The New Voices Expanding the Story of Jewish Food in Montreal

For decades, the shorthand for Jewish food in Montreal has been fixed: bagels and lox, a smoked meat sandwich, or a bowl of chicken soup. It's a narrative built on a real and rich history, but it's also an incomplete one.

Across the city today, restaurants are quietly making the case that Jewish food here was never specifically one dish to begin with. From Arthurs Nosh Bar and its newer dinette in NDG to how Yans Deli’s blends Eastern European roots with fine-dining rigour, their differences in price point, culinary tradition, and audience aren't incidental; taken together, they sketch a community whose identity has always been plural, diasporic, and generationally in motion.

A plurality of deep roots

Montreal owes its status as a major hub of Jewish immigration first to waves of Eastern European Ashkenazi settlement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which built the deli-and-bagel canon around Mile End and the Main. Later, Sephardic Jewish immigration, which peaked in the late 1960s and 1970s and was largely driven by Moroccan Jews, brought the vibrant flavors of the Mediterranean and North Africa to the city.

So the city's Jewish food culture was never monolithic, even when public perception flattened it into one story. What's changed isn't the diversity itself, but rather who's now cooking it into public view, and how.

Jake Greenberg represents the Ashkenazi canon through his Mile End restaurant, Chez Greenberg. The establishment is an ode to classic Jewish deli food, and Greenberg is candid about the weight he feels carrying even a small portion of that canon.

"There's a sense of responsibility that we feel like we need to elevate the ingredients in the quality of the finished product," he said. Everything on the menu is made from scratch except the bagels—a decision he expects to eventually reverse: "I think it's one of those things that's sort of inevitable."

The restaurant's decor is layered with community touchstones like Double Bubble gum as a nod to Moishes, and an original Gibbys menu board. These additions reflect Greenberg's deep generational roots in the community, and Greenberg says he wants to make his family proud.

"Despite us thinking outside the box, we still keep things super simple," he says.

It's a philosophy rooted in that sense of responsibility to and reverence for ingredients, space, and the story the restaurant tells that’s expressed through more refinement than reinvention.

A desire to be one’s self

Verdun's Beba, co-owned by brothers Ari and Pablo Schor, takes tradition in a different direction entirely, fusing Argentinean and Ashkenazi traditions.

For Ari, the starting point was personal, recreating what he experienced at his grandmother's table: "This whole table of bounty, this generosity when it came down to food really got me interested in it," he said.

Growing up in Argentina meant absorbing Spanish and Italian influence, "peppered with the little Jewish touches.” A braised brisket, he said, might be served with potato gnocchi rather than the sides North American diners would expect. "So that kind of diaspora of many peoples influenced cooking is what really set the bar for what we do here today," Schor said.