{"id":2233,"date":"2012-11-28T20:49:56","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T03:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=2233"},"modified":"2012-11-28T20:55:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T03:55:30","slug":"bagels-baaaaaagels-there-are-bagels-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=2233","title":{"rendered":"BAGELS! BAAAAAAGELS! THERE ARE BAGELS NOW!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everybody who lives in the Bay Area needs<\/em> to know about this right now: you can finally, finally, finally get a proper bagel, at Beauty’s Bagel Shop<\/a> on Telegraph.<\/p>\n

I really can’t overstate how monumental this is. When we first visited Beauty’s I teared up<\/em> eating a bagel.<\/p>\n

You see, the bagels around here are shit. They’re soft, breadlike substances—buns with a hole punched in the middle. This is a known fact, and everybody in the Bay Area is heartily sick of hearing East Coast transplants complaining about the bagels. When I first moved here twelve years ago and didn’t know that it was such a clich\u00e9, I remember telling my boss that I’d had a string of really rotten bagels and did he know where I could find a decent one? He looked at me scornfully and said, “You’re in California now. Eat croissants.”<\/p>\n

But it took me a long time to give up on bagels. I just didn’t believe that in a city with such fantastic food it could really be impossible to find a passable bagel. I stood in line for hours at all the little delis around town. Some San Franciscans swear by Katz Bagels, some by House of Bagels: these bagels, like all the others, are a cruel mockery of the form. Some people said it had to do with the water.<\/p>\n

And maybe my twelve years of privation can explain why I nearly wept when Beauty’s served me a bagel. A lovely, dense, chewy bagel. It’s been so long.<\/em> Bagels, precious bagels, never leave me again.<\/p>\n