On Bagels: A Rant and a Paen
A couple in Brooklyn does right by an institution, when so many others are doing it wrong
🥯 Before we get to our featured heroes, the husband and wife behind a nouveau bagel enterprise in New York City that makes New York bagels, a word—or 1000, if I may.
There are many a nouveau bagel enterprise in New York City; much to my dismay, most of them do not make New York bagels. I’m not sure their customers know this. I’m not even sure they know it themselves.
The disambiguation is particularly important to me because, like the New York bagel, I am a product of this city, and of Eastern European Jewish descent. When I see what looks like an erosion, replacing or forgetting of some aspect of my cultural heritage (not to mention a mainstay of my childhood), it hurts my heart and stirs up a protective surliness. What concerns me is that at the same time as all these sourdough-leavened “chubby pitas” as I like to call them (it’s the “rip and dip” thing that gets to me) continue to pollinate across the five boroughs, actual New York bagels are on the wane. They’re harder to find; good ones, harder still. This is a relatively recent development.
I grew up in the age of the H&H bagel. Founded in 1972 on the Upper West Side by Helmer Toro and his brother-in-law, Hector Hernandez, it was the city’s benchmark (possibly the country’s, too, although that’s arguable), and back then, before it got big and scaled up, it was home to really good bagels. New York bagels. That means leavened with commercial yeast and boiled, for a short time, in water—non-sweetened water—and eggless. I remember having stayed out so late one night, either my senior year of high school, or the summer after my freshman year of college, that while walking home with a few of my friends, we saw the employees of our local H&H (on the Upper East Side) already at work in the wee hours of the morning, prepping for the day ahead. We waved to them, and they offered us freshly made, straight-out-of the oven bagels. Warm. Chewy. Magnificent.
H&H, it should be said, did NOT invent the “water bagel,” as New York bagels are sometimes called. Bagel-type breads—centerless rings of dough of varying shape, size and flavor were a common sight across the Middle East, Northern Africa, Southeastern Europe and Southwestern Asia for at least five centuries before they ever arrived in the United States. Jewish refugees fleeing Poland brought over the template for our local O.G. in the 19th Century. They settled on the Lower East Side, where you would see street peddlers hocking the round, holed breads. Kossar’s, which first opened its doors on 22 Ridge Street in 1936 and relocated to its current address on Grand Street in 1960 is one of few remaining reminders of that establishing era.
Jews began leaving the Lower East Side at the end of the 19th century, moving to other neighborhoods in the city or to the suburbs over time. The bagels went with them and took up more permanent residence in brick-and-mortar shops instead of street-side carts.
Post-war NYC saw a shift in popularity for the Jewish culinary darling. This was when the gentiles “discovered” it. Bagel demand and size grew accordingly, and a new crop of businesses followed: Bagel Oasis in Astoria opened in 1960, sixteen years before H&H’s arrival; Ess-a-Bagel in Midtown East turned up in 1976, and Bagel Point in Greenpoint a year later. Whitestone welcomed Utopia Bagels to Queens in 1981, and a second outpost just landed in Midtown a few months ago. Pick-a-Bagel, which has multiple locations and which I now think of as being old-school, touched down in 1988, as did its competitor, Tal Bagels; Absolute Bagels on the Upper West Side in 1990, and Greenwich Village sweetheart, Murray’s Bagels in 1996. Youngsters probably consider Tompkins Square Bagels something of a classic. It’s only been here since 2011. These are all homes to New York bagels.
But all these places that people are lining up at and going on about on social media? They’re a recent development and they’re selling things that I, personally, don’t associate with bagelry although, yes, I know they are in fact bagels. They are just not my bagels. Okay?
First, before the current mania, came Black Seed in 2017 with its Montreal-style bagels. That means made with eggs and sweetened, usually with honey, treated to a longer boil and baked in wood-fired ovens. They’re also shaped soon after being mixed versus the New Yorkers, which take a cold-ferment rest for at least a day first. The shaping for both subspecies is the same: You roll the dough out, rope-like, and then bring the ends together to form a ring. When they bake, the dough will puff up and the hole will shrink to resemble the bagels we know and love (and it’s cool if you love the Montreal bagels; we can respect each other and agree to disagree).
Now, the bagels of our moment do not fall under either of these denominations. They’re kind of like the knock-off designer bags of bagels. I bemoaned the whole “bagels, bagels everywhere and not a one to eat” of it all to Joe Rosenthal, who is a bagel savant (pizza, too), via DM and asked him why I was starved for good or “true” bagels. I was being an over-dramatic brat and not expecting him to provide an answer. But he did, and he’s right: it’s the pandemic’s fault.
Most of these businesses, whether they originated in Connecticut (PopUp), New York (Apollo) or Los Angeles (Courage), started out as hobbies when we were all going stir crazy during lockdown and its aftermath, and seeking solace in sourdough. It was easy to look up basic bagel recipes developed for home cooks up online. But those are not the same recipes that professionals use; they’re work-around quick-fixes for people who don’t have the necessary equipment, space, time, knowledge or skill. And if you’ve spent quality time with them in the past, or if you grew up in New York City, you’ll detect a major discrepancy between bagels as you thought you knew them and these newfangled imitations.
That’s why I’d mostly given up on the arrivistes. It’s also why I want to tell you about a hope-restoring exception. It’s Bagel Joint, and come December, it will go from a weekly stall at Brooklyn farmers’ markets to its very own Greenpoint storefront. 🥯
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