Established by Mark Treviranus and Dave Young, Smoking Gun Bagels does bagels the Montreal way – in a wood-fired oven. The 14-tonne oven has been purpose-built in Canada, and is the first one in Australia.
The bagels are boiled first in honey-infused water before being thrown into their smoke-filled oven to finish off the cooking process. As a result of this unusual style of cooking (bagels are usually boiled in sugared water and baked in a conventional oven) they are sweeter than ordinary bagels with a crisp exterior and chewy middle.
Treviranus and Young spent much of 2015 training in this specific form of bagel-making in San Francisco and Montreal, and even had the head baker of Montreal’s celebrated wood-fired bagel eatery Saint Viateur come to Sydney to help them set up shop down under.
The bagels are served open-style, and named things like Champagne Papi – featuring pastrami, fermented cabbage, mustard, pickles and cheese – and Scone Wrong, with native Australian rosella and riberry jam, lemon myrtle cream, pickled rosella and cream cheese made exclusively for the venture by Sydney buttery Pepe Saya. It may be a Canadian concept, but that bagel is about as Straya as you can get.