BAGELS! BAAAAAAGELS! THERE ARE BAGELS NOW!
Everybody who lives in the Bay Area needs to know about this right now: you can finally, finally, finally get a proper bagel, at Beauty’s Bagel Shop on Telegraph.
I really can’t overstate how monumental this is. When we first visited Beauty’s I teared up eating a bagel.
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 cliché, 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.”
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.
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. Bagels, precious bagels, never leave me again.
November 28th, 2012 at 8:53 pm
I don’t even know what this “Montreal-style” business is about. To me it just tastes like a bagel ought to taste. I guess they had to warn people that their bagels weren’t going to taste like everything else that passes for a bagel around here, and “Montreal-style” probably makes for an easier pitch than “everything you think you know about bagels is wrong.”
November 30th, 2012 at 3:16 am
I had a good bagel once. Not in the UK of course – we can mess up any nice food – but when I was in Portland. We decided to go for a walk and pick a breakfast venue when we chanced upon somewhere that looked good. But weirdly, central Portland has no places to eat (or didn’t back then)! So we agreed that we’d keep exploring and definitely pick the next place we found. It was a McDonalds. I vetoed this, since I plan never to eat in a McDonalds ever again if I can avoid it. Then right when we were about to give up, we found Kornblatt’s. I had an onion bagel as a side order to my meal because I was starving by then, but once I tried it I wished I’d just ordered a big plate of bagels!
November 30th, 2012 at 9:03 am
I had a nice bagel in Portland too, at Kenny & Zuke’s. Little trips outside the Bay Area helped sustain me during those long twelve years!
November 30th, 2012 at 9:04 am
Also, on behalf of my country, I apologize for McDonald’s.