It was all those drives into the city for bagels that made Mike and Spenser realize the village rolled none of its own — so they bought a century-old building on Cartier Avenue and lit the oven.
The lineage begins in 1995, on Côte-Saint-Luc Road: Irwin "Dizzy" Dizgun and his son Steve opened the first Dizz's there — at first under the REAL Bagel banner — and the counter became a west-end institution, open late, bagels rolled by hand and baked in a hearth oven, with the family's secret ingredient giving them a hint of sweetness.
The third generation is Michael — Irwin's grandson, Steve's son — and his partner Spenser. In 2019, coming home from yet another bagel run into the city, the idea took shape: open a place near home, in the West Island, that would marry their love of food with the family heritage. They noticed that no address in Pointe-Claire Village sold fresh Montreal-style bagels; in March 2021, they bought the nearly century-old building at 35 Cartier Avenue — which had been, over the years, a candle shop, a real estate office, then a travel agency.
The opening came in December 2021, at the height of Omicron, the worst possible moment to launch a neighbourhood business. Word of mouth and takeout orders did the work: a few weeks later, Mike summed up the situation for the Gazette with a laconic "So far, so good." The oven recipe is the one Steve perfected decades earlier; the cream cheeses are made in-house, the sandwiches assembled on the spot.
It is a family house in the literal sense — the homepage shows Mike, Spenser, Amelia and Holland — and the village's tone suits them: «un endroit où tu peux relaxer pis être un local», they write to their neighbours. Thirty years of the trade in the wrist that rolls the dough, and a building from 1920-something that smells of woodsmoke and sesame.