When I moved from New York to Minnesota for college, my greatest culture shock was the bread.
I remember the first time I ordered a sandwich on rye, knowing full well that the cafeteria deli counter could not possibly have what I grew up calling “Jewish rye” – a crusty, slightly dense and squishy loaf, often covered in caraway seeds and thinly sliced for pastrami sandwiches or toasting. Still, my morbid fascination faded to simple disappointment when what I was handed was marbled sandwich loaf – the wrong taste, none of the texture.
I came of age during the era of the Atkins diet, when New York’s bread culture was demonized by the very population that was devoted to it. So perhaps I didn’t realize how attached I was to my daily bread. Everyone I knew had a paper bag of bagels in their freezer, and understood the protocol to slice them before freezing (ideally on their second day, when they were no longer fresh enough to be eaten untoasted but not yet rock hard to the point that slicing them was a safety hazard) and to revive them (microwave on a paper towel for a few seconds, then toast). Even as I had watched the institutions of Ashkenazi bread going out of business (first my local bakery, where I had once seen the proprietor snatch a cake out of the hands of a customer she was fighting with and storm off into the back of the shop, then the famous H&H bagels) I still nested in the comfort of dense, Eastern European breads that accompanied most meals. Bagels were for breakfast, lunch, a snack, or a dinner of desperation. Rye, pumpernickel, baguettes, Kaiser rolls, and Italian loaves were the foundations of heavy lunch sandwiches, which had meat, spicy brown mustard, and lettuce and tomato, but never cheese. Tiny versions of these breads accompanied soup, especially at every diner in the city, which coincidentally had exactly the same schedule for soup of the day (Thursday was split pea, matzo ball was always available). Challah was of course for Friday and Saturday, but packaged challah, including mini versions, were a known snacking hazard, around which circled an etiquette of slicing versus pulling off a single knot of the braid. Leaving New York meant leaving not only the ready availability of these breads, but the standards that surrounded them.
I knew I would never find bagels like in New York (let’s be generous and say “the tri-state area”). I was aware enough of the rest of the country, and had already been told so many times by adults I knew, that bagels could only be found in the Greatest City in the World(TM). There were ways of working around this. I always brought bagels back with me when I visited, and asked others coming to see me to bring or send them as well. I learned about acceptable substitutions (Finagle-a-bagel in Boston was great, Einstein Bros is fine). But I also simply learned to live without. It was a big adjustment. I didn’t love bread, I just loved my bread. I didn’t know how to eat the way Minnesotans ate. Boston was close enough to be adaptable but far enough that I never quite settled. When I moved to California that was yet another adaptation. American food culture also changed drastically in those years, with the attack on fast foods, the rise of the farm to table movement, and the explosion of both chef culture and home cooking. The food template I had grown up with in the 90s (soup/salad/sandwich for lunch, protein with vegetables on the side for dinner), which was boring but satisfying, was being upended to eventually arrive in our current moment where it is easy to be vegan and nearly every meal is best served in a bowl.
And then Boichick appeared. The shakeup that was the New York Times declaring that the best bagels in the country could be found in Berkeley, CA cannot be understated. H&H was gone. There were no good bagels to be had in New York anyway. It seemed like everyone had left New York. My family kept telling me that all good bagels were in New Jersey (traitors!) and something about Jersey tomatoes (whatever that is). And here, the Paper of Record (TM) was declaring that the long-running migration of New Yorkers to the Bay Area had finally yielded not only passable but exemplary bagels mere miles from where I had transplanted?!? Everything was on its head.
They were good. They weren’t life-changing. But the culture was all wrong. They were too expensive. I had to wait on line? Outside? For 20+ minutes? I had to plan the day I wanted to pick them up? This was all contrary to the culture. I remember a Time Warner Cable ad that ran when I was a kid of impatient people standing on a long line to use a payphone (a dated but accurate depiction of city life in the 90s) and it said “In New York, wait is a four letter word.” I was very confused, because “wait” literally is spelled with four letters, and at that young age I didn’t understand that “four letter word” meant a curse or a bad word. Eventually I got it, and this ad has burned into my brain. A true New Yorker would never wait. If we know there is going to be a wait, we plan on a waiting activity – “let’s go to that cool restaurant, we’ll put our name down and then walk two blocks to a bar, have a drink for 45 minutes, and by then our table will be ready”.
Now, five years into the bagel renaissance of the West Coast, I am in Seattle, where there are numerous quite good bagels to be had. They are not and cannot be New York bagels, though. For starters, the West Coast bagel is a different kind of bread. The “correct” bread method, typified by the sourdough craze of the early pandemic, is the slow, multi-stage rise from kept starter, to produce a pocketed, fluffy, slightly chewy product with a crisp crust. Ashkenazi bread is not these things. It is dense and squishy, with a distinct crust that is more like a skin (my mom used to peel the skin off of a bagel and put it back in the bag, which we mocked her for relentlessly). West Coast bagels are delicious, but they are different. But beyond the product itself, the culture is necessarily different as well. The craze has died down, so wait times are less, but people are still willing to wait without multitasking, because this is the West Coast and everyone doesn’t move through life like a shark, saying things like “you can sleep when you’re dead”.
Perhaps the most disruptive element of West Coast bagel culture, though, is when bagels are available. Bagels are a breakfast food here, served as sandwiches (typically toasted) with a variety of toppings, and only in the morning. I’m not saying no New York bodega has ever made a bacon egg and cheese with a bagel, I’m just saying that’s not the default (fun fact: my Colorado-born husband used to order a bagel with cream cheese and egg and it always sowed confusion). Few bagel places are open after 1, and the ones that are have been cleaned out of everything except the strangest flavors (no one wants a pumpernickel blueberry, Blazing Bagels). I have also recently discovered that bagels are largely understood as a weekend breakfast food, and so most of the popular stores are closed on Tuesdays. I don’t know what to do with this. I want a bagel for lunch in the middle of the week, when I have no capacity to make complex decisions or prepare lunch from home anymore.
Recently, a new place opened in University Village (an upscale outdoor mall) called Hey Bagel. Hey Bagel offers the Disneyland version of the New York Bagel Experience (TM). They don’t toast, they don’t make sandwiches. In the style of H&H, you ask what’s hot and you can get it with a package of cream cheese (although these are small and available in several flavors, not a brick of Philadelphia original). You’re mean to tear off bites of hot bagel and drag it through the cheese, like the bread and dip it is. Kenji Lopez-Alt shared an Instagram Reel of Hey Bagel and now they can’t keep up with demand.
Will West Coast bagel culture ever recapture late-20th century New York? Almost certainly not. It’s still interesting to see the push/pull of these two cultures trying to find an equilibrium where everyone can enjoy delicious baked goods. For myself, I’ve accepted the regionalism of food. I make the most of every trip home, even if it means I have to go to New Jersey (or settle for Tal). I make some things myself (mostly chopped liver, though occasionally bagels or rye). I don’t want to be able to find exactly the same culture in Seattle as in Manhattan; they’re different places, and there’s a reason I left. It was good to have the push to try different foods. It’s good for me to understand the regional character of where I live now, and to see clearly the regional character of where I’m from, not as the default, but as another way to be. It’s even highlighted for me the Seattle-New York connection, the smoked and cured salmon industry (and Atlantic salmon cannot compete with Sockeye). And, perhaps the truest element of New York culture, I need something to complain about.