The story of our bagels is the story of two friends who share a passion for good coffee and bagels. Our backgrounds could not have been further from the culinary world. At the time we teamed up on our Bagel Yard journey, our thoughts were mainly preoccupied with bringing great tasting bagels to Dubai along with great specialty coffee in a laid-back cafe setting.

A good day starts with coffee and bagels. That’s been our upbeat motto since Day 0, reflecting our positive take on things in life, and our approach to business. In fleshing out our vision for Bagel Yard, we drew inspiration from the long queues of eager and loyal customers — old and young, from different walks of life and cultures —  snaking out of Montreal’s bagel stores every morning, be it during the cold winter or those few hot-n-humid summer weeks (ok, we know we can’t compare to the baking heat of Dubai but still!).

To this day, bagels in Montreal are made the old traditional way just as they were before the onset of mechanized mass production; each and every bagel is hand-rolled, simmered in honey water, and then baked in a wood-fired oven. The end result is a bagel with a perfect little crunch, a slight chewy texture, and a hint of sweetness. You can’t beat that.

From the outset, we agreed that there would be no short-cuts and no effort spared in making sure that our bagels are on par with those made in Montreal. Style, taste and texture were all and everything. We also wanted our business to be Dubai home-grown; there would be no franchise or anything of the sort. In the autumn of 2016, one of us took a break from work to undertake a training stint at Montreal’s legendary St-Viateur — considered the city’s holy grail of bagel shops, churning out tens of tens of thousands of bagels a day across its different stores. We could not have been more grateful for the opportunity, more so that the training took place under the guidance of two of St-Viateur’s veteran bagel-makers.