It is the argument that starts at every table where both cities are represented, and it has a clearer answer than most people expect.
Montreal, and not by a small margin. But the interesting part is not the winner. It is what each city did with it afterwards.
The paper trail runs through 1894
The delis everyone names — Schwartz’s in 1928, Bens in 1910 — arrived long after the food did. Rigorous archival research by Eiran Harris, the late Archivist Emeritus of Montreal’s Jewish Public Library, points instead to Aaron Sanft, who arrived from Iași, Romania in 1884 and became the city’s first kosher butcher, on Craig Street.
In 1894 Sanft took out a full-page advertisement in a Yiddish-language almanac published by Ogilvy’s, promoting his shop as a manufacturer of salami, smoked meat, corned beef, smoked beef and sausages. That is documented smoked meat, sold commercially in Montreal, in the nineteenth century.
Sanft’s advertisement promised his meats were the same quality as New York — which tells you exactly where the benchmark sat in 1894.
Fourteen years later, in 1908, a New Yorker named Hyman Rees opened the British-American Delicatessen Store on Saint-Laurent and sold five-cent smoked meat sandwiches to lines that ran around the block. That is the moment it stops being something you carry home from the butcher and becomes something you eat standing up, quickly, so the next person can have your seat.
So what was Toronto doing?
Building something genuinely its own, slightly later and on a different street. Spadina Avenue in the twenties and thirties was thick with tailors, immigrant merchants and the smell of curing meat. United Bakers Dairy Restaurant opened in 1920. Zuchter’s, a grocery, was turned into a restaurant by Fanny Zuchter in the early thirties. Wexler’s anchored 294 Spadina.
And in 1921, Harry and Jennie Shopsowitz opened an eighteen-seat ice cream parlour at 295 Spadina that would become Shopsy’s — an operation that eventually produced over two hundred delicatessen products and put its founder’s face on every package.
The honest answer
Montreal got there first and turned it into a style — a specific cut, a specific cure, a specific way of being asked whether you want lean, medium or fatty. Toronto built a delicatessen culture that went wider and more commercial, and lost more of it.
Which is roughly why this business exists. Half the people at any given event in Burlington or Vaughan grew up on the Montreal version and have not had a proper one in years. The other half have been hearing about it their whole lives. Both of those are worth feeding.