Here are 9 secrets about St-Viateur bagel that’ll make you fall in carbfatuation\u00a0all over again.<\/p>\n
12.\u00a0St-Viateur Bagel employees can’t agree on the “right way” to eat a bagel.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel-8.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIf you’re a Montrealer, you can skip down a few lines. But if not, here’s a little\u00a0secret the locals already know… the real<\/em>\u00a0way to eat a bagel. General manager Saoul tells me he’s weak in the knees for it: dipping a fresh steamy sesame seed bagel straight into a pot of cream cheese, using the bagel’s crisp, sesame-laden edges as veritable cream cheese scoops. Eliminating the middle man\u00a0has never felt so good! After all, it is<\/em>\u00a0the food equivalent of ripping a lover’s clothes off out of impatient desire. Owner Joe tells me that he prefers the poppy seed bagels (blasphemous), and bagel master Frederic took \u00a0a very serious tone when instructing me to avoid all those “other spreads” and use only the real thing, salted butter.<\/p>\n11. Meyer Lewkowitz, the man behind St-Viateur Bagels, was a Holocaust survivor.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"st-viateur](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel-5.jpg\")
<\/a>Owner and founder, Mayer\/ Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe man behind the bagel is as legendary as the bagel has become. Originally from a Jewish village near Krakow in Poland, Meyer is a Holocaust survivor. He survived\u00a0camp Buchenwald, after which he stayed\u00a0in\u00a0Germany. It’s there that the Jewish Immigration Aid of Canada found him and brought him over to Montreal.\u00a0He’s quoted as saying “At Buchenwald, all I wanted was a piece of bread.” Not only did Lewkewitz survive the war, but he created the pinnacle\u00a0of his own bread dreams: the world’s best bagel. Upon arriving\u00a0to Montreal Lewkowitz found a job at a bakery on St-Laurent. It’s here that he learned the ins and outs of the bagel world, and started his own shop in 1957.<\/p>\n
10.\u00a0Every bagel contains over 1000 sesame seeds…!<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel.jpg\")
Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHere’s a fun afternoon game you can play in the Mile End if you’re bored some day: try to spot all those who had a bagel for lunch. How, you ask? Check them for sesame seeds. Think that’s an outlandish proposition? Consider this: each sesame bagel is covered in approximately 1500 sesame seeds! Hansel and Gretel aint got nothing on the trail a bagel can leave behind. It’s no wonder Joe, one of three brothers, has what some would call a “sesame seed phobia”. Rumour has it that when he does his round at the bakery, he’ll eat his bagel (with melted cheddar, fyi) and if something feels off he’ll say: “The seeds! Check the sesame seeds!” When you have 1500 of anything, you’ve got to make sure it’s perfect.<\/p>\n
9.\u00a0Sesame seeds weren’t always so popular.<\/h2>\n![\"Source:](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Poppy_seeds-1024x767.jpg\")
<\/a>Source: Bartekbas, Wikimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nConsidering that 85% of sales today are sesame bagels, it’s surprising to find out that when this bagel business all started, poppy seed was the primary bagel variety. Bagel-buyers weren’t interested in the bland looking sesame kind. But when the price of poppy seeds sky rocketed, the owner, Mayer made the switch to sesame, forever changing the Montreal bagel as we know (and love) it today.<\/p>\n
8. The true story behind their Open 24h a day policy.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"stviateur](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/stviateur-bagel-Open-sign-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: imperfectspirituality.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSt-Viateur Bagels wasn’t always open 24 hours a day. In fact, it wasn’t even the owner’s idea to keep it open late!\u00a0It was Haim, one of the bakery’s first employees. Haim was so passionate he’d stay at the bakery until the clients stopped coming, even against St-Viateur Bagel founder Mayer’s\u00a0wishes. He would tell Haim: “At 6 o’clock, you go home. Don’t stay here.” But Haim, stubborn and passionate, had a different idea: to stay until the bagels stopped selling. \u00a0And hey guess what: they never did.<\/p>\n
7.\u00a0There’s actually a secret time of day to eat a bagel…<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"Photo:](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/stviateur-bagel-arthur.png\")
<\/a>Photo: weheartit.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWe’re all familiar with the me 24h McDonald’s drive-through excursion and the 3am post-bar pizza slice. But a 24h bagel shop? That’s a truly novel Mile End affair. \u00a0At night, “it’s a different crowd, it’s more locals”, owner Robert tells me. “It’s like a hangout spot in here. People eat their bagels over the fridge, in the entrance, everywhere”. When I ask him if this bothers the staff, he laughs: “Not at all. That’s what it’s all about.” I mean, a bakery turned into an after hours snacking spot? Yes please. I asked around, expecting to hear a few\u00a0crazy night time stories. But nobody had anything bad to say. Robert says “It’s something about the smell of fresh bagels… it puts everyone in a good mood”.\u00a0So that’s the trick folks, warm bagels.<\/p>\n
6.\u00a0They will help you out if you’re in a jam.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel-4.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSo\u00a0I went out on a limb and told Robert about my night time teenage adventures. How after a night of partying with friends I would stumble into St-Viateur Bagel, without a penny, and ask if they had any free bagels (rumour had it that these were the ones that had fallen on the floor). Employees would without hesitation, turn around, reach into this white box, and hand me my carbohydrate sustenance for the next few hours. When I was done telling my bagel-love-story, Robert just smiled at me and said: “That box is still there. We give to whoever asks”. It turns out those are day old bagels, and since nothing goes to waste at St-Viateur Bagel, what better to do than to save them for a person in need?<\/p>\n
5.\u00a0They give to charity. Constantly.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel-7.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhen he said that he gives to whoever asks, Robert didn’t just mean individuals. St-Viateur bagel is also really big on donating to charities, and they’re especially interested in supporting the local community. Schools, festivals, and organizations such as the YMCA and Share the Warmth are regular recipients of these doughy godsends. After I was done sharing my excitement over the bakery’s generosity,\u00a0Robert responded\u00a0in the most genuine manner,\u00a0“It’s the least we can do for our family. It’s them who put us on the map”. Yep, he’s talking about locals.<\/p>\n
4.\u00a0Duddy Kravitz is responsible for St-Viateur’s international fame.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/montreal-stviateur-bagel-duddy.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWalking into St-Viateur Bagel is a lot like\u00a0walking into a hall of fame. To your right, a slew of famous newspaper and magazine articles paste the walls like vines that are all too happy to keep growing upwards. \u00a0Pictures of celebrities cozy up against one another, with barely any room to spare.\u00a0How exactly does that happen? Believe it or not, Duddy Kravitz can take credit for this one. The 1974 film has a bagel scene shot at St-Viateur bagel. This got people curious about bagels, and fans of the film came travelling to the soon to be hotspot.<\/p>\n
3. You can order St-Viateur Bagels from across the border.<\/h2>\n![\"Source:](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/st-viateur-bagel-montreal1-1024x683.jpg\")
<\/a>Source: hdwallpapers.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThat’s right! If you head to their “online bakery”, you’ll be asked which\u00a0country<\/em> you’re ordering from. Goes to show how in demand these babies are.<\/p>\n2.\u00a0The bagel pros compete between each other.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"montreal](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/montreal-st-viateur-bagel-3.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: St-Viateur Bagel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPictured above are the bagel masters themselves alongside culinary hero, Anthony Bourdain. You can almost see it on their faces that they earned their spot! There’s even a plaque on the wall you can see, from the last competition’s winner: 37 quality bagels in one minute! The rules are strict though: they can’t be mini bagels, and they have to be a real circle, not a strange\u00a0C shape.<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0Becoming a bagel master is kind of like getting a Karate black belt.<\/strong><\/h2>\n![\"Photo:](\"http:\/\/localmontrealtours.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/St-viateur-bagel-secrets.png\")
<\/a>Photo: Andy Gryn, stviateurbagel.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWe wanted to know what it takes to become a bagel master. Here’s what we found out. First, you’ll need a good, lavish dose of bagel appreciation. Then, you’ll need to dedicate the next 6 months to a year of your life to perfecting your bagel making skills. Yep, that’s how long it takes to become a bagel slayer.\u00a0During this time you will master the\u00a0perfect bagel size, cooking time, and wood oven technique.\u00a0Not everyone was born to roll bagels though: small hands mean small bagels, big hands mean big bagels. And what we’re after? It’s that mystical St-Viateur Montreal bagel in between size.<\/p>\n
<\/a>If you’re a Montrealer, you can skip down a few lines. But if not, here’s a little\u00a0secret the locals already know… the real<\/em>\u00a0way to eat a bagel. General manager Saoul tells me he’s weak in the knees for it: dipping a fresh steamy sesame seed bagel straight into a pot of cream cheese, using the bagel’s crisp, sesame-laden edges as veritable cream cheese scoops. Eliminating the middle man\u00a0has never felt so good! After all, it is<\/em>\u00a0the food equivalent of ripping a lover’s clothes off out of impatient desire. Owner Joe tells me that he prefers the poppy seed bagels (blasphemous), and bagel master Frederic took \u00a0a very serious tone when instructing me to avoid all those “other spreads” and use only the real thing, salted butter.<\/p>\n The man behind the bagel is as legendary as the bagel has become. Originally from a Jewish village near Krakow in Poland, Meyer is a Holocaust survivor. He survived\u00a0camp Buchenwald, after which he stayed\u00a0in\u00a0Germany. It’s there that the Jewish Immigration Aid of Canada found him and brought him over to Montreal.\u00a0He’s quoted as saying “At Buchenwald, all I wanted was a piece of bread.” Not only did Lewkewitz survive the war, but he created the pinnacle\u00a0of his own bread dreams: the world’s best bagel. Upon arriving\u00a0to Montreal Lewkowitz found a job at a bakery on St-Laurent. It’s here that he learned the ins and outs of the bagel world, and started his own shop in 1957.<\/p>\n Here’s a fun afternoon game you can play in the Mile End if you’re bored some day: try to spot all those who had a bagel for lunch. How, you ask? Check them for sesame seeds. Think that’s an outlandish proposition? Consider this: each sesame bagel is covered in approximately 1500 sesame seeds! Hansel and Gretel aint got nothing on the trail a bagel can leave behind. It’s no wonder Joe, one of three brothers, has what some would call a “sesame seed phobia”. Rumour has it that when he does his round at the bakery, he’ll eat his bagel (with melted cheddar, fyi) and if something feels off he’ll say: “The seeds! Check the sesame seeds!” When you have 1500 of anything, you’ve got to make sure it’s perfect.<\/p>\n Considering that 85% of sales today are sesame bagels, it’s surprising to find out that when this bagel business all started, poppy seed was the primary bagel variety. Bagel-buyers weren’t interested in the bland looking sesame kind. But when the price of poppy seeds sky rocketed, the owner, Mayer made the switch to sesame, forever changing the Montreal bagel as we know (and love) it today.<\/p>\n St-Viateur Bagels wasn’t always open 24 hours a day. In fact, it wasn’t even the owner’s idea to keep it open late!\u00a0It was Haim, one of the bakery’s first employees. Haim was so passionate he’d stay at the bakery until the clients stopped coming, even against St-Viateur Bagel founder Mayer’s\u00a0wishes. He would tell Haim: “At 6 o’clock, you go home. Don’t stay here.” But Haim, stubborn and passionate, had a different idea: to stay until the bagels stopped selling. \u00a0And hey guess what: they never did.<\/p>\n We’re all familiar with the me 24h McDonald’s drive-through excursion and the 3am post-bar pizza slice. But a 24h bagel shop? That’s a truly novel Mile End affair. \u00a0At night, “it’s a different crowd, it’s more locals”, owner Robert tells me. “It’s like a hangout spot in here. People eat their bagels over the fridge, in the entrance, everywhere”. When I ask him if this bothers the staff, he laughs: “Not at all. That’s what it’s all about.” I mean, a bakery turned into an after hours snacking spot? Yes please. I asked around, expecting to hear a few\u00a0crazy night time stories. But nobody had anything bad to say. Robert says “It’s something about the smell of fresh bagels… it puts everyone in a good mood”.\u00a0So that’s the trick folks, warm bagels.<\/p>\n So\u00a0I went out on a limb and told Robert about my night time teenage adventures. How after a night of partying with friends I would stumble into St-Viateur Bagel, without a penny, and ask if they had any free bagels (rumour had it that these were the ones that had fallen on the floor). Employees would without hesitation, turn around, reach into this white box, and hand me my carbohydrate sustenance for the next few hours. When I was done telling my bagel-love-story, Robert just smiled at me and said: “That box is still there. We give to whoever asks”. It turns out those are day old bagels, and since nothing goes to waste at St-Viateur Bagel, what better to do than to save them for a person in need?<\/p>\n When he said that he gives to whoever asks, Robert didn’t just mean individuals. St-Viateur bagel is also really big on donating to charities, and they’re especially interested in supporting the local community. Schools, festivals, and organizations such as the YMCA and Share the Warmth are regular recipients of these doughy godsends. After I was done sharing my excitement over the bakery’s generosity,\u00a0Robert responded\u00a0in the most genuine manner,\u00a0“It’s the least we can do for our family. It’s them who put us on the map”. Yep, he’s talking about locals.<\/p>\n Walking into St-Viateur Bagel is a lot like\u00a0walking into a hall of fame. To your right, a slew of famous newspaper and magazine articles paste the walls like vines that are all too happy to keep growing upwards. \u00a0Pictures of celebrities cozy up against one another, with barely any room to spare.\u00a0How exactly does that happen? Believe it or not, Duddy Kravitz can take credit for this one. The 1974 film has a bagel scene shot at St-Viateur bagel. This got people curious about bagels, and fans of the film came travelling to the soon to be hotspot.<\/p>\n That’s right! If you head to their “online bakery”, you’ll be asked which\u00a0country<\/em> you’re ordering from. Goes to show how in demand these babies are.<\/p>\n Pictured above are the bagel masters themselves alongside culinary hero, Anthony Bourdain. You can almost see it on their faces that they earned their spot! There’s even a plaque on the wall you can see, from the last competition’s winner: 37 quality bagels in one minute! The rules are strict though: they can’t be mini bagels, and they have to be a real circle, not a strange\u00a0C shape.<\/p>\n We wanted to know what it takes to become a bagel master. Here’s what we found out. First, you’ll need a good, lavish dose of bagel appreciation. Then, you’ll need to dedicate the next 6 months to a year of your life to perfecting your bagel making skills. Yep, that’s how long it takes to become a bagel slayer.\u00a0During this time you will master the\u00a0perfect bagel size, cooking time, and wood oven technique.\u00a0Not everyone was born to roll bagels though: small hands mean small bagels, big hands mean big bagels. And what we’re after? It’s that mystical St-Viateur Montreal bagel in between size.<\/p>\n11. Meyer Lewkowitz, the man behind St-Viateur Bagels, was a Holocaust survivor.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>10.\u00a0Every bagel contains over 1000 sesame seeds…!<\/strong><\/h2>\n
9.\u00a0Sesame seeds weren’t always so popular.<\/h2>\n
<\/a>8. The true story behind their Open 24h a day policy.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>7.\u00a0There’s actually a secret time of day to eat a bagel…<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>6.\u00a0They will help you out if you’re in a jam.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>5.\u00a0They give to charity. Constantly.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>4.\u00a0Duddy Kravitz is responsible for St-Viateur’s international fame.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>3. You can order St-Viateur Bagels from across the border.<\/h2>\n
<\/a>2.\u00a0The bagel pros compete between each other.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>1.\u00a0Becoming a bagel master is kind of like getting a Karate black belt.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>