The Holey Grail
Molly Pepper Steemson searches for London's best bagel. Photographs by Aura Silver Hope.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s guide-essay is by Molly Pepper Steemson. A month ago Molly proposed an idea to us: before she left the country at the end of the summer she wanted to undertake a critical piece of service journalism and embark on one final and important mission: to find London’s best bagel.
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Mine is a life built on bagels. For two years I lived above Fairmount Bagel, one of Montreal’s most famous bakeries, in a flat that, thanks to its 24-hour wood-fired ovens, always smelled like bagels. Invariably, I too always smelled like bagels. It made sense: I was born within literal spitting distance of Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood, where, when we were sick, my father would go to buy us chicken soup and bagels. The rest of the time, we ate New York Bakery’s ‘Original NYC bagels’. A lot of them. Those pappy, gummy, crustless supermarket monstrosities were toasted and spread with a layer of Marmite so thick that the skin on the roofs of mine and my sister’s mouths would peel off at the sight of them. The bagels themselves were really quite bad, but they were the bagels we had and the bagels we knew. Many Brits today have no idea what a bagel really is. They just think they do, and New York Bakery is to blame.
They are not, however, to blame for the desperate ‘New York-style’-ing of contemporary bagel brands, which would rather trade in asinine and inaccurate pastiche than use a word like ‘Jewish’. These ‘New York-style’ bagel shops, with their menus of variously ‘filled’ bagels, have been the focus of much of recent history’s bagel discourse, which is something I care neither for nor about – and for good reason. Good reasons, even:
Raw bagels (untoasted) are considerably worse than cooked (or toasted) ones. Cream cheese is an inferior product to good British butter. And most of all, a bagel is a shit vehicle for a sandwich. A good bagel is crusty and chewy and, without toasting, should offer significant dentine resistance. Put my salt beef on rye, my BEC (bacon, egg, cheese) in a crusty roll. Bagels are for the toaster – for the butter knife, Maldon, and occasionally Marmite – for a cup of tea, for home.
These are all things about which I’m currently feeling quite sentimental. At the end of the summer, I’ll be moving to, predictably, a flat that is no more than a minute’s walk from what friends assure me is a ‘really great bagel’ in the world’s bagel capital, New York City. Each morning, I’ll be offered schmear and nova or lox, and other things I won’t buy. I’ll miss London’s bagels, which are less bloated than their American cousins and chewier than their fresh-baked Canadian counterparts. A good London bagel has a dark crust and a density of flavour, as well as the right dough. I had to make my final London summer (for a little while) count. So I set out with a plan – a journey across north and east London to try 16 bagels, ending at what I believed to be the British bagel’s spiritual home. No, not there, at the top of Brick Lane. But St John’s Wood.
After the paywall: an evaluation of the new-wave ‘New York-style’ bagel shops, the final verdict on B Bagel, and Molly names London’s best bagel.