Why Is It So Hard To Get a Great Bagel In California?

You can overthink the bagel concept. Innovation, disruption and scale are not necessarily its friends. JL



Elizabeth Weil reports in the New York Times:

All of this makes you wonder if the problem is really cultural, if California bagel bakers are too hooked on innovation and culinary self-expression for the bagel’s good.

One day in February, a notice appeared on the website San Francisco Eater. An unknown outfit called Eastside Bagels was hosting a pop-up at a Mission District bar called Dear Mom. One morning only: actual New York bagels, with schmear, lox or pastrami. Doors open at 11:30 a.m.

But even before Sonya Haines pulled out her slicing knife, she was in well over her head. She had 10 dozen bagels (five plain, five everything) overnighted to herself, and by 10:30 a.m. there were more than 200 people standing on the 16th Street sidewalk in the rain. When you offer an East Coast Jewish transplant the possibility of a fresh New York bagel on a Sunday morning, you arouse a lot of yearning. Californians, spoiled by Platonic produce, excellent burritos and fine-art coffee, have a tormented relationship with this particular food item. Even expert local bakers, like Joe Wolf, the owner of Marla Bakery, concede, ‘‘San Francisco has struggled with the bagel.’’

The New York bagel, as everybody knows, is an institution. No bagel definition will satisfy all, but for starters, let’s just say: A good one requires a chewy interior with blisters, called fisheyes, on a shiny, crispy crust. Making a bagel requires several steps: Hand-roll enriched dough; let it rise, or proof; retard the rising in a refrigerator; boil briefly in malted water; then bake. Mitchell Davis, the executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation — a man who is currently living in Milan and who almost came to tears one recent Sunday morning at the thought of his husband back home in Gramercy Park, reading the wedding announcements and eating an everything from Brooklyn Bagel — believes that the secret to a good bagel is technique, the length of time, say, for proofing and boiling, more than the type of water or flour. Achieving the right crust is foremost. ‘‘That’s the hardest thing, that outer crunch,’’ Davis told me. He recalled that his father described the bagel as ‘‘a doughnut dipped in cement.’’

“So he wasn’t a fan?’’ I asked.

‘‘No!’’ Davis said. ‘‘He loved them.’’

The obvious saviors in San Francisco’s bagel situation should have been Evan Bloom and Leo Beckerman — occasional chefs at the Hillel chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, and the owners of San Francisco’s relatively new and much beloved Jewish deli, Wise Sons, which opened in 2012. Many already believed Wise Sons made the best deli rye west of the Hudson River. The restaurant sold so much house-made pastrami that, after several years of Bloom’s transporting the smoky, fatty meat to catering events, his girlfriend could no longer stand the smell and insisted he buy a new car. A disclaimer on the menu reads NOT A NEW YORK DELI. Bloom and Beckerman added the notice just a few months after opening because even though the place was packed, customers groused that Wise Sons’ offerings didn’t taste like the food they grew up eating on the East Coast. ‘‘Our kugel is definitely not as good as your bubbe’s kugel,’’ Beckerman told me, sitting on the bench where he used to sleep after working 20-hour shifts. ‘‘The actual food we serve is better,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m very proud of our food. But it’s never going to match the memory of what your grandmother made you between the ages of 5 and 15.’’

Bloom, 29, grew up in Ventura, Calif., the great-grandson of Jewish deli owners from Swampscott, Mass. Beckerman, 31, was raised in Los Angeles, attended Jewish day school for a couple of years and, as a child of a feminist mother, made what he describes as unimpressive dinners for his family once a week. A few years after graduating from Berkeley, the two started working on cooking projects — in particular, on perfecting the kosher pastrami sandwich that Bloom’s father remembered from his youth but could no longer find, a sandwich that Bloom eventually realized ‘‘may or may not exist.’’ Then, in 2010, Bloom was laid off from his job as a construction manager, and Bloom’s brother, who was enrolled in Harvard Business School, started sending Bloom and Beckerman business plans. The two worked up recipes for rye bread, bialys and smoked salmon. Then, in January 2011, like seemingly everybody else in San Francisco, they opened a pop-up restaurant — one that didn’t sell bagels.

Wise Sons deli now occupies a former taco joint on the corner of 24th and Shotwell Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District. They also have an outpost at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. From the start, Beckerman says: ‘‘We knew making a bagel would open us up to so much criticism. There isn’t another product as personal as the bagel. It was already struggle enough.’’

Still, by mid-2014, Bloom, the more optimistic and heavily bearded of the Wise Sons pair, was lobbying his partner. ‘‘We need a great bagel,’’ Bloom said to Beckerman every day for a month. ‘‘How hard can it be?’’

Photo

The elusive New York City bagel. Credit Tom Schierlitz for The New York Times. Food stylist: Jamie Kimm.

The bagel, originally from Poland, has done poorly in the diaspora from New York. In the late 1920s in New Haven, a Polish immigrant named Harry Lender opened one of the first bagel shops outside New York City. Over the years, he grew tired of slow weekdays followed by hectic Saturday nights to meet the Sunday-morning rush. So in the early 1950s, without telling his customers, he started baking and freezing bagels through the week and selling them as fresh on Sunday. Nobody noticed for nearly two years. Lender then started selling them frozen and presliced in grocery stores. By 1984, when the Lender family sold the business to Kraft Foods, they were making more than two million bagels a day. To celebrate with their sales reps, Murray and Marvin Lender, two of Harry’s sons, walked Len, an eight-foot-tall Lender’s bagel, down the aisle to meet Phyl, his Kraft Philadelphia cream cheese bride.

Further bagel debasement followed. In 1995 Boston Chicken, which owned a string of restaurants, mostly in New England, saw an opening in the breakfast market, to compete with the doughnut. The company started buying mom-and-pop bagel bakeries, and the resulting Einstein Noah Restaurant Group now owns 852 bagel shops in 42 states. A very nice team of marketing and R. & D. people told me that the company, which uses steam ovens for its Noah’s bagels instead of boiling and baking separately, prides itself on its innovative flavors, like Cheddar jalapeño, as well as what it calls its ‘‘traditional’’ ones, like . . . blueberry.

The San Francisco bagel famine broke for a short time in 2011, when four former Dartmouth students started an outfit called Schmendricks. (The name means ‘‘stupid person’’ in Yiddish.) They decided to follow tech start-up protocol — ‘‘to A/B test our way to a perfect bagel,’’ says Dan Scholnick, one of the schmendricks who not at all stupidly kept his day job as a venture capitalist. By November 2011 they had a product ready to take to beta. So Schmendricks posted an announcement on Facebook and Twitter and placed a sign in front of Faye’s Video and Espresso Bar, across the street from Bi-Rite Market, a sort of Dean & DeLuca of San Francisco. Then, on the appointed morning, they showed up with four dozen bagels — and found a line stretching down the block. The bagel columnist for J., a Northern California Jewish weekly, described the product as ‘‘everything you could ever want.’’ But the glory didn’t last. Before Schmendricks opened a storefront, its bagel disappeared. ‘‘We were never going to grow the way a top-tier tech company is going to grow,’’ Scholnick told me, stating the obvious. Besides, after months of hand-rolling, Schmendricks’ primary baker discovered she had a gluten intolerance.

Other bagels emerged, none as beloved. After Dan Graf, 30, quit his job at Saul’s deli in Berkeley, he decided to take on the challenge. His boss at Saul’s, who trained under Alice Waters, encouraged Graf to go to New York and learn the bagel craft as most chefs learn technique — by apprenticing at a master’s knee. But instead, Graf, who majored in genetics, took a scientific approach, turning his apartment into a lab for isolating variables (proofing times, retarding times, baking times, ratio of malt to boiling water). He opened Baron Baking a few months later, when he achieved a dense midsize bagel he liked. He supplies Saul’s and does a brisk wholesale business, but when I presented one of his bagels to an East Coast transplant, he looked at it and said, ‘‘I don’t even want to taste it — I know it will make me sad.’’

Joe Wolf, of Marla, says his partner and wife, Amy Brown, did not refer back to any primary bagel source, either. ‘‘Amy never tasted a bagel and said, ‘I want to make a bagel like that!’ ’’ Wolf told me. What she makes now is a truly accomplished round bread product, with a tight crumb and a hint of sourness. Even Beauty’s Bagel Shop, which had been supplying Wise Sons, did not try to produce the New York bagel so many California Jews crave. Instead, the owners, Amy Remsen and Blake Joffe, veered toward the Montreal bagel, which is fine but more or less to a New York bagel what Chicago deep-dish pizza is to New York pizza. (A Montreal bagel, which is smaller and sweeter than a New York bagel, is baked in a wood oven and lacks salt.)

All of this makes you wonder if the problem is really cultural, if California bagel bakers are too hooked on innovation and culinary self-expression for the bagel’s good. Mitchell Davis of the Beard Foundation believes that the bagel, like ketchup, is a product ill served by current food trends. ‘‘The effect of artisanship does not always produce a better result,’’ he told me. What’s more, he says, an up-and-coming San Francisco baker may have a hard time realizing his fantasy of learning how to make a New York bagel from an authentic Jewish source. Not that it matters. Bagel baking remains the province of immigrants, even if it’s no longer particularly the province of Jews. Among the great bagel bakers right now is Samak Thongkrieng, who owns Absolute Bagel on Broadway near 107th Street. Thongkrieng came to New York from Thailand in 1980 and worked for three years at Ess-a-Bagel, considered by many to produce some of the best bagels in the city.

Late last year, Beckerman finally relented and agreed to make a bagel, much to the relief of Wise Sons’ fans. He continued, however, to worry about how those same customers would behave once they had an actual, not idealized, bagel in hand. Beckerman told me that his customers seem to feel entitled to express their disappointment, as if eating at Wise Sons were like eating at a family member’s home. About a year after the opening, a woman came in, ordered the matzo-ball soup, asked to speak to the chef and then proceeded to tell Beckerman that though his was O.K., it could be better. She returned a few days later with her own matzo-ball soup, as promised, as well as her specialty white-chocolate-and-cranberry mandelbrot. Beckerman sat down with her and ate.

Photo

Leo Beckerman, left, and Evan Bloom of Wise Sons. Credit Molly Matalon for The New York Times

This insistence on the part of customers to make the Wise Sons experience personal rather than transactional makes sense to Rabbi Michael Lezak, who lives in Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and leads Congregation Rodef Sholom. ‘‘San Francisco is a radically assimilated community,’’ Lezak explains. ‘‘So there’s something about being in an out, public Jewish space that’s rare here. We don’t have a Jewish neighborhood. Wise Sons serves a purpose for people who fled the East Coast.”

In New York, where he attended rabbinical school in the late 1990s, Lezak lived on First Avenue across the street from Ess-a-Bagel, which, he says, ‘‘lit me up in beautiful ways and left an imprint on my soul.’’ No California bagel, at present, affects Lezak in that way, but he is touched by Wise Sons. ‘‘Their challah is off the charts,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s a language for Shabbat.’’ Connecting to religion through food may be even more important for secular Jews. ‘‘Food is an easy vehicle; it’s a great first step,’’ Lezak says. ‘‘Religion needs to lead to something bigger, something outside yourself. But food can resuscitate your dead grandmother.’’ It evokes the past. ‘‘If we make a commitment to meet for lunch once a week at Wise Sons, you tell me about who is alive in your family and who is not, what your life is about,’’ he says. ‘‘That summons us toward something greater.’’ Many Jews, Lezak thinks, have arrested religious development — ‘‘their bar or bat mitzvah might be the last great religious experience they had,’’ he says. ‘‘They’re 13 years old, Jewishly.’’ Temple may be intimidating — not so a deli. As Beckerman notes, ‘‘We’re not asking about God here.’’

Beckerman destroyed two mixers in trying to perfect the bagel. But after just three test batches, Bloom said: ‘‘Go no further! That’s it!’’ So Beckerman started practicing the production of bagels at scale — first four dozen, then eight, up to his test run of 25 dozen, which he baked in Wise Sons’ commissary kitchen, on Mission and 22nd Street the morning of Jan. 28. The following day, Wise Sons planned to drop bags of bagels and cream cheese at its big San Francisco catering accounts, like Airbnb. The day after that, bagels for all.

That evening, Beckerman’s and Bloom’s phones started ringing. A text message arrived: ‘‘Bakery on fire. Not a joke.’’ Bloom set down the chopped liver he was serving to Warriors season-ticket holders at an event on the Embarcadero. By the time he’d raced up and over Potrero Hill to the three-story mixed-use building, he could smell the smoke. On Mission Street, along with a cluster of fire trucks, Bloom found Beckerman and their bakers, still in aprons, watching flames erupt from the building’s roof.

The fire, which started elsewhere in the building, was devastating; one of the building’s tenants died, and six others were hospitalized. The next day, Bloom and Beckerman came back to salvage a few things. Beckerman grabbed the rye starter and his brother’s bar mitzvah certificate. Bloom focused on the shorted-out machine that they had used to shape bagels.

This past spring, I drove with Bloom and Beckerman to look at a potential new space for both baking and selling bagels, near the corner of Geary and Fillmore Streets, a spot much closer to Congregations Sherith Israel and Emanu-El than their original deli. Rabbi Lezak believes a worthy bagel would make Jewish life in the Bay Area more complete. ‘‘My hope and prayer is that someday I’m schlepping into San Francisco on Sunday mornings for a bagel,’’ he told me.

The space turned out to be a rundown former sushi restaurant. Beckerman stared at the stained red walls and peeling linoleum floor. Ever optimistic, he said, ‘‘You gotta have vision to feed your dreams!’’

But not too much vision. After all, creativity is not the bagel’s friend. ‘‘The bagel is the Jewish madeleine,’’ says Niki Russ Federman, a fourth-generation owner of the New York appetizing store Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side. ‘‘You bite into it, and you’re reminded of where you came from and who you are.’’