Smoked deli meat seems to be a bit of a cult. There is a lot of obsession about eating it in various cities across the Eastern seaboard. Personally I’ve had the opportunity to to try the ‘best’ deli meat in Montreal (Schwartz), and NYC (Carneige‘s and Katz) but had never heard about a standout place in Toronto. That all changed when I was surfing around BlogTO (this is the problem with blogging from my phone, it’s difficult to put in links unless your post gets cut off and you go fix it up later) which queried the community for the best deli meat in Toronto. Caplansky’s was at the top of the list.



Caplansky’s recently moved to a new location near Kensington Market to accomodate its newfound popularity – when we arrived on Saturday shortly before 1PM we had to wait 20 minutes for a seat. After sitting down, the manager told us that there was an extra 10 minute delay for the smoked meat. Also for napkins/utensils which the server forgot until the table beside us asked. That’s not a good start.



They have all the usual deli things including a variety of mustards, pickles and Cott’s Black Cherry Cola. We ended up ordering 2 7oz smoked turkey sandwiches, latkes, matzoh ball soup, fries, the 8oz smoked meat burger and a 7oz smoked meat sandwich; except when we tried to order it they said there was no more smoked meat! So we ended up switching it to the Elinor’s chopped liver on Challah.

Aside from the smoked meat sandwich, the smoked meat burger was supposed to be something to try. It’s 20% smoked meat (i.e., all the shavings after cutting the meat for the sandwich) and 80% ground beef. I wasn’t impressed as it was pretty dry and not that savoury. The rest of the food was in similar vein; there wasn’t anything special about it.

After bothering the waiter for awhile (and seeing other tables get smoked meat), we were finally able to garner a smoked meat sandwich (medium). These things are harder to get than Google Wave invites! Their story was that their current smoker was on-the-fritz and a new one was supposed to be delivered on Friday, but was delayed till Monday. The smoked meat was (expectedly) good but not really worth the effort.

In general it was not a fun experience going to Caplansky’s, certainly not worth going out of your way for. The last piece of advice I leave you with is to not count on paying with Mastercard, since their credit card handling system doesn’t support MC (but Visa works fine).

Posted by Kevin in 4m.mobile Tags: restaurants, toronto