Billy's Downtown Deli

At Billy's Downtown Deli, one griddle handles two jobs. The morning side poaches eggs for a benedict and crisps potato latkes; the lunch side stacks smoked meat and corned beef by the quarter- and half-pound. Both run off a single counter on Dundas Street in downtown London, and both are daytime work — Billy's serves breakfast and lunch and closes by mid-afternoon, with no dinner service to speak of. The deli on the sign and the diner on the plate are one operation, run off one short shift.

Breakfast carries real menu weight here rather than a token short stack. The Skillet piles hash browns and diced corned beef under ham, hot peppers, cheese, two eggs, bacon, and a shake of Cajun spice, with toast to catch the overflow. Eggs Benedict comes in a half-dozen builds — peameal, ham, bacon, smoked meat, or spinach and tomato — and it runs all day rather than through a narrow brunch window. The Potato Latke Breakfast sets crisp potato pancakes beside two eggs and a choice of ham, bacon, or Oktoberfest sausage, with smoked meat available as a swap. French toast arrives as four thick slices dusted with cinnamon and icing sugar, and most plates are built to send a diner back to work full.

Lunch is where the deli half earns the name. The Smoked Meat Sandwich keeps it plain — a quarter-pound on white, brown, rye, or a Kaiser, mustard or mayonnaise, with fries, soup, or salad alongside. The Reuben builds it out on grilled light rye with corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss, and a choice of mustard or Thousand Island. For the genuinely hungry there is the Super Sandwich, a half-pound of pastrami, corned beef, ham, turkey, or roast beef triple-stacked on the bread of your choosing. Billy's Famous Poutine sits among the sides, with the option to bury it under Montreal smoked meat, and the dessert case runs to apple and rhubarb pies baked in-house. The portions are the point: a typical order sends someone home with a second meal in a takeout box.

Around those headliners is a menu broad enough that a table rarely fails to find its plate. The breakfast wrap folds bacon, ham, cheese, hash browns, and scrambled eggs with hollandaise into a grilled tortilla; alongside it sit omelettes, banana pancakes, burgers, chicken fingers, club sandwiches, and a French onion soup for the diner who wants something other than a deli stack. Nearly all of it travels — Billy's leans on takeout and delivery as much as on its booths — so the same kitchen that anchors a sit-down breakfast also feeds the desks and meetings a few blocks over.

The restaurant has run as a family operation since 1983, and the continuity shows in how little it reaches for reinvention. The cooking stays in a familiar Canadian deli-and-diner lane — eggs, sandwiches, soup, poutine, pie — the kind of menu a neighbourhood learns by heart. Downtown London has reshaped itself more than once across those four decades, and Billy's has answered by staying legible: the same daytime hours, the same comfort food, the same modest prices on a block that has seen plenty of turnover.

The hours tell you who Billy's is for. It opens early — half past seven on Saturdays — closes by two every afternoon, and stays dark on Mondays, which makes it a breakfast-and-lunch proposition rather than a night out. The booths turn over twice in a shift, once for the unhurried weekend morning and once for the lunch-hour rush, and empty before the dinner crowd downtown even starts to think about a table. Order the benedict on a slow morning, the Reuben on a working one, and a slice of rhubarb pie whenever the case still has it — that is the full range of what downtown London comes here for.