comme çi, comme ça

Luckily, blog posts don't go stale as quickly as baked goods* because I actually went to St.-Viateur Bagel last Saturday.  I made the trip after an, ummmm, interesting softball practice.  Team sports are a great way to meet other young professionals, right?  Not this time, friends.  I wouldn't use the terms young or professional to describe this team.  How would I describe them?  Let's just say that one would be unable to find a full set of teeth among the team members.  Okay, okay, saying that they weren't professionals probably isn't fair.  There was this one guy, Sammy, who was definitely high on some sort of stimulant.  It seemed like he'd done his fair share of drugs before, so I'll go ahead and call Sammy a professional drug user.  Great. 


I left the softball practice feeling a little hungry and a lot disappointed.  Could there be a better place to eat my feelings than St.-Viateur?  The internet told me that Fairmount and St.-V are the bagel meccas of Montreal, and since eating a Fairmount bagel was like eating an angel's halo, I knew St.-V couldn't be bad.  I was right...  It wasn't bad.  But it wasn't great, either.  As the title suggests, it was just so-so.  

St.-Viateur Bagel gets its name from the street on which it's located, and that street is busy on Saturday afternoons.  There were tons of people on the sidewalks, and I passed a number of cute cafes with patios that were absolutely packed.  Given all the foot traffic, I figured the line for a bagel would wrap around the block, but I arrived to find not a single person in the shop.  Some young kid in an Italy hat was working the cash register and told me that there were only three bagel options: plain, sesame seed, and poppy seed.  I asked for a sesame seed bagel with cream cheese and was told that my total would be $1.25.  The kid put a knife and a bagel in a bag, took my $1.25, and told me not to forget my cream cheese.  I looked in the cooler to my right, spotted the little individual packets, and went on my merry way.  Strangely enough, I missed the hairnet lady from Fairmount.  Sure, she didn't have the most stellar oral hygiene, but at least she smiled enough for me to notice.  Anyway, this mission is about bagels, not service.  

Truth be told, I can get on board with the idea of offering only three varieties.  Why bother adding a bunch of different flavors when you've already got a good thing going?**  I'm just not sure I enjoy what St.-V has got going.  After struggling to cut my bagel with the plastic knife, I found my lap covered in  25986 sesame seeds... give or take.  The same thing happened when I put on the cream cheese.  Anyway, I finally got to eat the bagel, and it was good.  The outside wasn't as firm and tasty as the Fairmount bagel (see below), but you could taste that it had been cooked in a wood-burning oven.  The inside was a little lighter and sweeter, which some people might prefer (but I did not).

Fairmount bagel on the Left and St.-V bagel on the Right

Despite the holier store name, St.-V only ranks 6.5/10.  If you're in the area on a nice day, I'd check out one of the cute cafes with the bustling patios.

*exception: fluffy, marshmallow-like wonder bread, which has a shelf life 2x that of a blog post
**confession: Since my trip to St.-V, I've gone back to Fairmount.  I ordered a chocolate chip bagel the second time around, and it wasn't nearly as good as the all-dressed bagel.