Montreal is a café city in the European sense: places you go to occupy rather than to transact. It also has a bakery tradition — Jewish, Italian, French-Canadian, layered over a century — that rewards eating your way slowly through a morning.
What to order
The Montreal bagel
Smaller, denser and sweeter than its New York cousin, boiled in honey-sweetened water and baked in a wood-fired oven until the crust blisters. Sesame is the default; poppy is the argument. Mile End holds the two famous bakeries, St-Viateur and Fairmount, a few minutes apart and locked in a rivalry the city takes seriously. Eat one warm from the bag, without cream cheese, standing on the pavement.
Espresso, the old way
Long before third-wave coffee arrived, Montreal's Italian cafés were doing this properly. Café Olimpico in Mile End and Café Italia in Little Italy are the institutions — small rooms, football on the television, cash-preferred, a cappuccino that has not changed in decades.
Pastry
Olive et Gourmando in Old Montreal turned a bakery into a destination and still draws a line down the street for its brioche and sandwiches. Elsewhere, the city's French-Canadian sweet tooth shows up as pouding chômeur, a Depression-era cake baked under maple syrup, and as maple in more or less everything from March onwards.
The savoury detour
It would be dishonest to write about eating in Montreal without smoked meat and poutine. The famous Boulevard Saint-Laurent delicatessen has been curing brisket since the 1920s; the Plateau's best-known poutine counter runs around the clock and offers an alarming number of variations. Neither is coffee. Both are compulsory.
