under-steamed, highly pumped, cut along the grain, and rubbery to the point of inedible. Same went with Mel’s Montreal Delicatessen, which was actually the closest deli (in name alone) to my old
apartment. To call their matzo ball soup “watery” would imply that it had some flavor other than water. Their smoked meat could have been carved by a chainsaw. Yet many Torontonians call it a “great deli” for some reason. A downtown deli called Reuben S’s was the most recent hope, but it lasted all of two years. Since Montreal’s Jewish exodus began, only one successful transplant has won over Toronto’s smoked meat faithful.
Cheryl Morantz had no designs for the deli business when she moved from Montreal in the late 1980s, but she soon realized how well her family’s Snowdon Deli could tap into the community of ex-Montrealers here. Her father was less enthusiastic. Cheryl knew nothing of the business, so Joe Morantz proposed a solution: he’d send his head counterman, Sam Agelopoulos, to help her. It was a chance for Joe to reward Sam with a real piece of the business, while ensuring Cheryl wouldn’t get in over her head.
Centre Street Deli is now the most successful delicatessen in Toronto. Though Cheryl and Sam opened in a strip mall surrounded by empty fields on the northern fringes of the suburb Thornhill, the area is now the heart of suburban Jewish Toronto. On Saturdays, the lineup can snake into the kitchen. The place is big, bright, and sparkling clean, and the food is always on the mark. Their kishke dissolves away into soft bites of melting beefy mash, though the real draw is their hand-cut smoked meat.
Centre Street Deli uses the same meats from Lester’s (a Montreal purveyor not related to the deli Lester’s) that Snowdon Deli and most other Toronto delis use. They use the same Silverstein’s rye as other delis and the same French’s mustard. The secret rests in the touch of Sam Agelopoulos, whose nimble hands can carve a brisket as though he were Rodin chipping at marble. At least 80 per cent of Centre Street’s clients were Montrealers in the beginning, and while the percentage has shifted, I still feel as though I’m at my parents’ high school reunion. Some ex-Montrealers, like my friend Bryan Icyk’s father, Henry, eat there every single day (he’s also their accountant).