Here’s an all-dressed food mystery: a Burlington, Vermont bakery appears to be using a cartoon bagel mascot that is suspiciously similar to that of Montreal bagel mavens St-Viateur Bagel.
Photo evidence of the curious similarity came via Montreal-based aggregator of junk photos Fuck No MTL, who published a photo that appears to be from outside Myer’s Bagel Bakery, about two and a half hour drive south of Montreal.
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Here are the two anthropomorphic bread circles next to each other: wow, look at that family resemblance! To be fair, the Myer’s bagel does seem to have slightly less webbed fingers, and a few more sesame seeds. It also appears to be eyeballing its own crotch, for reasons unknown, while the all-pupils St-Viateur mascot seems to be looking straight ahead.
OK, it’s obviously the same damn bagel. So who used it first? Given that Myer’s opened in 1996 and St-Viateur in 1957, this point probably goes to St-Viateur — at least one photo online shows the cartoon bagel on St-Viateur staff shirts from a decade before the ‘90s.
Of course, that doesn’t mean this is inherently something sinister. Maybe St-Viateur’s owners gave Myer’s their blessing to use the bagel-man — after all, with an international border between the two bakeries, it’s not like they’re direct competitors. Maybe the bagel drawing is actually so old that it has fallen out of copyright and into the public domain. Or maybe Myer’s just really liked it and borrowed it.
Update: A St-Viateur Bagel owner tells Eater that a previous owner of Myer’s also worked at St-Viateur back in the day — but suggested that the Burlington bakery probably shouldn’t be using the cartoon bagel figure.