Over five episodes so far, Eater’s Dining on a Dime has touched on some Montreal Jewish classics such as smoked meat and bagels — and now it’s time for a more modern take on this cuisine, that helps define the city’s food scene.
To do that, host Lucas Peterson is at café, breakfast, lunch, and brunch spot Fletchers, in the heart of the Plateau. The counter opened up about two years ago alongside the Museum of Jewish Montreal on St-Laurent, with Jewish food historian Kat Romanow at the helm.
Romanow tells Peterson that she aims to push the cuisine forward, by looking both at Ashkenazi and Sephadic Jewish food cultures, and mixing in other influences.
“I have a friend in Boston, he loves to mash up Korean flavours in a matzo ball soup...that’s such a fun way to move it forward and test the boundaries of what Jewish food is.”
Perhaps the ideal example at Fletchers takes a classic Eastern European item, gefilte fish. She makes white fish salad that one might find at a Jewish deli and combines it with the classic Mexican fish taco, to tasty ends.
“When Jews come in they’re like ‘gefilte fish tacos? gefilte fish club sandwich?’, and I’m like ‘no, no, just let me make it for you’”.
They approve heartily, says Romanow. That’s not the only mash-up: also on the menu at Fletchers is a za’atar-spiced breakfast sandwich, and massafan cookies, an Iraqi almond and rosewater cookie, served up as an ice cream sandwich at Fletchers.
Dining on a Dime will release Montreal episodes weekly until late September — click here to watch all previous episodes.
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