Bagels are cooked in firewood ovens. And they are certainly not "fluffy"!
Best bagels are in Montreal.
Around here we have a nice bagel shop also. Look for "Bagel Maguire Cafe" in your search engine of choice ... you can also find pictures of their big firewood oven.
I've never heard of anyone outside Toronto advertising "Toronto-style bagels"
The parent comment may be worded obnoxiously but it has a grain of truth.
The only "grain of truth" in the parent comment is how it shows that there are plenty of people who can't figure out how to talk about what they like without denigrating stuff they don't, for no good reason. Maybe Montreal bagels and New York bagels are simply different, and that's okay? Not everything has to be a competition.
My problem with 'Toronto-style bagels' is not that they are bad, but that they are not really 'a thing'. Upon rereading the article, I now realize nobody was making that claim.
Montreal-style bagels, on the other hand, are very much a real thing. They have a singular reputation within Canada. That's a mildly interesting fact, hopefully. No reason anyone else has to like them.
And I swear to god did I just google my way to an airport cafe
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/montreal-bagel...
and this, from an AI:
"... The dough is boiled in honey water, hand-rolled and baked in a wood-fired oven; it contains malt but no salt or eggs, giving a crisper, sweeter, flatter and denser bagel than New York's. The texture difference traces back to which region of Poland each city's immigrants came from. "