Location: 174 Ossington Avenue, Toronto
Website: https://linnysluncheonette.com/

Whenever there’s a new deli specializing in pastrami or Montreal smoked meat, I sit up and take notice.  We have a handful of quality restaurants like this in the GTA, but not nearly enough.  There should be one on every block, and there’s what?  Like maybe five or six?

The menu here is extremely simple.  They serve pastrami, a couple of other sandwiches, and a few sides.  It’s also take-out only, so if you don’t get one of the two small picnic tables out front, too bad.  Take your food and walk.

The pastrami is quite tasty.  The spicing on the meat is weirdly restrained, though, which dials down the flavour and holds the sandwich back from greatness.  But otherwise, everything here is exactly where it should be, with thick, hand-cut slices of ultra-tender beef on perfectly-fresh rye bread with just the right amount of mustard (I find a lot of places tend to over-mustard their sandwiches, overwhelming the beef, but here it’s just right).

I will say that although the borderline bland spicing is a bummer, the meat has a distinctly smoky flavour that goes a long way towards mitigating this.  And it’s still a great sandwich — it’s just that everything else about it is so stellar that its lack of seasoning stands out more than it would otherwise.

I also got a side order of the coleslaw, which is a great zippy counterpoint to the very heavy sandwich (albeit a little too heavy on the onions for my personal preferences).