| rev:text
| - Schwartz's was high on our list of places to visit when in Montreal. My husband loves smoked meats, and we'd heard comparisons to Katz's in New York, so we were eager to try their sandwiches.
Plus, we hadn't eaten anything more than a tiny poutine sample and some nibbles on a beer tour prior, so we were starving.
Everybody said to be prepared for a wait. As a tourist attraction, it gets busy. It was almost 6:30 pm on a Friday night when we approached the restaurant, and though there was a line out front, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected.
They do a good job of managing the people outside and clearing tables inside. We thought we were going to have a wait of upwards of 20 minutes ahead of us, but the guy working the line got us inside and at a table for 4 (with another couple) within five minutes.
It is crowded inside. The deli counter runs along the right side of the restaurant, taking up most of the space inside. Tables are crammed along the left side, with a very narrow aisle for servers and customers to walk down. The register is located at the front of the store (inconvenient if you're in the first table with your back to the register, like me), and the restrooms are squished in towards the back.
Menus are either above the counter or on a placemat on your table. The harried wait staff will come by to take your order, though, which is nice because fighting the crowd to get to the counter would have been a nightmare.
Our waitress suggested the smoked meat sandwich ("of course"), which we each ordered. To that, we added an order of the hand-cut fries and the pickles.
While we waited, I tried to make small talk with the couple across from us. We were forced to sit together, and we were both trying Schwartz's for the first time. I was trying to be nice. I asked, "So, where are you two from?" and got, "Ontario" out of them before they shut me down. That didn't make for an awkward meal at ALL.
The food came out quickly, which I absolutely appreciated (because I was starving, not because the other couple was making things strange.) The pickle(s) that we had ordered turned out to be one regular-sized dill pickle, whole. The fries were a bit cold and didn't look like a whole lot.
As for the sandwich...my husband liked it a lot more than I did. The meat was good, and the bread was soft and moist, but it didn't wow me the way Katz's sandwiches did.
It was good to try, and I'm glad we went, but after we left, we both agreed that there was no need to try to go back. It's too frenzied inside, and it's kind of pricey for what you get. You know - at Katz's you pay through the nose, but you're given a sandwich the size of your face. Here, it's kind of expensive for a regular-sized sandwich. Maybe that's just the American in me expecting everything to be "super-sized", though.
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