Schwartz's front window is heaped with whole briskets that have been corned and smoked on the premises. Over the day, these dark spice-imbedded slabs will disappear into hundreds of sandwiches, with rye bread serving as little more than a vehicle for mustard and an edible napkin. Customers waiting for tables in the long, narrow, 70-seat establishment line up and trail out the door. "This is a slow day," I was told by Frank, the manager, when the line only reached 10 yards up the block.

Another reminder of the once-pervasive Eastern European Jewish presence along St-Laurent and its cross streets is the St. Viateur Bagel Shop, several blocks west of The Main. Here, though, Montréal's kaleidoscopic multi-ethnicity really shines through. St. Viateur, where deep wood-fired ovens glow so fiercely you'd think they could smelt iron, was purchased from its Jewish founder by a Montréaler of Italian ancestry, Joe Morena, who had started working there as a boy. Walk in today, and along with Joe you might see Asian, Hispanic, and Québec French bagel-makers crafting the bakery's sole product right behind the counter in the tiny store. "Crafting" is just the word. The only job done by machine here is mixing the dough, slabs of which are hand-cut, rolled and fashioned into circles, plopped into boiling water, then retrieved to be poppy- or sesame-seed coated and slid into the oven on long wooden paddles.

Buyers watching this bagel theater, as they queue up for a dozen, see everything except the most distinctive touch at St. Viateur: "We put honey in the boiling water," says Morena. "That's what gives our bagels their little touch of sweetness."

Despite having a squeal-proof, rubber-tired subway that is the closest thing to teleportation in the realm of urban transit, Montréal is a superb walking city. This is all to the good, since locals and visitors alike can use the exercise: After New York, Montréal is perhaps the best restaurant city in North America. As I saw on my walk up Boulevard St-Laurent, the array of ethnic choices is sublime; my own favorite among them is a gymnasium-sized,second-floor Chinatown dim sum place called Kam Fung, where you just can't wait to see what the lady with the next cart will bring. It would be a mistake, though, to table-hop through Montréal with only cultural diversity in mind. French cuisine is the city's great glory, and it has its temples old and new.

At venerable Chez la Mere Michel, occupying airy and elegant rooms in a stone townhouse on Rue Guy, chef-owner Micheline Delbuguet's black-tie waitstaff made a splendid presentation of an ethereal swiss cheese soufflé, roast pheasant surrounded by gratineed mushrooms, and a voluptuous strawberry Napoleon. At Bonaparte, on Rue Francois-Xavier down in Old Montréal, I nestled into less formal surroundings and soldiered through a seven-course degustation menu built around a ginger-tinted lobster bisque, a puff of goat cheese and almonds in phyllo, a confit of quail legs clutched around a heady ratatouille, and a butter-tender tenderloin of beef in a demiglace studded with morels.

The Montréal French restaurant I love best, though, is still the Paris, on Rue Ste-Catherine. Just where you'd expect another storefront, a door opens on a big room made cozy by red leatherette banquettes, an indoor striped awning, old theater posters and framed prints of Paris scenes. The effect is that it's 1955 (not coincidentally, the year the Paris was founded), and that you're settling into your favorite bistro in your home arrondissement. Nothing fancy here; just French provincial comfort food, with second helpings. On a cool, drizzly evening, I was delighted to see brandade as a main dish: a velvety pudding of codfish, potato, garlic, and olive oil, soulful and fortifying.

Over a carafe of Muscadet, I talked with Sebastien Poucant, whose grandfather founded the Paris, and who runs it today with his father Guy. "How come," I asked, "with all the trendy restaurants that come and go, all the ethnic cuisines of the moment, all the fusion, how come you've stayed in business all these years?"

"Good food," Sebastien said. "Good service. Good prices."

I couldn't have gotten a simpler answer, or a truer one.

It now seems an eternity ago, but there was a time when an Anglophone minority held sway in Montréal, when the words "St. James Street" - Rue St-Jacques today - meant the same thing that "Wall Street" does in the United States. St. James/Jacques is way downtown, in what today is called Old Montréal; when their work at the banks and brokerages was done for the day, Englishmen and Scots of consequence headed west, to that part of Mt. Royal's slopes called the "Golden Square Mile," and farther still to Westmount, where at least half the houses seem to have been designed by Sir Walter Scott, and the street names read like a glossary of Great Britain. The Golden Square Mile begins along Sherbrooke Street, more or less in the vicinity of the Ritz-Carlton, where on a warm summer evening I watched English-speaking prep school boys in tuxedos that fit too well to have been rented play hacky-sack while their prom dates - or was it a formal wedding reception? - gossiped in silk gowns beneath the hotel's bronze-and-blue-canvas entrance canopy. Across the street stands the Mt. Royal Club, a block of granite so staid, square, and still that it simply had to have been the model for Montréal humorist Stephen Leacock's fictional Mausoleum Club.

But the Ritz preppies could just as well have been French, and their fathers might easily today pass muster at the Mt. Royal. Mansions are gone now from the Square Mile, which is all posh shops and apartment buildings. The old financial district is still there, much brightened by antiques shops, bistros, and loft conversions; at Place d'Armes, the columned grim facade of the 1817 Bank of Montréal building stands opposite the neo-gothic Basilica of Notre Dame, like a bluff Scotch banker seated with wary cordiality across from a French bishop in a sleek soutane.

One day as I walked the narrow streets near Place d'Armes, a small historic marker caught my eye. It stated that nearby, in 1675, lived Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, Explorateur. Now there is a name to conjure with. Rearrange the letters in "du Lhut," and see how far the men of Montréal ventured in the seventeenth century: on the western shore of Lake Superior, in today's Minnesota, there is a city named after an adventurer who got there, from here, by canoe.

Looking for further reminders of the days when Montréal stood at the head of the great fur trade that opened the way to discovery of much of the North American interior, I headed out to Lachine, on the banks of the St. Lawrence west of the city proper.

Rafting on the Lachine Rapids ©Les Descentes sur le St-Laurent