I spent the weekend in Montreal – a fantastic food city all around. There is an unwritten law among Canadian foodie friends and Montreal expats - if you make a trip to Montreal, you had better bring back bagels. I knew the scorn I would bring upon myself if I were neglect in returning with a grocery bag spewing sesame seeds. As a matter of fact I met a New Yorker, a first-timer in Canada, who was also instructed to secure bagels for a Toronto native living in that fat-bready-bagel city.

So, any one who knows about Montreal bagels knows the eternal unanswerable question – St Viateur or Fairmount? These are the two masterful bakeries that make the slightly sweet, thin, chewy seed laden beauties have both been around for over 50 years. They both make hand rolled bagels baked in wood fired ovens with the original recipes of their founders and are only a few blocks away from each other in the Outremont area of town. And yet – Montreal citizens are as fiercely loyal to their bagel as they are to their hockey team.

The bakers at St Viateur are purists baking two varieties only, black or white (sesame or poppy seed), as a bagel should be. The shop has less ambience but you get the feeling that the real McCoy is filing up your paper bag hot out of the oven. Fairmont has a bit more cache and an expanding array of flavours from caraway, to muesli, to spelt and buckwheat and pesto and black olive as well.

Being a purist I bought at StViateur but I had a bagel from Fairmont the following day and I cannot say that one was superior to the other – they were both great. Lucky with the age of the internet you can buy bagels online and have them shipped but there is no way that either of these bakeries can ship that authentic experience of pulling out a just purchased bagel from the top of your paper bag, the bagel still hot from the oven and having it half eaten before you get to the door.

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