Montreal, Canada (The Joy of Food) — A legend in its own right in a city that’s famous for its food, St-Viateur is a premier bagel purveyor in Montreal.
Comparisons between the Montreal bagel and the American bagel [*] abound. A Montreal-style bagel is smaller and has a larger hole, less like a plumped hockey puck in appearance and more like a pretzel without the twisting. The bagels are hand-shaped and boiled in honey water before being placed in a wood-fired oven, making them chewy, fragrant, and slightly sweet. Thanks to the distinctive cooking process, Montreal bagels seem more like artisan bread and mirror the qualities of other wood-fired breads and doughs.
Since the shop opened in 1957, the process of producing bagels has stayed true to the original recipe. It all starts as a massive sheet of dough that gets sliced and diced into a snake-like roll. This gets cut further and hand-rolled into a series of loops that end up in a sweetened bagel sauna for exactly three minutes, then oven-cooked for about 20 minutes. Depending on where they land in the flames of the oven, some bagels come out more browned than others.
At St-Viateur, flavors stay mainly within purist and traditional territory; the most popular flavor is sesame. There are no jalapeño bagels covered in fluorescent DayGlo orange cheese here. You’ll find an array of condiments at a self-serve station — butter, cream cheese, smoked salmon, and jelly. The trick here is to rip and dip, using the bread’s crisped edges as veritable scoopers. But thanks to the toasty, nutty flavor and the reduced density of the inside, you could conceivably eat these without any added topping and be fine just enjoying the chew of the bread.
The flagship location is in the Mile End on Rue Saint Viateur to which this world-famous shop owes its name. The vision when you walk in is one of oodles of bagels in giant wooden bins. It is a tiny place with the massive production in full view and one in which they churn out between 700 and 1,000 dozen bagels a day. The nearby Mont-Royal store also operates a cafe for eating in.
As with all magical fairytales of foodie lore, there is a feud involved — St-Viateur competes with neighboring Fairmount Bagel for the title of Montreal’s best bagel. Both shops sell their bagels 24 hours a day so there’s plenty of time for a taste test comparison.
[*] When I say “American bagel,” I mean bagels made in the fine northeastern states of New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Bagels anywhere else in the U.S.A. are crap and not worth the water they’re boiled in. Bagels on the east coast have the hallmark crunchy texture on the outside, are remarkably chewy and dense on the inside, and exhibit a ‘pull’ as you bite or pinch. They are often served still warm from the baking process thanks to the law of supply and demand and come slathered with a generous smack of cream cheese. Bagels everywhere else make me very sad and prone to profanity-laden tirades, with which my friends and family are well familiar.
Written by Joy
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So I won’t see you waiting in line at Einstein Bros?
Ha ha I’ve been to plenty of Einstein’s, particularly before some of the specialty shops started opening up (Solomon, Garden State, etc.). Of the mainstream options I do like Bruegger’s better because of the texture.
I’ll check out Bruegger’s when they open up the Mira Mesa Blvd location.
The bagels at Bruegger’s are smaller but the texture is a bit more crunchy and stretchy and they’re more dense. They’re also a little more careful with applying the cream cheese so it doesn’t end up like a massacre in your basket. There’s a Bruegger’s shop right by the Santa Fe Depot station and I used to stop there when I commuted to work with the trolley.