“You have to go to Kettleman’s.”
When I moved to Ottawa for my undergrad in 2019, one of the first restaurant recommendations I received from locals was Kettleman’s Bagel Co. on Bank St. I don’t remember any actual reviews of the bagels, just the ambiance.
“It’s open 24 hours a day,” “It’s perfect for when you’re drunk,” “It’s an Ottawa staple.”
I wasn’t too impressed when I tried a Kettleman’s bagel for the first time on a first date. But their banana bread was excellent on a 2 a.m. journey with friends following a Panda game afterparty. And I understand the cultural hype. It’s nice to have somewhere consistent. Now, seeing the Kettleman’s logo instantly reminds me of late-night antics with friends and some decent bagels.
I’m not entirely sure how I got the idea to spend 24 hours eating as many bagels as I can in Ottawa’s staple bagel shop for a story, but it happened, and here I am. Mostly, I did it because my friends doubted me (or at least questioned my well-being), and I wanted to prove them wrong.
I spent 24 hours in Kettleman’s and here’s what I learned.
10:42 a.m., Friday
I walk into Kettleman’s at Lansdowne on Bank St. at 9:50 a.m. on Jan. 27, cheeks frozen from the walk across the bridge over the almost-frozen Rideau canal from my house. I order two bagels with cream cheese—one sesame, one blueberry—and a black tea, and sit down to wait.
The buzzer startles me when it starts vibrating on the table to alert me my order is ready. Somehow after eight hours of sleep, I’m still tired. The bagels are good and warm and I eat them as I watch two men enjoy their breakfasts and lean into their conversation with every bite. Songs from SZA’s latest album, SOS, practically shout over the loudspeaker I have mistakenly positioned myself directly under.
🥯Bagels eaten: 2.
1:04 p.m., Friday
Three of my friends come to join me and simultaneously ask if I’m okay. The answer? Probably not. But I’ve committed now.
I follow them to the counter and buy a bag of a dozen assorted bagels and one vegetarian bagel sandwich. For a moment I wonder if the woman at the counter recognizes I have now had both breakfast and lunch without moving from the seat I’ve chosen. She looks like she recognizes me for a second and then hands me my bagels without saying a word.
🥯Bagels eaten: 4.
3:22 p.m. Friday
The same man has come into the dining area to clean the space at least twice now. Someone has left a Tim Horton’s coffee cup on top of the silver trays piled high atop the garbage can.
I had a poppy seed bagel at around 2 p.m. and tried to eat a garlic one shortly after. It’s now nearly an hour and a half later and I still can’t finish the garlic. As much as I love garlic, it’s pretty overwhelming for a singular dry bagel, and I’m beginning to realize starting this by eating an entire bagel sandwich was a mistake.
Maybe I’m not the bottomless bagel pit I thought I was.
🥯Bagels eaten: 5.5.
The man who cleans the dining area refuses to make eye contact with me. He lifts the trays but leaves the coffee cup. I finished the garlic bagel and had a delicious herb and cheddar experience.
I’m wondering if the employees on the other side of the glass separating the cash register and the dining area are talking about me. It’s an interesting feeling, not knowing whether you’re being observed. I’m not sure which I’d prefer. I think I’d like to be noticed, but something tells me I’m not noticeable at all. Through shift changes and bagel orders I’m just another face.
🥯Bagels eaten: 7.
7:27 p.m., Friday
Googled “bread psychosis real.” Had more bagels. Lemon cranberry. Coffee cup still there.
🥯Bagels eaten: 9.
7:37 p.m., Friday
I initially planned to eat 24 bagels in the 24 hours I expect to spend here, but I think I’d probably vomit first. The goal has been (begrudgingly) lowered to sticking out the 24 hours. I’m more than a third through my bagel journey and I’m beginning to hope the employees kick me out, but it seems like they’ve barely noticed me.
Groups come and go. The abandoned coffee cup and I are the only constants. I hear snippets of conversations. “I’m sorry I wake up every day and choose to be a homosexual,” someone jokes to their friends. A boy and his parents discuss how best to hide bags of Skittles inside his coat to sneak them into an event—a movie or a hockey game, I couldn’t hear. The dinner rush ends and people clear out.
I think I’ve finally been noticed. Someone with a beard rolling dough into circles keeps looking in my direction. Someone new comes in to clean out the garbages. They also avoid eye contact with me, but they take the coffee cup.
🥯Bagels eaten: 10.
9:09 p.m., Friday
My friends took bets on what the hardest time would be. One said he thought I’d struggle the most between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. I think the evening is the hardest. I’m tired and full and think my friends are done visiting. I text my mom and tell her what I’m doing in the hopes that she’ll tell me I’m silly and should go home and sleep.
“Are you in any danger?” she responds. “If not, then you should go for it.”
I can’t believe the only things keeping me at a bagel shop are spite for the people who said I couldn’t make it 24 hours and a text from my mom.
10:34 p.m., Friday
I can tell when the hockey game at Lansdowne ends because the restaurant fills with people in jerseys and red scarves. One confused patron wears a red coat with a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey underneath.
Another, a boy I’d guess is in first-year university, sits down with his friends. “I just made eye contact with that lady in her car and it was so awkward,” he says. “She like, stared into my eyes.” He’s trying to be funny, obviously to impress the girl in his group sitting across from him and touching her Ugg boot to his shin. He keeps making excuses to grab her hands. “They’re so dry,” “she scratches them too much,” “look at her nails.”
“Why would you tip here?” the boy asks his friends at one point in this conversation. I wonder why I’ve latched on to him in particular. Is it because he’s the loudest? Because he’s the closest to me? Or because I’m deliriously sleepy.
“You know if you worked on like a construction job site? And you had to get up at five in the morning? Here would be the perfect place to come,” he says.
Another girl in his group ignores him and starts talking about her family’s collection of limited edition drinking glasses. I like her.
11:00 p.m., Friday
I decide I’m tired of being a fly on the wall and ask the cashier, Roger Tall, for an interview when I get another cup of tea. He says the shop usually calms down around 1:00 a.m. and someone can speak to me then.
The group of supposed first-years leave after a lengthy, but awfully middling discussion on the ethics of kink and the Fifty Shades of Grey movie adaptation.
A boy comes up to me and asks me where I bought my pants (double-fronted carpenter jeans from the sale rack at Urban Outfitters). I feel fashionable. He tells me he wants them for work and points to his own, almost identical, forest green Carhartts. I think he’s the first stranger who has really noticed me. I wonder how many others have noticed my pants, or the book I’m reading (“The Skin We’re In” by Desmond Cole), or the bags beneath my eyes.
12:01 a.m., Saturday
“Any chance that I could have a piece of dough?” a group of four teens run up to the plexiglass where another employee is rolling out bagels, one after another. He laughs and happily tears off a piece of dough for each of them as they raise their hands in excitement and anticipation. “Thank you,” they squeal and run to their table to join their other friends. One of them says something exciting and suddenly they’re all high-fiving. Their group grows until they’ve pulled up extra chairs and are sitting two-to-a-seat at two tables designed to seat six.
Tall, the cashier, later tells me it’s probably not a good idea for them to eat the dough. Raw egg and flour probably isn’t a great combination for a digestive system. Apparently, people ask to do it often enough that employees just hand it out without so much as a second thought.
It’s the busiest the shop has been today and I’m the most excited about people interacting I’ve been so far. Until this point, it all seemed so insular. Now, people are making friends, nibbling on raw dough and erupting in laughter.
I take back everything I said about the teenagers. They are loud and obnoxious and I hate them and they just threw a chunk of bagel across the dining room.
I turn to the woman next to me when she asks if we should ask them to quiet down. “I’m going to talk to them,” she says.
“If you guys don’t shut up I’m going to call the cops,” she shouts. She doesn’t want to be named. She worries someone from work might recognize her name—she works with children.
The teens laugh and quiet down marginally. “If your eyes are too big for your sockets get the fuck out,” one of them yells a few minutes later. Another throws a french fry at the woman who shushed them. It hits her friend. I’m mostly confused by why the teens have fries at a bagel shop.
The woman tells the manager, the kids leave.
“They can’t leave, their parents have to pick them up,” Veronica Carvalho, a patron—and coincidentally one of my classmates—says to the remaining customers as she walks in. The teens jeer and make faces at customers through the windows before leaving.
2:03 a.m., Saturday
Tall, the cashier, finally has time to sit down with me for a quick chat. He’s a second-year economics student at the University of Ottawa. He has worked overnights at Kettleman’s since he came back to Ottawa in September.
His advice for surviving the overnights? Get lots of sleep during the day. He usually sleeps between his morning classes and his evening shifts.
He says tonight was one of the rowdiest he’s seen. Usually there’s the bar crowd on Friday nights, who can get a little loud, but people don’t often throw food. Once, a few weeks ago, a baker and a patron had a confrontation that resulted in both front doors shattering. He doesn’t know the story.
“I think it’s worse when there are more of them,” he says.
I ask him if he has ever eaten the raw dough, like the rowdy teenagers. He says no, so I ask him if he ever would. “Maybe,” he laughs. I ask if he can get us some to try right now and he says yes. We walk over to the kitchen. He slips on a pair of gloves and tears off a healthy chunk of dough for me to try. I ask him if he’s having some and he says no. I try a tiny piece and realize it’s sweeter than I expected. I roll the rest in my hands like Play-Doh for a few hours until it dries out.
In the past hour I’ve been told I go to a party school, money is the only thing that matters, money doesn’t matter, everyone drinks water inconsistently and that I have to listen to more male country artists. A friend came by and we chatted for a few hours.
🥯Bagels eaten: 10.5.
4:16 a.m. Saturday
A woman comes in wearing a gorgeous fluffy coat and asks my friend and me not to tell anyone she is smoking. She’s in socks, no shoes. One of her eyes is swollen and the white is flooded with red. One of the bakers buys her food and asks her to put the cigarettes away.
When she doesn’t stop, staff say they have called the police (they haven’t). She leaves and takes the passenger seat of a delivery driver’s car while he’s inside fulfilling an order.
5:10 a.m. Saturday
Staff get the woman out of the delivery driver’s car and an employee, Said Hafidi, offers to Uber home with her. When she was unable to give him an address she would be safe at, she ends up leaving on foot.
Hafidi has worked here five years and says this happens occasionally. Someone comes into the shop having a hard time, looking for a place to stay. Employees will offer food and a warm place to sit unless the person is smoking or being aggressive with customers or employees.
Hafidi adds a few weeks ago a woman sat outside, so intoxicated she couldn’t make her way home. He called an Uber for her. Several days later she came back to thank him personally. He was shocked she remembered him.
“We try to be nice,” Hafidi says. “We’re human.”
I realize the employees noticed me the entire time I’ve been here.
Nour Sakhniya, a social worker and Afghan immigrant who has been in Canada for about a decade, watched the woman leave. He has been working a second job at Kettleman’s to make ends meet for about a year. He called in a wellness check for the woman in socks to the Ottawa Police Service but the woman left before they arrived.
“We don’t need to have homeless people in Canada,” he says, adding that he wishes government funding would support jobs and social services, rather than putting cash into newcomers’ pockets.
I’m surprised by the amount of thought these men put into helping people who come in. I’m surprised that they give up quiet time on their breaks to sit and speak with me.
7:10 a.m. Saturday.
Sakhniya’s shift ends and he buys me a chocolatine and iced coffee without prompting. He probably saw me trying to keep my head up as my vision blurred from fatigue. I thank him for the gesture and he goes home. I stay. Only a few hours left. I eat one last bagel—whole wheat.
🥯Bagels eaten: 11.5
I’ve made it through the night. I’ve done it. I walk out to Maggie Rogers’ and Zach Bryan’s Dawns blasting through my headphones. The night shift staff who were so friendly to me have all gone home, and I leave without commotion.
As I walk across the bridge to my apartment, grooving to my new favourite song and surviving on caffeine and bread alone, I think to myself, “All these people around me don’t know I’ve spent 24 hours in Kettlemans. Nerds.”
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
