The Holy Cream
21 sept. 2023
Young Alma entrepreneur Vincent Lavoie never ceases to amaze us with his ambitious project to give a second life to the old Isle-Maligne church in Alma. In addition to the 10-room hotel section, called the Autel-Relais, its food court on the ground floor is richer than ever.
"Initially, the restaurant part, the Saint-Crème, was just a dairy open during the summer. What we are doing with it is a real bagel factory, open year-round," explains Vincent Lavoie. The goal is simple: to offer breakfasts and dinners at the counter for hotel guests, but also for the entire regional clientele, more and more of whom are frequenting the Saint-Crème.
With these bagels, the owner explains that he will be able to develop and diversify his breakfast and dinner offerings. Saint-Crème can now offer the classic bagels with cream cheese, smoked salmon, smoked meat and garnishes for breakfast, but we are promised some nice surprises!
To do this, the owner has just installed a bagel oven in the kitchen. “But not just any oven,” says Vincent Lavoie, “a real stone bagel oven measuring about 2 meters by 3, weighing more than 6,000 kilos. We even had to deconstruct a wall of the church, rebuild it and reinforce the floor to support our behemoth.”
This acquisition fits perfectly into the Saint-Crème restoration project. The owner wants all the food offerings to be authentic and of quality. For a few weeks now, they have been producing delicious brioches exactly like our grandmothers used to make them. They look like they came straight out of a 1950s kitchen.
For bagels, it's the same. Vincent Lavoie spared no expense. It's not just the oven. Everything is there: the chef trained for it, the raw materials and the recipe, 100% authentic bagel!
“We’re really happy,” Vincent Lavoie tells us. “We had several regular customers taste them and we refined the recipe until they gave us a perfect score. They are preservative-free and fresh daily. We make traditional ones: plain, with sesame seeds, with poppy seeds, and we’re going to add a different flavour every week, as we do for all our other products. People will no longer have to stock up on bagels when they go to major centres,” continues Vincent Lavoie.
An open house event is organized between 1:00 pm and 4:00 pm on Friday and Saturday, September 29 and 30. An excellent opportunity to come and taste all the Saint-Crème products and also to visit the hotel rooms, upstairs. The whole team is ready to welcome visitors and tell them about the fabulous adventure of the Autel-Relais and the many challenges that the team had to overcome to marry the old and the new.
Rest assured, Saint-Crème has not forgotten its primary vocation as a dairy, which will return every summer, but until then, you can stop by to taste its bagels, sandwiches and lots of treats on site. Of course, you can have them packaged to eat at home!