Iconic Vancouver bagel shop Siegel’s Bagels celebrates 35 years

Parise and Joel Siegel of Siegel's Bagels in Vancouver.

All anniversaries call for cake and candles, but the celebration at Siegel’s Bagels next Friday is a double-whammy for the Vancouver business that would call for 124 candles in total.

While the store marks 35 years of doing business, its owner Joseph Siegel will be celebrating his 89th birthday.

To mark the occasions, the store will be throwing a shindig at it’s Kitsilano location and the first 100 customers will be given a free bagel slathered with cream cheese.

Siegel was born and raised in Montreal, a city famous for its distinctive handmade and wood-fired bagels. When he moved with his family to Vancouver in 1974, he says he felt the urge to bring a taste of home with him after the the only varieties he could find locally were supermarket offerings that were “more like a bread with a hole in it.”

Vancouver was so unfamiliar with the chewier and denser style bagel that Siegel had to request a permit and bring in a mason from Montreal to build the required wood-burning oven, as nobody locally had the expertise.

“There were a lot of Montrealers that had moved to Vancouver, and I had said, ‘If I can get half of those to come and try my bagels, I’ll be able to develop the business.’ That was my main goal,” he says.

Siegel set up a small table beside the main store on Cornwall Avenue and, much like what guests can expect this weekend, gave away bagels with cream cheese in the hope word would spread. Before long the shop gathered a cult following, attracting loyal customers that, Siegel says, still visit to this day.

“The secret to success with the type of business we have is number one, the product. You have to have a good product. And number two, you have to have the service, and I think we have both,” he says.

Now 89, Siegel lives on Salt Spring Island and has left the business in the hands of his daughter, Parise.

“The thing that we’re super proud of is that we have 80 per cent of our staff who have been with us for over 20 years. We’re like a real family there. We’ve built this family community within the store,” says Parise.

Keeping the business within the family has ensured the crowd-pleasing recipes remain true to the store’s very beginnings, which is lucky, really, she says, because few regular customers are on board with change at Siegel’s Bagels.

“Some things that we have can’t change, they have to stay the same. Even if we do a renovation in the store, it throws customers off a little bit and they want you to know they don’t like it,” she laughs.

“Going from a small business to something bigger, sometimes people will describe it as becoming more corporate. People like the homegrown element and I think that there’s less and less of that these days, and so customers love to know that we have kept things quite original from where we were when we began.”

Parise says many of her fondest memories revolve around the comfort food.

“I remember going back to Montreal as a young child, we would visit four to five times a year to be with family for different holidays and occasions, and we would always fill up our suitcases with Montreal-style bagels and bring them home,” she says.

“We’d slice them and keep them in the freezer and all our friends who were from Montreal would come over and hang out and eat bagels with us, because you couldn’t get bagels like this in Vancouver back then.”

She says she hopes to create heartwarming memories for others in the way they were created for her when she was younger. As for whether she ever gets sick of the donut-shaped breads, after 35-years of business and a lifetime of consuming them, she says, surprisingly, she’s never quite had enough.

“I get asked this question often, and the truth is I just never get tired of them,” she laughs.

“If I’m ever starting to feel that way I’ll just create a new flavor, but there’s usually so many different ones we offer, there is always something that I feel like eating.”

Currently the shop offers 14 flavours, spanning everything from the classics to exciting iterations like sun-dried tomato, blueberry and jalapeno.

“I talk to my customers and they say ‘I’ve been coming here for 35 years, week in, week out, and I never get tired of them’,” she says.

“There’s just something about them that will always have you coming back for more.”