![]() A few years back, Murray's relented, and now you get to ruin your bagel, just the way you like it. But as anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a New York bagel shop can tell you, the customer is always right, and possibly will also fight you, and everyone in the store for good measure. ![]() Give this Greenwich Village institution some credit-for the longest time, they fought back. Used to be, according to conventional wisdom, that only a second-rate operation would allow such a travesty the best bagel bakers took too much pride in their work for such foolishness to go unchecked. There was a time when you could separate the best shops in New York from the rest by the presence of a commercial-grade toaster behind the counter. Saveur Magazine raised eyebrows a few years ago, calling this one of the finest in the entire country-they were right. (There are three Maine shops on this list, and there probably should have been more.) When Allen Smith opened up shop in Lewiston the better part of a decade ago, he wasn't the first to tinker with the notion of a naturally leavened, long-fermented, and wood-fired bagel, but these days, Forage, which has since branched out to Portland's Munjoy Hill neighborhood, makes Maine's best bagel right now, gorgeously light and beautifully structured, with an exterior that snaps and crackles like popcorn. For a state with a scattered population less than Manhattan's, this is a group of people that is absolutely spoiled, and certainly for bagels: There isn't another off-the-beaten-path state quite so excited by the idea of the reinvention of the bagel. But the doughy, chewy, shiny, boiled-then-baked, fresh, crunchy crusted bagel that Americans know and love is a Jewish and New York City creation.What can be said about Maine's enviable baking culture, except that if you know, you know, and if you don't, take a little road trip. Montreal has their own (also truly excellent) signature style. ![]() No, the bagel that we know and love today belongs deep in the veins of New Yorkers and Jews. The Polish and Eastern European bagels they were based on were much smaller and harder - and they definitely never put lox or a schmear of cream cheese on their bagel, as New Yorkers started to do in the following decades. A lox and egg sandwich from High Street on Hudson. It was cheap, it was reminiscent of their old country, but it was uniquely New York. The bagels were looped and stacked onto sticks and carried through the streets of the Lower East Side, selling out quickly. And they were all so obsessed with bagels, that the bagel bakers became unionized, with almost 300 bakers represented and coveted membership passing only through the sons of current members. When my great-grandfather escaped Russia by leaving behind everything he knew to come on a boat to New York at the age of 12, he was met by a teeming population of like-minded Jews. On the contrary, it is an ode to the hard-working bakers who have taken their bagel knowledge (learned mostly from New York) and flung it further afield so that more people can experience the pure joy of a top-notch bagel. If you actually read past the headline, you might notice that the article itself isn't actually about ranking bagels. Takeout from the Upper East Side Russ and Daughters Café on a picnic table in Central Park: bagels, bialy, whitefish salad and their incomparable Hot Smoke/Cold Smoke salmon. Obviously, as someone who loves her local bagels, I was offended on behalf of my beloved city but as the headline kept glaring out at me across my social media feeds, it started to irk me for different reasons. ![]() As a Jewish woman living in New York, I couldn't even count how many people sent the article to me (usually accompanied by a lot of choice expletives). Now is probably not the time to pit restaurants against each other … one would think.īut then, on Monday, The New York Times published an article by California restaurant critic Tejal Rao with a headline that declared, “The Best Bagels are In California (Sorry New York)," and the internet lost its collective mind. And this week, help is finally on the way in the form of a $28.6 billion grant program, built into the American Rescue Plan, specifically for struggling restaurants and bars. For the past year, restaurants have been begging for help amid unprecedented shutdowns and a historic era of racial and cultural reckoning.
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