Ask who invented Montreal smoked meat and you will get four confident answers, usually from people with a stake in one of them. The honest version is more interesting than any single claim.
The famous names
Schwartz’s, founded on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in 1928 by Reuben Schwartz, a Romanian immigrant, is the name most people reach for. Schwartz’s did more than anyone to make the dish famous, and its dry cure and preservative-free spice blend set the standard others are still measured against. Popularised, though — not invented. The food was already there in 1928.
Bens De Luxe opened in 1910, and the story goes that Benjamin Kravitz, from Lithuania, started selling smoked meat sandwiches out of his wife’s fruit and candy shop using a brisket cure he remembered from Lithuanian farmers.
Author Bill Brownstein has pointed to a salami maker named Itzak Rudman working on de Bullion Street as early as 1902.
The name that predates all of them
Research by Eiran Harris, the late Archivist Emeritus of Montreal’s Jewish Public Library, sets those claims aside in favour of someone earlier: Aaron Sanft, who arrived from Iași, Romania, in 1884 and became Montreal’s first kosher butcher, on Craig Street — now Saint Antoine.
The evidence is not folklore. In 1894 Sanft took out a full-page advertisement in a Yiddish-language almanac published by Ogilvy’s, describing his shop as a manufacturer of salami, smoked meat, corned beef, smoked beef and sausages. Smoked meat, named as such, on sale in Montreal, thirty-four years before Schwartz’s opened its door.
From butcher’s counter to lunch counter
Sanft sold smoked meat as a thing you took home. Turning it into something you ate standing up took another step, and that one has a date too.
In 1908 a New Yorker named Hyman Rees opened the British-American Delicatessen Store on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, selling five-cent smoked meat sandwiches. The queues went around the block, and Rees ran the room the way delis have run ever since: eat, pay, get up, there are people waiting. The counter-service culture that feels timeless was a business decision made by one man who needed the seats back.
Why it stays contested
Nobody was keeping records because nobody thought they were making history. A butcher rubbing salt into brisket in 1890s Montreal was doing what his father did in Iași, for customers who wanted what they had at home. It only looks like an invention in hindsight.
Which is the part we like. This food came from people improvising with the cut of beef they could actually get, in a city that was not yet sure it was any good at anything. That is a decent thing to be carrying on.