The Bagel Story

Most people haven't had a real bagel in years. They just don't know it.

 

What passes for a bagel in most grocery stores and chain shops is a steamed roll with a hole in the middle — soft all the way through, no crust, no chew, no character. It's not bad, exactly. It's just not a bagel.

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A real bagel gets boiled before it gets baked. That's what gives it the thin, crackly exterior and the dense, chewy interior that makes you work for it a little — and enjoy it a lot more. It's an extra step most commercial operations skipped decades ago and never looked back. We never skipped it.

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My introduction to real bagels goes back to the late 1970s, when Durham got its first bagel shop. I enjoyed them so much I ended up working there. Around the same time, a man named Milan Burger enrolled in the Rice Diet — a weight-loss program that brought out-of-town dieters to Durham, several of whom lived two doors down from me. We did what any good neighbor would do: we snuck them pizzas, stacked vertically in a bag so no one would notice.

Mr. Burger, for his part, contributed bagels he brought back from H&H in New York City whenever he traveled on business. H&H was the standard by which all bagels were measured. He was selling more bagels than he was losing pounds — so he bought that first Durham bagel shop outright, shipped equipment down from Long Island, and brought in Norm Oppenheimer, a friend from H&H, to teach us both how to boil and bake the traditional way.

That was forty years ago. The method hasn't changed.

 

Our bagels still start with high-gluten flour, still retard overnight in the refrigerator, and still go into a kettle of boiling water the next morning before they ever see the oven. We offer six varieties — plain, poppy, salt, sesame, garlic, and everything. 

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Try one. You'll remember what a bagel is supposed to taste like.

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The Bloomin' Bagel

If you want the full experience, order the Bloomin' Bagel. We take a fresh-baked bagel, score it into petals, pipe in a flavored cream cheese, slather it with butter, and bake it again. Each one comes as a crafted pairing: garlic cream cheese finished with roasted garlic, Nutella cream cheese finished with hazelnuts, salmon cream cheese finished with capers. We don't mix and match because we don't need to — each combination is already exactly right. It arrives looking like something you'd photograph and tasting like something you'd drive back for.

 

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