There are few things in this world on which I can claim to be an expert; the bagel is one.
My use of the term “expert” is airtight and narrow. Some with equivalent chops and opinions may refer to themselves as “snobs,” however, that sentiment should be kept far away from bagels. (More on that later.) I come by my expertise the hard way: My family owns a bagel shop back east called Bageleddi’s and I’ve spent half of my life’s summers working bagels. I sometimes dream about making bagels like Jiro does sushi.
I know bagels, which is why I’m so unsatisfied here. I’m shy to admit this, but after three years in the Bay and nine in California, I’m still trying to adjust my East Coast expectations and accept that while not quite up to my personal standards, bagels here are OK, even, in a pinch, edible. It wasn’t until the recent bagel taste tests conducted by The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Standard that I discovered the source of my discontent: The entire conversation around bagels is wrong.
The Chronicle’s food team dug deep into their vertical’s petty cash reserve to blind taste-test bagels from 20 shops across the Bay. (Someone had the cheeky idea to include a Trader Joe’s plastic sleeve, which ranked credibly, an amazing self-own by our city’s hometown paper.) The Standard, similarly, chose 5 of the top rated bagels in SF to test blindly. Spoiler alert: Boichik Bagels, the Berkeley shop celebrated to be the best bagelmaker in the US by the New York Times, performed middlingly.
Both pieces included descriptions and considerations I had never heard in all my years of bageling. Language like “bejeweled” and “toothsome” accessorized their critique. The “crumb,” a gauge wielded within sourdough circles, was a persistent topic. “Glimmers” and “very burnished” could be used to describe antique vases, and also apparently bagels. This vocabulary — and this form of discourse — is not something that should be unleashed on bagels. At my family’s shop this past weekend, I considered sprinkling “crumbs” of this “very burnished” terminology into my conversations with the bagel-making team. It proved nearly impossible, such vocabulary being so outside of bagel culture as I have known it.
The bagel — equal parts form and function — was never meant to be dissected or engaged outside of its context. A bagel is supposed to be a few things: fresh, quick, and cheap. In other words, bagels should be casual and accessible, the language around should be the same. This is an inexpensive breakfast of commuters, hard hatters, and geriatrics. Bagels are street food, bodega fodder, something to bring to a shiva call. Born from prejudice. Easy to make, and make good. The bar is limbo-height. So why are we so hard to please?
Per the Chronicle’s review, over half of the top-ten bagels in San Francisco fell below a seven-point rating. Even the crowned champ, Loveski Deli, hardly scraped together eight points in their ten-point scale. Does this reflect a lack of good bagels or a lapse in awareness? Are San Francisco bagels just okay at their best, or have we heightened our expectations beyond reasonable enjoyment to a very Bay Area game of quantification, optimization, and Instagrammification?
The bagel’s persistent allure is its simplicity. They are a few-ingredient food, best enjoyed with little intervention. They shine in their humility; that’s why, when they’re good, they’re amazing. If I’m seeking a bagel, one basically just needs to exist and cost somewhere in the single digits to land a perfect score that morning. A crunchy exterior, dense innards, and generous seeding are compounding blisses.
The Standard’s review structured the bagel’s evolution in waves similar to coffee. But, unlike coffee, for which plenty of options up and down the spectrum of price and connoisseurship remain, we’ve gutted the bagel middle class save for Noah’s. We are left to choose between the commodified lower tier (Trader Joe’s) or the third wave, otherwise known as the specialty (i.e. long line) wave. Over the weekend, my friend texted me his review of the lauded bagel pop-up Chicken Dog on Cortland: Delicious, but “too bad the line is a million miles long unless it’s Burning Man weekend.”
What we’ve done to the bagel points to a bigger cultural shift. In this hype cyclone of our own making, we’re choking ourselves out of truly accessible food.
Bagels — which are fast and casual — have been wrongly absorbed by the “fast casual” movement. Since “fast casual” dining has become all the rage, it has devolved to be neither: it has become as deliberate and as expensive as fine cuisine even if it’s wrapped in paper and thrown into a brown bag. What once was a single-digit calorically-dense meal eaten on the go is now a 45-minute wait and a $17 tab. I wondered if the absence of those things contributed to the lukewarm ratings from the Chronicle team. In other words, were they less impressed by the bagels without the hype, branding, and long lines that Stockholm syndrome us into enjoyment?
As with coffee, wine, and pizza, I fear we’re tasting bagel hype more than the bagel itself. We believe this bagel that we’ve burned an hour of our time and a significant portion of an hour’s pay on must be the best bagel in town because if it wasn’t, why did we spend so much on it? We literally cannot afford otherwise. Sure, the cost of everything is going up, but the inflation of our expectations has far outpaced economic inflation. These bagels are too big to fail.
I’m still searching for San Francisco’s freshest bagel; nevermind the jewels or burnishments, the toothsomeness and crumbs, I think a bagel, above all, should be fresh. Stripped of its context, sliced and aerated for probably too long, and with the magisterial gaze of a critic, those bagels were dissected without its most appealing quality: the warmth that only a fresh from the oven bagel can bring.
Me? I’m looking forward to the fourth wave of West Coast bagels served with freshness and simplicity. You know, like on the East Coast. Until then, I’ll still happily eat bagels whether they top charts or not.
