Bagel Etc

Bagel Etc. on Park Avenue in the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood was Leonard Cohen's regular breakfast cafe during his Montreal years -- the place he reportedly came most mornings to eat and think and occasionally be approached by fans who recognised him but tried not to make a fuss. The cafe sat in the same Plateau neighbourhood where Cohen lived in his final years, a few blocks from his Vallieres Street home, and served the kind of Jewish-inflected Montreal cafe food -- bagels, smoked meat, eggs -- that connected the neighbourhood to the immigrant culture from which it came.

Cohen was famous for his regularity of habit in Montreal. He walked the same routes, ate at the same places, was known to the neighbourhood in the way that a person is known when they have stopped being a celebrity and become simply a resident. The Bagel Etc. appearances were documented by fans who happened to be there and by locals who became accustomed to seeing him at his usual table. His ordinariness in Montreal -- the contrast with his global reputation -- was part of what made his late-life return to the city feel like a genuine homecoming rather than a performance.

Bagel Etc. closed following Cohen's death in 2016. The loss of the cafe was felt locally as part of a broader change in the Plateau neighbourhood, which has gentrified significantly in recent years. The address on Park Avenue no longer operates as the same restaurant. For fans retracing Cohen's Montreal, the neighbourhood itself -- the streets, the staircases, the park nearby, the mural a few blocks away -- gives a stronger sense of his presence than any single address.