We joined a fast-paced bike tour to see the city\u2019s highlights, pedaling 15 kilometres through green alleyways, busy boulevards and along the Lachine Canal to get a broad overview of Montreal\u2019s history. We rode through the Old Quarter, with its ancient stone buildings, following the canal past factories and warehouses reincarnated into swanky apartments. We puffed up the hill to the base of Mount Royal and zipped back down past the austere buildings of McGill University.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At Place d\u2019Armes, we stopped to gaze at a pair of statues called \u201cThe Two Snobs.\u201d On one side, a Francophone woman holds her poodle, looking with contempt at the head office of the Bank of Montreal, a symbol of English power. On the other, an Anglophone holds his pug, looking with similar disdain at the Notre-Dame Basilica, a symbol of the Catholic Church in Quebec. The statues hint loudly at the enduring, simmering tensions between English and French in Montreal.<\/p>\n We escaped the tourist crowds in the Old Quarter by heading to Mile End to join a food and history tour offered by the Museum of Jewish Montreal. Our guide, Avery Monette, a 23-year-old master\u2019s student at Concordia, led us on a gastronomic feast as she described the city\u2019s Jewish origins in 1760. That\u2019s when Jews first arrived in Montreal to work as fur trade merchants. The community stayed small until the 1880s, when pogroms drove Eastern European Jews to the safety of Montreal\u2019s Mile End. Over the next 90 years, it would become the largest Jewish community in Canada.<\/p>\n We bit into a sweet, rich cheese crown from Boulangerie Cheskie, a small kosher bakery in the neighbourhood, and then braved the cold wind to line up outside St-Viateur Bagel, one of Montreal\u2019s two most famous bagel shops. Established in 1957 by Hyman Zeligman and Myer Lewkowicz, the store never closes. Ever. \u201cIn April 2023, there was an ice and snowstorm that knocked out all the electricity in the area,\u201d Monette recalled. \u201cEven then, this place was open!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We strolled along rue Jeanne-Mance in Mile End, where frum families pushed strollers alongside us and a man wearing a shtreimel strode by, headed for the synagogue with his tallit tucked under his arm. The Jewish influence was easily spotted, with most houses having mezuzot on their doors and many with the skeleton of a sukkah in their front yard.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By the 1950s, Jews in Montreal had migrated to the middle class, and many left Mile End for larger homes in C\u00f4te Saint-Luc, Hampstead and C\u00f4te-des-Neiges. We passed the College Fran\u00e7ais, once the home of the B\u2019nai Jacob Synagogue, which was known as the Carnegie Hall of cantorial singing in its heyday.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our Vancouver jackets were feeling pretty inadequate in Montreal weather by the time we arrived at Fairmount Bagel, where the line out the door was even longer than at St-Viateur. Once inside, we were surrounded by garlic, pumpernickel, cranberry and muesli bagels, as well as matzah with sesame, onion and poppy seeds. While none of it is kosher, the store is still owned by the same Shlafman family that first opened it in 1949.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A few doors away is Wilensky\u2019s, a small restaurant with origins in 1932 and family members still at the helm. With its Formica counters, bar stools and what could easily be the world\u2019s tiniest washroom, the store feels like a 1930s time capsule. Monette orders the Wilensky Special, an original family recipe featuring beef salami, beef bologna and mustard on a grilled roll. No special requests or modifications are allowed, not for us or for Anthony Bourdain and Mordecai Richler, both of whom were customers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On Boulevard Saint-Laurent, new stories mingle with the old. We picked up a babka at Hof Kelsten, where Jeffrey Finkelstein is turning heads with his challah, rugelach and rye. We passed Leonard Cohen\u2019s grey-stoned triplex, a house he lived in from 1968 and that\u2019s still owned by his family. \u201cHe was well known for padding around the streets in the slippers he bought right here,\u201d Monette says, gesturing at J. Schreter, a shoe shop on the corner.<\/p>\n Between the bagels, the babkas and the Wilensky Special, it\u2019s hard to make room for more food, but the length of the line outside Schwartz\u2019s Deli tells us this one is not skippable, so on we go. Famous for its smoked meat sandwiches since its inception in 1928, the deli is now owned by Celine Dion and her partners, who have kept things much the same, adding a smoked meat poutine to the menu. Take a bite of one of Schwartz\u2019s sandwiches, which literally bulge with hefty portions of meat, and you understand precisely why the little deli is such a cultural icon in the city. Quite simply, it\u2019s unforgettable. It\u2019s a fitting symbol for the city of Montreal, which is bursting with flavour.<\/p>\n Whether you come for the food, the history, the arts scene or the culture, Montreal is charmingly seductive, and so vastly different from Vancouver that it feels like an entirely different country. Now just four-and-a-half hours away, it\u2019s an easy decision to put this sophisticated French city on the itinerary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you go \u2026<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 In April, Porter Airlines launched its daily round trip service between Vancouver and Montreal (flyporter.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u2022 A bike tour with Fitz Montreal is a great way to explore Montreal\u2019s highlights, with many sights packed into an exhilarating, fast-paced ride (fitzmontreal.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u2022 Museum of Jewish Montreal offers regular Beyond the Bagel Tours in the spring, summer and fall. The three-hour tours include food and range from $79-$95 per person (museemontrealjuif.ca\/beyond-the-bagel<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/may-24-travel.24.50698-Credit-FR-\u00a9-Freddy-Arciniegas-Arcpixel-Tourisme-Montreal-EN-Credit-\u00a9-Freddy-Arciniegas-Arcpixel-Tourisme-Montreal-.jpg\"){kind=tracking}
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