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In Montreal, Bagels Are 'Made with Love' Posted November 24, 2010 By George Medovoy, Editor There are many reasons to visit Montreal, a sophisticated island city with an infectious Quebec joie de vivre. But if you're a foodie, it's the bagels, hands down. Two of the city's bagel bakeries, St-Viateur Bagel at 263 St-Viateur West and Fairmount Bagel at 74 Fairmount West, are no-frills establishments in Montreal's Mile End district, one of the city's trendy neighborhoods with a sprinkling of Hassidim thrown in to add to the eclectic mix.
(Time for fresh bagels at St-Viateur in the trendy Mile End neighborhood)
No matter when you get a craving for a Montreal bagel, you can drop by any time because both shops are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Back in the 1920's, Mile End was home to many Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and as a matter of fact, between the two world wars, Montreal's three principal languages were French, English, and Yiddish. Adding to the color of the neighborhood is Wilensky's lunch counter, which figured in the movie, "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," based on Mordecai Richler's popular novel set in Montreal.
(Wilensky's historic lunch counter is also in the neighborhood) Well, so much for history - now let's get down to food basics! At St-Viateur, where people were lining up for fresh bagels straight out of the wood-burning oven, one of the bakers summed up the difference between Montreal and New York bagels, saying: "These are made with love." As a matter of fact, that "love" has been around since 1919, when Isidore Schlafman, an immigrant bagel-maker from Russia, arrived in the city. "My grandfather opened up the first bagel bakery in Montreal," said owner Irwin Schlafman. Schlafman described his grandfather's experience as the classic immigrant's story, operating in "makeshift" quarters on St. Laurent Street for 30 years, eventually moving to a house on Fairmount, "where he moved in upstairs with my grandmother and a daughter, knocked down the back wall of the living room and built a bagel oven into the backyard." "He baked bagels from five in the morning to five at night," said Schlafman. While automation has caught up with bagel-making in other places, bagels in Montreal are still made the old-fashioned way: they're hand-rolled, boiled in honey water, and then baked in a wood-burning oven to yield that wonderful, crusty exterior and soft, chewy center.
(This is how it's done, in a wood-burning oven, as at the Fairmount Bagel)
Schlafman trains the workers on how to roll bagels. "Out of every 10 that I train," he said, "one or two will stay and the other eight go because they just can't do it properly." Whether you like them plain, with sesame seeds, or with any of the other myriad toppings, they're great! Obviously, making bagels requires "a lot of hard work," said Joe Morena, the owner of St-Viateur Bagel, who jokingly described himself as a "good Italian boy that speaks Yiddish." On my recent visit to St-Viateur, the crowded little place was filled with customers placing orders at the counter, near bags of flour stacked high against the front window. Meanwhile, in a large building at 7005 Victoria Avenue in the Cote-des-Neiges district, Montreal Kosher bakes bagels plus 100 other products like cakes and mouth-watering potato knishes to die for under the watchful eye of Yaacov Bineth, who is originally from Hungary.
(Montreal Kosher, where you can buy bagels and products like potato knishes to die for) Every time we shop at Montreal Kosher, stocking up on tasty products to take home on the plane, the counter is crowded with customers, workers are pushing tall carts of freshly baked goods, and the aromas are wonderful! Of the secret to making Montreal bagels, Bineth, who has operated Montreal Kosher for 55 years, summed it up perhaps best when he said: "You have to understand how to make them." HUNGRY
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