St-Viateur Bagel
bakery in Montreal, Quebec
St-Viateur Bagel is a Montreal-style bagel bakery located in the neighbourhood of Mile End in the borough of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
History
St-Viateur Bagel was established on May 21, 1957 by Myer Lewkowicz, a Holocaust survivor who moved to Canada in 1953. Lewkowicz had grown up poor in a shtetl near Kraków, Poland. Lewkowicz spoke of his experience in the Holocaust influencing the opening of the shop by stating "At Buchenwald, all I dreamt of was a piece of bread". He learned the trade as an employee of Montreal Bagel Bakery, another local bagel shop owned by Hyman Seligman. The shop is named after the street it is located on, St-Viateur Street, and is one of the longest-running bagel shops in Montreal. In 1985 St-Viateur Bagel suffered an extensive fire, but the wood stove remained entirely intact.
St-Viateur Bagel has two bakeries, three bagel cafés, a food truck, and an online store, in addition to the original storefront. In March 2019, the shop's Monkland Avenue café permanently closed due to the end of their 18-year lease and rising rent prices. Today, the bakery is owned by Joe Morena, who had previously worked at the shop for 15 years, and competed with the nearby Fairmount Bagel for the title of Montreal's best bagel.
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This entry incorporates text from “St-Viateur Bagel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.