St-Viateur Bagel Run
You are a Montreal bike courier. Pick up fresh wood-fired bagels at St-Viateur and deliver them across the Plateau, Mile End, and beyond before they cool. Dodge car doors, potholes, and traffic.
Bike Couriering Across the Plateau, One Bagel at a Time
If you have ever waited in line at St-Viateur Bagel at 6:30am on a Saturday, you know the energy: the wood-fired oven roaring, a paper bag of two dozen sesame bagels going across the counter, and someone outside hopping on a bike to deliver them across the Plateau before they cool. St-Viateur Bagel Run is a free browser game built around that exact ritual — except now you are the bike courier, and the city is throwing potholes, dooring, taxis, and Old Port tourists at you the whole way.
Each level drops you at the iconic yellow B (the St-Viateur shop sign) with a single, very hot bagel in your basket. You have a temperature meter that ticks down second by second. Pick up the bagel, sprint to a numbered delivery point, drop it off while it is still warm, then race back for the next order. Hit your level target (3 to 8 deliveries depending on neighbourhood) before the timer expires — and try to keep every bagel HOT for the perfect 3-star run.
What Makes It Feel Like Montreal
🥰 The Dooring Hazard
Parked cars open their doors at random intervals. Get hit in the bike lane and you are stunned for nearly a second, lose 25% of your bagel heat, and probably yell something unprintable.
⚠️ Pothole Season
The legendary Montreal spring-thaw potholes are everywhere. Hit one at speed and the bike kicks you off-line for half a second.
🚴 Bike Lanes Reward You
The green bike lanes (those iconic Montreal segregated paths) give you a real speed boost — 280 px/sec vs 220 on the road. Stick to them when you can.
🚗 Real Traffic
Cars drive across roads at neighbourhood-appropriate speeds. Get clipped and you lose heat plus time. Wide downtown boulevards are especially dangerous.
How to Play St-Viateur Bagel Run
The controls are simple, the strategy isn’t.
- Arrow keys or WASD — pedal forward, brake, and steer.
- Space — emergency brake. Useful when you see a car door open in your lane.
- R — restart the current level. Esc — return to the level select.
The real game is choosing your route. Every level shows the St-Viateur shop as a yellow B, and the delivery points as numbered green squares. You can deliver them in any order. Most players default to “nearest first” — that is usually wrong. The smart play is to look at your bagel cooling time (shown in the HUD), pick the delivery point you can reach while keeping the bagel above 40% heat, and only chase the far-away deliveries when you have a fresh full-heat bagel just out of the oven.
The Star Rating, Decoded
- 1 star: you met the target delivery count. Customers got their bagels but the Google reviews are mixed.
- 2 stars: at least 70% of your deliveries arrived hot. A decent shift.
- 3 stars: every single delivery hot, zero cold rejections, finished in under 75% of the time limit. St-Viateur is calling to hire you full time.
A Little About the Real St-Viateur
St-Viateur Bagel opened on St-Viateur Street in Mile End in 1957 and has been baking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week ever since. Unlike the famous Montreal cold-weather rule, the shop never closes — not on Christmas, not on a snowstorm, not during the 1998 ice storm. Their wood-fired oven (still hand-fed) produces around 1,000 bagels an hour at peak. The signature is the boiled-then-baked Montreal-style bagel: sweeter, denser, smaller, and with a wider hole than its New York cousin, topped with sesame or poppy seeds.
The shop has a famous rivalry with Fairmount Bagel, three blocks south on Fairmount Avenue, which opened earlier (1919) and uses a similar process. Montrealers have very strong opinions about which is better. The game does not pick a side. (Yet.)
Levels Inspired by Real Routes
- Level 1 – Mile End: A gentle 3-delivery introduction right around the St-Viateur shop. The training level.
- Level 2 – Plateau Brunch Rush: 5 deliveries across the Plateau on a Sunday morning. Parked cars start opening doors here.
- Level 3 – Park Ex: Tight streets and the iconic Montreal pothole minefield. Watch your line.
- Level 5 – McGill Ghetto (Milton-Parc): 6 deliveries, narrow streets, lots of student foot traffic and parked cars.
- Level 6 – Downtown Dash: Skyscrapers, fast cars, dooring zone. The boulevards are wide but the bike lanes save you.
- Level 7 – Saint-Henri Industrial: Cross the Lachine Canal. Old warehouse district with cobblestone slowdown zones.
- Level 8 – Vieux-Port: Pure cobblestone roads slow you down dramatically. Tourists and caleche horses imagined but not rendered.
- Level 9 – NDG Long Haul: The bagels cool on the long suburban ride. Pace yourself.
- Level 10 – The Marathon: 8 deliveries across the full Mile End/Plateau grid. The boss level. Welcome to a real bike courier shift.
Tips From a Veteran Courier
If you keep losing bagel heat, the issue is usually one of three things:
- You are not using bike lanes. The green-painted lanes are ~30% faster. Stay on them between deliveries.
- You are taking damage from parked cars. When you see a car with a yellow K in the lane, give it a 1-cell buffer. The door swings out unpredictably.
- You are choosing routes by distance, not by heat budget. A close delivery you can do in 8 seconds is always better than a 15-second sprint, regardless of which is geographically closer to the shop.
Like Pelle Boy? Try Our Other Montreal Games
We are slowly building a small arcade of Montreal-themed browser games. All free, all playable in 60 seconds or less.
Bagel Run FAQ
Is St-Viateur Bagel Run really free to play?
Yes. No signup, no ads inside the game, no in-app purchases. Built for the Montreal Tips community as a side project.
Does it work on mobile?
The game runs on any modern browser, including mobile Safari and Chrome. The keyboard-driven controls work best on laptop or desktop. Touch controls are on the roadmap.
Why does the bagel temperature drop so fast?
Each level sets a different cooling rate (24 to 32 seconds full-to-empty). It is calibrated to roughly match what an actual hot bagel does in a paper bag in February. Plus, every car-door or pothole hit knocks 20-25% off your remaining heat.
Are St-Viateur and Fairmount the only good bagel shops in Montreal?
Most Mile Enders will tell you they are the top two, but Beauty's, Boulangerie Cheskie, and the bagel section at Adonis all have their fans. We picked St-Viateur for the game because it is the most globally recognized name and the yellow shopfront is the most iconic visual.
I keep getting doored. How do I survive Level 6?
Downtown Dash has the most parked cars. The trick is to ride the second (inner) bike lane when there are two, and to slow down before passing a parked car so you can react if its door opens. If a door is already open as you approach, give it 2 full cells of berth.
Can I deliver multiple bagels at once?
Not in this version. The game is intentionally one bagel at a time so the heat decay creates real pressure on each individual run. A multi-bagel “basket mode” with a heat meter per bagel is on the wishlist for v2.
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🎖 Things to Do in MontrealYear-round picks for visitors and locals.
St-Viateur Bagel Run is a free fan-made game made with love for Montreal. We have no affiliation with St-Viateur Bagel – though we are open to bagel-based sponsorship.