Montreal's culinary landscape owes its layered character to three centuries of immigration, each wave leaving indelible marks on the city's bread ovens, smokehouses, and corner diners. The Mile End neighborhood, historically a nexus for Eastern European Jewish settlers and Portuguese immigrants, remains home to wood-fired bagel bakeries operating continuously since 1919. These establishments use honey-sweetened dough and hand-roll each piece before sliding it into oak-fired ovens, a method unchanged for over a century. Just blocks away, smoke billows from delis that cure brisket for fourteen days in spice blends guarded across generations. The district's food identity crystallized in the mid-twentieth century when Jewish delicatessens and Portuguese poultry shops lined Saint-Laurent Boulevard, creating a corridor where Yiddish, French, and Portuguese mingled over steaming pastrami and grilled chicken. Today, that multicultural momentum persists. Poutine—Quebec's contribution to global comfort food—originated in rural diners in the 1950s but found urban refinement here, where chefs layer hand-cut fries with cheese curds and inventive gravies that nod to French technique and local terroir. Old Montreal, by contrast, offers a different culinary narrative. Cobblestone streetsframe bistros and chocolate ateliers housed in seventeenth-century stone buildings. French colonial influence persists in butter-rich pastries and charcuterie boards, while the port's proximity shaped a historic appetite for imported wines and oysters. Walking these neighborhoods reveals not just flavor but urban geology: each block records a chapter of trade, migration, and adaptation. A Montreal food walking tour tours these layers in real time, connecting wood-fired bagels to Portuguese grilled chicken, smoked meat to contemporary poutine interpretations. Guides, often neighborhood residents, translate menus, explain curing processes, and point out architectural details that contextualize the food. The experience is both sensory and archival—a way to taste history without reading a single plaque.