06-08-2025
Montreal's small bagel shops say they're just as good as the two ‘big boys'
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The rich, comforting aromas from the wood-burning oven in a Côte-St-Luc strip mall are much the same as those found in other bagel shops dotting the Island of Montreal. But at M.T.L. Bagel, that aroma blends with the bright flavours of the adjoining restaurant, where owner and longtime bagel maker Glen Spence serves up Jamaican classics.
Spence expanded into Jamaican food in 2023, tearing down the wall between M.T.L. Bagel and the adjoining storefront, where he opened MTL Yardie. As an early promotion, he offered jerk chicken bagel sandwiches, introducing bagel fanatics to the Jamaican classic and jerk chicken lovers to his bagels.
'People still come and ask for it, so we'll make it,' Spence says.
But tantalizing as the jerk chicken, oxtail and Jamaican patties may be, The Gazette is here to talk bagels.
Montrealers love to bicker over the best place to buy their bagels. And when they do, two names tend to come up far more than any others: Fairmount and St-Viateur. But outside of the icons are dozens of local, lesser-known bagel shops that serve as something of a backbone in Montreal's bagel culture. These businesses prepare bagels with the same time-honoured methods as their better-known competitors and their owners say they take the craft just as seriously.
'I make the bagels the same way they were doing it 100 years ago,' Spence says. He shuns what he considers quality-sacrificing shortcuts, boasting that he uses real eggs instead of liquid eggs.
'I'm here every day and I know what quality I want,' he says.
Spence has been in the bagel business as long as he's lived in Montreal. He spent about a decade working at Fairmount Bagel after he moved to the city from Jamaica in 1993.
After that, he co-founded a bagel shop on Montreal's South Shore. 'It didn't work out,' Spence says, declining to go into the details. In 2014, he bought the Côte-St-Luc business, renaming it M.T.L. Bagel.
Plaza Côte-des-Neiges mall plays host to its own bagel shop, Maison Bagel, which owner Babak Assadollahi has been running for over two decades.
'I'm established in the Côte-des-Neiges area,' Assadollahi says. 'People know my bagels.'
His bagels are fluffier than your typical Montreal bagel. 'You could maybe eat two bagels and you don't feel too full,' Assadollahi says. But he's quick to clarify that the bagels are still prepared according to traditional Montreal methods.
Like Spence, his bagels come in a wide variety of flavours. Both businesses offer classics, including sesame and all-dressed. They also both offer carrot-pineapple bagels and cheese bagels, another Montreal classic, but with a misleading name: cheese bagels are made with horseshoe-shaped puff pastry, not bagel dough.
'People buy as much of that as they do the bagels,' Assadollahi says of the cheese bagels.
The bagel maker only learned his craft when he bought the shop from its previous owner, who 'taught me how to make the dough, how to make the bagels,' Assadollahi says.
'I've had bakers throughout the years. They've all taught me a little trick here, a little trick there,' he says.
Asked how his bagels stack up against the competition, Assadollahi rejects the premise.
'I'm not competing with anyone else,' he says. Whether his come out on top 'depends on the person's taste.'
'Try mine, try, I don't know, Bagel Brossard,' he says.
Many Montrealers only know two bagel shops, Assadollahi says, but 'they should know 20.'
'When you try, you're going to have your own favourite,' he says.
Competing with Fairmount and St-Viateur is futile, Spence says. 'I won't even try.'
'When you think about Montreal and you think about bagels, the first go-to is either one of those,' he says. Though Spence says his bagels are just as good, 'we don't have the name that the big boys do.'
'They have a customer base, which is great for them. I'm just trying to build.'
But he says a recent interaction with a 91-year-old customer gave him hope that he could make a crack in the bagel duopoly.
Spence says the man told him he'd been going to Fairmount Bagel since he was a kid. 'That's all he ate and that's what he loved.'
But 'he came here and he's like, 'the bagels are just as good.''
