If you’re a tourist I recommend Schwartz’s for the experience, but there’s lots of excellent and not so excellent options around town as well. I’m not opposed to trying out a new or old place so here’s my Cliff’s Notes summary of places in case you’re looking for inspiration!

• Lester’s: another institution, old school ambience, their meat has nice flavour but it’s (strangely?) wetter
• Snowdon Deli: more of a western Montreal institution, decent smoked meat, I feel like they get more renown for their other menu items, and people have historically claimed they don’t make their own smoked meat
• Dunn’s: this is a chain, smoked meat is borderline acceptable but not a lot of love here, the one downtown is open 24/7 though so that fills a Main sized hole in the roster
• Smoked Meat Pete: smoked meat is very solid, suburban vibes, there’s (totally unconfirmed) lore about how it’s run by the son of the owner of The Main which was formerly across the street and was the contrarian’s smoked meat choice
• Chenoy’s: Smoked Meat Pete vibes, my dad and grandpa always took me here when I was out on the west island for any variety of unfortunate reasons. Another one where the meat’s a bit wetter and I don’t know why
• Reuben’s Downstairs: just to confuse people there’s two Reuben’s just down the street from each other, the downstairs one feels like a real hole which… is authentic enough. Smoked meat is borderline acceptable, the waitstaff the last two times I went attempted some sort of cash-only machine-broken scam to get another dollar or two in tips. So I guess they get a lot of naive tourists and don’t care about the aftermath
• Reuben’s Upstairs: the upstairs one is more of a respectable restaurant, feels almost too posh for good smoked meat but it was pretty decent last time I was here, they have good desserts too
• Roi Du Smoked Meat: I dunno who’s giving out these royal titles but… they’ve been there forever so I guess hard to depose. Acceptable smoked meat last time I had it, this place feels like a Greek diner that also has smoked meat. I like Greek diners!