The Paris of North America
Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and one of the oldest in North America. It sits on an island in the St Lawrence River, with a mountain at its centre and four centuries of history in its streets. The comparison to Paris is not accidental. The French language, the café culture, the architecture of Vieux-Montréal, the particular Quebecois approach to food, art, and nightlife.
In 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier climbed the mountain at the island’s centre and named it Mont Royal. The city that grew around it became the heart of the North American fur trade — a commercial hub drawing merchants, trappers, and adventurers from across the continent. That strategic position shaped everything that followed. Montreal dominated Canadian commerce and culture for over a century.
Episode
The Old City
Vieux-Montréal is the old heart of the city — cobblestone streets, 17th and 18th century architecture, the Basilique Notre-Dame with its extraordinary interior, the waterfront along the St Lawrence. People live and work here. The restaurants are serious. The streets are busy in all seasons.
The underground city — the RESO — is one of Montreal’s practical innovations. An interconnected network of tunnels linking shopping centres, offices, hotels, and metro stations beneath the downtown core. In a city where January temperatures drop to minus 25, the ability to move between buildings without going outside is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. The RESO covers 33 kilometres and connects over 80 buildings. Montreal built its city twice — once above ground and once below it.
Mont Royal itself is the green lung of the city. The park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted — the same landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York — sits above the downtown and offers views across the island and the St Lawrence. It is where Montrealers go in summer for the Sunday tam-tam drum circles and in winter for cross-country skiing and skating.
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Who are the Voyageurs?
The French-Canadian canoe men who paddled the fur trade networks across the continent. Their routes connected Montreal to the interior of North America, running thousands of kilometres through lakes, rivers, and portages that no European had mapped.
The reality of a Voyageur’s life was brutal. They carried loads that often exceeded their own body weight. The physical toll was constant — hernias, frostbite, drowning in rapids. Their working lives were short and the conditions were punishing. Their endurance forged the paths that became Canada’s first roads and established Montreal as the commercial gateway to the continent. That legacy sits underneath everything the city became.
Cuisine
The Montreal Steak Spice Backstory
Schwartz’s Deli Smoked Meat. Montreal’s answer to pastrami, cured and smoked in-house using a recipe that has not changed in nearly a century. The line outside is permanent. The interior is cramped and efficient. The smoked meat sandwich on rye with mustard is the reason you are there.
The backstory of Montreal Steak Spice connects directly to Schwartz’s. Morris “The Shadow” Sherman — a grill man at the deli in the 1940s and 50s — began applying the deli’s smoked meat pickling spices to his own steaks. Coarse salt, black pepper, coriander, garlic, dill. That seasoning blend is now used worldwide and traces its origin to a grill man at a Montreal deli improvising on his lunch break.
Recipe
How to make French Canadian Creton
Cretons is the other essential Quebecois food — a coarse pork spread made with cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, served cold on toast for breakfast. It began as a practical, high-energy food for 18th-century Acadian hunters and lumber workers in Quebec. Pork scraps, fat, local spices — a smart way to use everything and provide enough calories for a day of physical work in a Canadian winter. Over generations it became a family tradition, with recipes passed down and adjusted and argued over the way serious food always is. Chunky, strongly spiced, deeply satisfying alongside strong coffee and fresh bread.
The POUTINE Backstory
Poutine is the signature. Fries, cheese curds, gravy — a combination that sounds straightforward and tastes like something that required decades of refinement to get right. The cheese curds are the key detail. Fresh, squeaky, specific to Quebec dairy production. The gravy binds everything. Done properly, poutine is one of the great comfort foods. Done badly, it is just wet fries. Montreal does it properly.
Music Clip
Mont Royal Jam
Montreal has produced an unlikely concentration of significant musicians. Oscar Peterson — one of the greatest jazz pianists in history — was born here. Leonard Cohen spent most of his life here, writing songs that are now part of the permanent record of what the 20th century felt like. Arcade Fire was founded here. Recording in a church and developing a sound that became one of the defining rock records of the 2000s.
The live music culture reflects the city’s broader character — late, serious, unapologetic about quality. Jazz festivals, classical performances at the OSM, the Club District around Crescent Street.
Interview
The Man Behind the Art
Montreal is where Erik Nieminen works. The Canadian painter whose oil paintings blur urban realism and surrealist abstraction has been based here for years. His studio sits in the city that produced Oscar Peterson and Leonard Cohen and the Voyageurs — a lineage of people who took their craft seriously and built something lasting from it.
The NAO interview with Nieminen covers his studio practice, his approach to AI in art, NFTs, and the question of what it means to make physical paintings in a digital age. The Montreal context runs through all of it. This is a city that has always taken art seriously.
For more on Canada — covered in full on NAO.
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