Sorry... You CANNOT compare Montreal's smoked meat with NY's pastrami...
Smoked meat is the Ritz... Pastrami's is a cheap motel on Road 117....
Never, ever say this at Katz Deli or any of the other top 8 Jewish delis in NYC, unless you have a New York Yankees baseball cap on your head or an Aaron Judge jersey on your torso, which just might save you from the beating of your life and being thrown out the door and into the street on your ass outside any of these places:
http://gothamist.com/2015/09/21/best_jewish_delis_nyc.php
The first time I ever ate smoked meat at Schwartz's was around 15 years ago, when I went with my cousin, who is also American. He had been to Schwartz's and compared it to really good NYC pastrami and invited me to join him there. As we ate our lunch, I told my cousin that I thought it actually tasted like very tender corned beef.
The manager at Schwartz's overheard my comment and came over to our table. He knew I was an American tourist and proceeded to give me a 20 minute dissertation, which almost sounded like a doctoral thesis, on the differences between corned beef and smoked meat, the principle one being corned beef is boiled and smoked meat is dry cured and smoked.
The manager then told me he had challenged the owner of Carnegie Deli, which at that time was the top pastrami purveyor in NYC (Katz has since taken that honor- Carnegie closed in 2016) to a "meat challenge": smoked meat vs. pastrami. He told me the Carnegie owner was a "pussy" who would not accept the "challenge" (I presumed the challenge was for Carnegie to come up to Montreal with their pastrami and have a meat tasting contest). I think the challenge was declined because Carnegie was too busy making money in NYC to be worrying about the bravado from some small Montreal meat purveyor. Who knows.
However, the point is that the fact that he issued a challenge is, to me, a tacit admission that Carnegie's NYC pastrami was a worthy competitor deserving of the challenge. Would the coach of the Habs issue a challenge to play a minor league team like Laval or Verdun for Montreal area hockey supremacy? Of course not. You only challenge someone you deem worthy of that challenge. So respectfully T, you don't know what you are talking about. Even the owner/manager of Schwartz's knows how good NYC pastrami is at the real hardcore NYC delis which I posted above.
And I do like NYC pastrami more than smoked meat, but I was kind of weaned on it. One of my parents is Jewish, so I ate lots of that shit when I was younger. Don't eat it much any more mainly for health reasons, but it is real, real good stuff they are selling at Katz's. How dare you compare it to a cheap motel. They certainly do not have cheap motel prices lol.
