Ever since the Main on Saint-Laurent put out its smokers in 2023, Pete Varvaro Sr.'s recipe has lived on in a highway-side room in L'Île-Perrot, between two sets of blues.
The lineage begins in 1974, when Peter Varvaro Sr. opened the Main Deli Steak House on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, directly across from Schwartz's. Céline Dion and Leonard Cohen took tables there, and it is where the son, Peter Jr., learned the trade — twenty years slicing meat at his father's side, until he became, according to Orcasound, one of Montreal's great makers of smoked meat.
In 1996, Peter Jr. crossed the bridges and opened Smoke Meat Pete in the West; once success came, the house moved in 2000 into its current room in L'Île-Perrot, steps from the Galipeault Bridge. The Gazette crowned his sandwich Montreal's best in 2001 and pinned on him the nickname "Lord of the Fries": from day one, the fries have followed his mother's recipe, cut from the Manitoba potato he refuses to give up.
The room has the feel of a cabin and an old blues bar: photos and newspaper clippings on the walls, ordering at the counter, musicians seven nights a week who ease off while the plates go by. The family never let go of the Main's original recipe: brother Philip serves it at Delibee's in Pointe-Claire, Peter Jr. here. When the Main closed in 2023, after forty-nine years, it was on this side of the bridges that the heritage carried on.
The smoked meat is rubbed with spices kept secret, smoked slowly, sliced thick on rye bread with yellow mustard — and the house goes well beyond the sandwich: ribs, smoked sausages, smoked meat spaghetti, poutine crowned with meat.