Montreal’s Wilensky Special

Mordecai Richler‘s 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a classic Canadian satire about the ambitions of a young Jewish kid from an immigrant family in 1940s Montreal. In the novel, Duddy’s father Max, the garrulous cab driver and part-time pimp, holds court with his compatriots at a neighborhood shop called Eddy’s Cigar & Soda.

He walked up to Eddy’s Cigar & Soda, across the street from the Triangle Taxi Stand, ant there he found his father drinking coffee with some of the other men. Josette was there too.

In the 1974 film adaptation starring a young Richard Dreyfuss, the Eddy’s scenes were filmed at the real-life model for Eddy’s Cigar & Soda, Wilensky’s Light Lunch in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal.

Max always had his breakfast at Eddy’s Cigar & Soda. His usual fare was a salami sandwich and a Pepsi.

Famous for its salami sandwich called the Wilensky Special, Wilensky’s Light Lunch first opened in 1932. It was a sort of catchall in the early days, a barber shop in the back and a cigar store in the front, complete with soda fountain and hot dogs, comic books, magazines, and dry goods. Early on, Moe Wilensky convinced his father Harry to buy a grill and start selling sandwiches. They moved around the corner into their current location, located at Fairmount and Clark in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, in 1954.

Looking at Wilensky’s, it isn’t hard to believe it has existed in this form since 1954 or that it’s been open since 1932. It doesn’t take a flight of fancy to imagine that the sandwich someone orders there today is in essence identical to the sandwich someone might have eaten there 90 years ago. It is an institution in the same way that some other better known Jewish food purveyors in that same neighborhood are institutions: St-Viateur Bagel, Fairmount Bagel, Schwarz’s Deli with the famous Montreal smoked meat.

How we missed it when we traveled to Montreal to try those bagels and smoked meat sandwiches a few years ago, I do not know. I wish we had found our way to that delightful green-painted storefront and spent an hour sitting at the counter, drinking cherry sodas and egg creams, eating salami sandwiches and experiencing a living piece of early 20th Century Montreal.

I missed it, though. I did some research on the sandwiches of Montreal but clearly not enough. I did not get to experience this amazing-looking lunch counter firsthand. So once again, I will be attempting to experience a foreign delicacy, locally.

Sometimes the old ways are best*

_{* This is a James Bond quote and has nothing to do with anything else in this article. I just like throatpunchy spy movies.}

In Chicago, we have our own local Jewish culinary centers. There’s Manny’s of course, a deli in the south loop known for their great giant corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, potato pancakes, chopped liver, short ribs, and a dozen other cornerstones of Jewish-American cuisine served cafeteria-style on big plastic trays; Kaufman’s in Skokie, with a variety of deli meats and smoked fish; NY Bagel and Bialy in Lincolnwood; Morry’s Deli in Hyde Park; JB’s Deli in Andersonville; Schmaltz Deli in Lisle; BNY in Chicago Heights. I’ve written about most of these places at one point or another in over the past eight years. But while some of them have been around longer than others, and all of them have their charms, none of them have that early mid-century aesthetic that these photos I’ve seen of Wilensky’s exude.

I suppose Romanian Kosher Sausage Company in Chicago’s far north Rogers Park neighborhood doesn’t give off exactly the same vibe either. Old-school, yes. A neighborhood staple, undoubtedly. Without, though, the welcoming counter and the stools and the soda fountain and the sandwich grills. You can get a sandwich at Romanian Kosher Sausage Company, of their rightfully famous kosher salami, or beef bologna, or pastrami or any number of their house-cured meats; on rye, or Kaiser, or onion roll, or challah; with or without mustard. The sandwich they serve you will be substantial. But you’ll be taking it with you when you leave.

This business also started over 80 years ago and later moved to its current location, according to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune. Its road to its current location was a bit longer though. Romanian Kosher Sausage Company opened its first Chicago store in Albany Park in 1957 after relocating from the Dominican Republic, where the Loeb family, proprietors of Romanian Kosher Sausage Company, had fled from Bucharest, Romania after the war. Before Arnold Loeb’s 2020 death, people would travel from other states to bring home salamis from Romanian. (Nowadays, you can order it online instead.)

I stopped by Romanian recently and picked up a chub of their terrific salami along with a pound of their beef bologna, sliced. What better product, what better history, to replicate the sandwiches of another group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in North America?

Reverse Breadgineering

According to some accounts, the bread rolls Wilensky’s uses for their sandwiches are a secret, made specially for Wilensky’s sole use. In this segment from David Chang’s Netflix show Mind of a Chef, narrated by the late Anthony Bourdain, Chang visits Wilensky’s with fellow chefs David McMillan and Frederic Morin as well as comedian Aziz Ansari, Ansari jokes that he wants to open a restaurant in LA selling similar sandwiches and asks current proprietress Sharon Wilensky where she gets her bread. “I could tell you,” she responds, “but then I’ll have to kill you.” An old joke, perhaps, but it gets a laugh.

Some descriptions of the bread call it an English muffin. Others call it a Kaiser roll. In the photos I’ve seen, I can pick out the flat brown griddled surface and possible cornmeal dusting that might give someone the impression of an English muffin. I can also see that the bread’s texture is less open-crumbed and more like a softer bread such as a hamburger bun or Kaiser roll. And is it just me or does the bread seem to have a slight yellow tint?

What I’m looking for here, it seems to me, is a small circular roll, slightly flattened rather than risen high, made from an eggy dough and lightly dusted with cornmeal. What kind of bread has that kind of eggy dough? Well, brioche for one–this is Montreal, after all, and though everyone in Montreal speaks English it is in Francophone Quebec with French as its official language.

However, even more relevantly, challah is another soft, sweet and eggy bread similar to brioche, with the main difference being that challah, designed to be compatible with kosher eating, does not contain dairy and uses vegetable oil instead of the butter featured in brioche.

I think either would work, and that challah is likely to be a more appropriate option. However, as it happens, when I made this bread I had butter in the house but no vegetable oil, so I went with King Arthur Flour’s brioche recipe, split into 12 buns each consisting of approximately 70 grams of dough.

There is a hand-written sign at Wilensky’s, a poem posted on the wall above the menu, that reads

When ordering a Special, you should know a thing or two
They are always served with mustard, they are never cut in two
Don’t ask us why, just understand that this is nothing new
This is the way that it’s been done since 1932

Originally, according to multiple sources, Wilensky’s charged five cents extra to serve one of their sandwiches without mustard. That was raised to 10 cents and then eventually they stopped allowing mustardless Specials at all. Based on the Wilensky’s menu posted on their website, the default state of a Special is salami and bologna with no cheese, but either cheddar or Swiss can be added for a slight upcharge. All the chefs onscreen ask for “Kraft” rather than cheddar, so this might be more of a processed American cheese rather than a real cheddar. However, Bourdain’s narration also references pork several times when this is a Jewish establishment with all their meats clearly labeled as beef. I will trust the menu, at least to start with.

The sandwich prep appears to be relatively simple. Several slices of salami and one slice of bologna are stacked and heated on a griddle before being added to a split-open bread roll with mustard. Then the sandwich is pressed until hot and crisp. The cheese seems to be added after pressing the sandwich–allowing the residual heat to melt it and preventing the need for frequent sandwich press cleanups, I imagine–and the sandwich is placed in front of the customer on a slip of wax paper.

“You know you only get one at a time,” says Sharon Wilensky in the video above while placing a Special with Swiss in front of David Chang. Wilensky’s runs like a well-oiled machine and cranks out dozens of these things at a time. I of course am making only a few of them at a time, and mostly for myself, so I allow myself to break the rules a bit–serving myself two at once, or letting the cheese melt a bit while the sandwich is still in the press. I even made some with different cheeses–American, Havarti.

And what is not to like about this sandwich? The bread is soft, supple, yet given a crispness and rigidity by its time in the press and by the light cornmeal coating. All-beef bologna is the exception to the rule (I say “rule” but it’s really just my own personal guideline) that all the best sausages must contain pork fat, and Romanian Kosher Sausage Company’s salami is such a fantastic product, garlicky and peppery, coarsely ground but with such a smooth fattiness that you’d swear it did have pork fat in it.

The time these meats spend on the griddle renders some of the fat from them, which mingles with the crumb of the bread roll, seasoning the whole. Mustard is, of course, the natural accompaniment for most cured meats but especially salami and bologna. The cheddar is, I think, a better foil for that squirt of yellow mustard–the sharpness of cheddar stands up well to it, making those sandwiches seem more balanced than those with the milder, nuttier Swiss, which are more mustard-forward. But even the Kraft American cheese seems underpowered against all this salami, bologna, and mustard.

I made myself a cheeseless version just to try it, and then I committed yet another crime against Wilensky’s by cutting the sandwich in half to see the cross-section.

Without the cheese, the balance shifts, salami and mustard, with the spiced salami fat the main thing gluing the whole together. There is not a thing wrong with this–it is in fact a simple, elemental sandwich, bread and meat and a condiment, combined in just the right ratio, elevated to the sublime by its time in a sandwich press.

I made two more, with Swiss and Cheddar, and also cut these open to show the cross-sections

As with the cheeseless version above, I cannot find fault with either of these sandwiches, reduced as they are to the most basic elements, combined just so and simply prepared, served immediately, hot and crisp and perfect. The balance does change from one to the other–the cheddar and mustard teaming up to take over the one, while the milder Swiss cheese becomes more of a stage that the salami and mustard play upon.

All of them are great though, and I imagine that the real thing in Montreal is even better. I haven’t done much traveling in my life, and while thus far Montreal has been one of my favorite trips, there are so many places left to go that I can’t say for sure whether I’ll ever return.

If I do though, Wilensky’s will be my first stop. They’ve made it 90 years so far. Surely they will still be around.