Location: 847 Brown’s Line, Etobicoke
Website: https://www.kettlemansbagels.ca/

Kettlemans Bagel serves Montreal-style bagels — I was actually in that city recently and tried fresh bagels from the big two (St. Viateur and Fairmount) and yeah, if you’re craving a Montreal-style bagel in the GTA, the version at Kettlemans is bang-on.  It’s got a satisfyingly substantial chew, it’s a little bit sweet, and the wood-burning oven gives it some nice personality.  And as you can see from the open kitchen in the store, they make them fresh throughout the day.  They’re quite good.

(And yes, as far as I can tell, “Kettlemans” does not have an apostrophe, though the company themselves seems to be a bit confused about it.  The logo on the shop is sans-apostrophe, but if you go to their website, it’s about 50/50 apostrophe/no-apostrophe.  I’m just going to assume that the logo is right.)

They have a variety of bagel types that you can get on their own, but if you’re looking for more of a meal, you can pick from a bunch of different sandwich options.  I went with the Kettlemans Special: “smoked salmon, deli cream cheese, tomato & red onion, served with garlic olives.”  You can pick the type of bagel that you want, but since the photo in the restaurant used the sesame seed variety, that’s what I went with.

It’s a tasty sandwich — the smoked salmon is nothing to write home about, but combined with the juicy tomato and the ultra-silky cream cheese (it’s easily the creamiest cream cheese that I’ve ever had, with the usual zippiness of cream cheese but with a texture that’s closer to mayo), it’s a quality sandwich.

I’m not a fan of raw onions, so I got mine without, but for most normal people I’m sure that they would have enhanced the sandwich — something crunchy would have been nice.