Inside Montreal's Temple of Blues and Brisket

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Inside Montreal's Temple of Blues and Brisket

Along Quebec's Highway 20 is a little roadside restaurant serving smoked brisket to all walks of life.

"Right before Stompin' Tom Connors passed away, he came through here with his band. So I bought them all dinner, and later, I got to sit outside with Stompin' Tom and do a shot of Jack with him."

Stompin' Tom was, by all accounts, Canada's greatest "beer-drinking, dart-smoking, plywood-banging" country singer. On his final ride down Quebec's Highway 20, he stopped in at a roadside restaurant called Smoke Meat Pete.

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"That's one of the memories that will probably stay with me for a long time," recalls owner Pete Varvaro, whose smoked brisket is the stuff of lore among travelling musicians. "By having live blues seven nights a week here, a lot of musicians from around Canada spread the word. They tell their fans and other musicians about the food here."

"You can't beat Pete's meat." 

Pete even gets up on stage on Saturday nights to play guitar and trade a few licks with whichever band happens to be on stage. And while this blues-infused deli food is a mutation of a century-old tradition, the pairing of traditional Jewish food and American blues music just works. "It brings people together. We get all kinds of people coming here but I have yet to see a fight."

The wooden tables and constant stream of blues music at Smoke Meat Pete are more reminiscent of the Double Deuce from the Swayze classic Road House than the classic deli decor that adorns Montreal landmarks like Schwartz's and The Main. But that's not to say that Smoke Meat Pete, whose slogan is "You can't beat Pete's meat," isn't intimately related to Montreal's smoked meat pioneers.

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In fact, it was at The Main, that Pete would cut his teeth—and a whole lot of brisket. His father, Peter Varvaros senior, owned the place. "My dad was there for almost 40 years," Pete recounts. Cutting brisket is a trade unto itself, with some delis requiring 10 years experience for meat cutters wishing to get their blade anywhere near a brisket. Pete's son, Peter the third, heir to the brisket throne, has been cutting meat at Smoke Meat Pete for the last six years.

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"It is an art. It's like being a carpenter who understands wood and the grain and whatnot. Meat is similar to that. What you want to do with a brisket is cut against the grain so it's not tough. If you keep that in mind when you're cutting, it will help. But sometimes the medium part, which is fatter, the grain will cross over with another grain which is going the other way, so it's definitely a bit of an art."

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But Pete learned more than just how to cut brisket at The Main. On Saint Laurent Boulevard, he would learn the ways of the world along Montreal's hardened artery.

"It was fun. We had some wild nights there in there. You would get transvestites slapping your ass or whatever, all dressed up in drag. Lots of wrestlers, too, like Mad Dog Vachon and the Great Antonio. You name it, we'd get it there, because it was on Saint-Laurent and we were open 24 hours."

READ: Eating Pimp Steaks in Montreal's Former Red Light District

There, he would also begin to brush with musical greatness, providing late-night cuts of brisket for towering local figures like Leonard Cohen. "Leonard was a regular. He was the nicest guy in the world. One time he came in with his guys and they were so fucking high they were just jumping from tabletop to tabletop to get to their seat."

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Celine Dion was another loyal customer. "I used to serve her. She never liked smoked meat [laughs]. She would always bug my ass and order a club sandwich in the middle of a rush. I would see her come in and I knew I had to make a club sandwich."

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Ironically, years later, Celine and her dearly departed René would become part-owners of Schwartz's, directly across the street from The Main.

"In 2014, Smoke Meat Pete won best smoked meat in Montreal. It was the first time Schwartz's ever got beat in the history of that competition. I ended up sending them an e-mail, I don't know if it ever got read or if she remembers me, but it said, 'Thank you Celine, we still love you here!'"

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The Schwartz/Main binary has existed for decades and has distracted many Montrealers from the fact that perhaps the best Montreal smoked meat isn't even on the island of Montreal. To the untrained eye, Pete's location may seem like a strange one, but for the cartographically inclined, it's a no-brainer.

"If you look at a map, it's a good central location for everywhere. It's near the highway and a lot of people come to Montreal to get their smoked meat," Pete says. "But when you go downtown, you've got to look for parking or get lost on the one-ways. Here, you get on the highway, you pick up your brisket and you're already on the highway back to Toronto or Ottawa."

Despite being so far from the mecca and medina of Montreal smoked meat, Pete says he was never worried about attracting customers off the beaten track.

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"Eventually, no matter what you do, if you do something right, I believe that you'll start making money. If you put time and effort into it. But if you stop doing things, I find, that's when you fall off and people find it boring."

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And one of the ideas that Pete had early on was to starting playing blues in his dining room. "In our old location, which was in a basement, there were huge lineups. Rock or metal can make people more aggressive like 'Where's my food?' But when we played stuff like this, people seem more relaxed, and I realized that I was on to something."

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Blues is no-bullshit music. "It's for real," as Pete says. And much like the blues, Montreal-style smoked meat is a completely unpretentious tradition, but one which is very difficult to master.

Steeped in over a century of thick smoke and secret spice blends brought over from European Jews, the blanket term "smoked meat" has, for Montrealers, at least, come to signify one thing and one thing only—brisket.

As per tradition, all of Pete's meat sits in a brine for ten to 14 days. It's then cured for in a dry spice rub for two days and smoked for eight hours. Finally, the meat is steamed back to life before being sliced by hand with surgical precision and slapped between two pieces of rye bread.

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"I don't know how they do barbecue in America," says Pete. "I went to the South once and they kept calling their brisket 'smoked meat' because they were cooking it with wood fire and smoke. And the guy kept saying, 'It's smoked meat, just like you got in Canada!' and I said, 'No, the meat we've got is cured before, and it's pinkish red on the inside like a ham.'"

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Another key ingredient to Pete's success is his French fries, which have won him accolades over the years. The secret, he says, are big, red potatoes from Manitoba. But huge food companies from the US have swooped in and bought all of them.

"I'm having a hard time getting those potatoes right now. The Americans come in and buy the whole farm-load off the guy. I'm working a deal to see if I can get some from Manitoba. They're known for being the biggest, highest-quality red potatoes around." Or, in the immortal words of Stompin' Tom Connors, "the best doggone potatoes that's ever been growed."

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But for all of the high-quality ingredients and attention to detail in the kitchen at Smoke Meat Pete, the spirit of the place is rooted in the sound and feel of the blues, and it all goes back to the Boogie Man himself.

"I started the live blues thing here in 2001, right after John Lee Hooker passed away. He was my favourite blues artist and it was a dedication to him," Pete says. "I liked his whole style, his life. He was a pretty simple guitar player, and so am I. But his music always seemed to come from his soul."