Lots of places—whether cities, provinces, states, countries, or regions—have a food or foods that they’re famous for. Sometimes those foods are famous worldwide, like Japan’s sushi or Italy’s pasta. Sometimes they’re just famous within the country or region itself.

To give you just a few examples, Canada is known for its maple syrup production; the province of Quebec is known for a delicious blend of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds called poutine; and Montreal is famous for bagels (and smoked meat too, but I’ll save that for another blog post).

Whenever I visit my family in the province of Ontario, they always ask me to bring some Montreal bagels with me for us to eat for breakfast. You can buy bagels pretty much anywhere across Canada, but Montreal-style bagels are somehow just better! They must be made differently than the bagels you can buy at the supermarket in other parts of the country, because they’re softer, chewier, fresher, and have a different texture.

In Montreal, there are a lot of bagel stores. In these shops, you can buy different flavours of bagels, as well as other things such as cream cheeses to spread on your bagels, deli meats and cheeses, sandwiches, pastries, and other snacks.

The R.E.A.L Bagel shop near my apartment

Cream cheeses and other goodies

One of the special things about Montreal-style bagels is that they’re handmade and then cooked in big wood-fired ovens. At the bagel shop near my apartment, they move the bagels in and out of the oven using a long, wooden paddle and then drop them into a metal bin to be packed up and sold. I love buying a dozen fresh-from-the-oven bagels on a chilly day and then hugging the warm, delicious-smelling bag close on my walk home!

Rolling some bagels into their traditional ring shape

Removing bagels from the wood-fired oven

The bagel shop near my apartment is called R.E.A.L Bagel. The current owners bought the shop 10 years ago, but the store itself has been around for about 35 years. My neighbourhood’s very multicultural, so the employees at R.E.A.L Bagel have come to Montreal from all over the world, including Haiti, Turkey, Trinidad, the Philippines, and Pakistan.

The owner of R.E.A.L Bagel told me that sesame seed is by far the most popular flavour of bagel that they sell, but they have other flavours too, like whole wheat, pumpernickel, multigrain, poppy seed, flax seed, cinnamon raisin, onion, garlic, all-dressed, blueberry, plain, and oatmeal raisin. She said that her personal favourite is all-dressed with cream cheese and salmon. It’s really hard to choose, but I think my favourite is the traditional sesame seed, with lots of cream cheese!

Is there a famous food (or foods) where you’re from? Have you ever tried a bagel? Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Thanks to Ryan King for the great photos.

-Jessie
Culips Free ESL Podcast