[Note to moderators: Feel free to move or cross-post this to a more general category. I think an “e-Food” category for on-line food purchases and food-related service might be useful]
Those sneaky target marketers stuck a picture of some luscious-looking Montreal bagels in front of my nose. It was an ad for goldbely.com, offering me four dozen beauties from St-Viateur for $69 including shipping. The “including shipping” was the gotcha here; St-Viateur’s website cites a $89 cost for shipping alone for 4 doz. bagels from Montreal to San Francisco. I hadn’t had a St-Viateur (or any other Montreal bagel) in seven years, and resistance was futile.
St-Viateur offers plain, sesame, poppy seed or “everything” bagels (“Everything” for St-V means sesame and poppy; they consider any other added ingredient to be non-traditional.) I went for the sesame bagels, which my wife likes because they remind her of “da bing.”
I ordered my bagels on Saturday. They were shipped late Tuesday afternoon and arrived at my home mid-afternoon on Thursday. They were actually shipped from Champlain NY, just across the border, some 40 miles south of Montreal, enabling a considerable saving on International shipping costs. They were packed in a St-Viateur branded box, and I assume they were made the same day they were shipped.
By the time my bagels arrived the flavor was still good, but they were already starting to get a bit crumbly when sliced, as Montreal bagels will. They were not fresh enough to eat untoasted, as I prefer, but perfectly fine toasted. Those that I didn’t eat or give away were immediately sliced and put in the freezer.
Goldbely sells a lot of other East Coast gourmet items of high nostalgia value (from Russ & Daughters, Ess-a-Bagel, Primante Bros. etc) as well as the Montreal bagels from St-Viateur. If you are tempted to to buy St-Viateur bagels or other goodies, you can use promo code CORNBREAD1247 at checkout and get $25 off your first order. [Disclaimer: it will also earn a $25 credit for me.] Applying the credit to 4 doz. bagels will bring the cost down to 92¢ per bagel, compared to 79¢ per bagel from Safeway’s bulk bagel bin. Such a deal!