After a flight back into Montreal, I usually like to stop off for a smoked meat sandwich on my way back home, usually ducking into Montreal proper for this. But a handful of minor delays at CDG resulting from luggage that had lost its tag had us arriving an hour later into Montreal, which mean that the normally bad traffic around the airport had grown to excessive, and going into the city just for a smoked meat sandwich would not have been efficient. Luckily, most residential parts of Montreal have pretty good shops and delis that will also sell you smoked meat sandwiches, so instead of battling traffic, I ducked into Southwest Montreal’s Côte-Saint-Paul neighborhood to check out Les Aliments Félix Mish.
Les Aliments Félix Mish isn’t a restaurant, it’s primarily a Polish deli, and one of the area’s oldest ones, operating since 1961. They make a wide variety of meat products, both traditional Polish cuts and the ever-present Montreal-style “smoked meat”. As I talked about in in my reviews of Schwartz’s or Dunn’s, this uniquely Quebecois product falls in the spectrum “corned beef” and “pastrami”, and the version at Les Aliments Félix Mish is particularly nicely smoked over local maple, and nicely spiced. They’ve also got an entire array of sausage products available, including the classic kielbasa, the longer, thinner and drier kabanos, and the paprika-spiced Hungarian cousin to kielbasa, Debrecyna. I even spied some good-looking polish
As I mentioned above, Les Aliments Félix Mish isn’t an actual restaurant, but they’ll happily serve up sandwiches, and, in particular, they’ll serve up a proper Smoked Meat sandwich on rye with cheese and mustard. The result is one of the better smoked meat sandwiches I’ve had in Montreal: the meat is nicely sliced, and both a bit more heavily-smoked than most of the other places I go around Montreal. And, more importantly, the maple smoke is apparently here, you can definitely taste it as “maple”, but without any of the sweet notes. I really enjoyed this, and it’s one of the more delicious renditions of this classic.
Overall, I loved Les Aliments Félix Mish. It’s one of the best options for getting a smoked meat sandwich, and it’s located a bit outside the usual busy restaurants. And the other Polish meat products definitely look like they are worth trying on a future trip. Two caveats: for most Americans, consider this place cash only (since they only take Canadian debit cards, not credit cards), and it’s take-out only (I ate mine in my car).
