A sign-painting war, a Broadway musical, and an eighteen-seat ice cream parlour that became an empire.
Toronto’s smoked meat history gets overshadowed, which is a shame, because parts of it are stranger and better than anything Montreal can offer.
295 Spadina
In 1921, Polish immigrants Harry and Jennie Shopsowitz opened an eighteen-seat ice cream parlour on Spadina Avenue. By the mid-forties the family had swung hard to savoury, and after Harry’s death in 1945 his sons Sam and Izzy renamed it Shopsy’s.
Sam was billed in 1947 advertising as the “corned beef king”. Harold Ballard — later owner of the Maple Leafs — pushed him to open a dedicated meat-processing plant to keep up with demand. Shopsy’s ended up producing more than two hundred delicatessen products, most of them carrying Sam’s grinning, chef-hatted face.
The part nobody expects
Sam Shopsowitz was a frustrated musician who played the accordion. He set up a Shopsy’s booth at the CNE right beside the grandstand, and fed the casts and crews of the grandstand shows with enormous trays of deli meat, year after year.
That generosity embedded him in show business. Jimmy Durante called him “Shotsy”. He became close friends with the composer Mitch Leigh — and helped financially back the original Broadway run of Man of La Mancha.
Some portion of one of Broadway’s great musicals was funded by Toronto corned beef.
The sign wars
Directly across the street at 322 Spadina sat Switzer’s Delicatessen. Switzer’s hired Nathan Appleby, a Toronto sign painter whose work echoed the old Eastern European trade signs advertising schochets, and briefed him plainly: make the signs big enough and loud enough to pull customers away from Shopsy’s front door.
Applying for a job at Switzer’s was its own rite of passage. The owners wanted hard labour and actively discouraged candidates from turning up in a suit — this was a meat business, and they wanted you to know it before you started.
And then the modern chapter
By the 2000s the traditional Toronto deli was in steep decline. In 2007 Zane Caplansky, unable to find a decent Montreal-style sandwich in the city, started curing brisket in his own backyard. He rented the unused upstairs kitchen of the Monarch Tavern on Clinton Street — a dive bar that let patrons bring outside food — and the combination of serious artisanal smoked meat and a room that smelled of stale beer became a sensation almost overnight.
He opened a full deli on College Street in 2009 and launched one of Toronto’s first modern food trucks. A bitter landlord dispute from 2016 onward eventually closed the flagship in 2018 — a reminder that in this business, the rent has ended more delis than the cooking ever did.