I’d be content to eat this seven mornings a week
I’ve only recently admitted New York’s supremacy over Philadelphia in the realm of bagels. For years, a mistaken sense of local pride convinced me that the two were, at the very least, comparable. Too many trips to New York, with mornings featuring bagels from Murray’s and H and H in Manhattan, and most recently Bergen in Brooklyn, must have pounded some objectivity into me.
As a result, I feel little shame about driving fifteen minutes to the edge of the city, at the corner of Haverford and City Line, to a small shopping-center storefront parsimoniously named NY Bagels. While I once might have found such a concession off-putting, I now have no trouble acknowledging that these bagels, even with their foreign title, are the best I’ve had in the region.
Once inside, the bare-bones establishment looks as if it was lifted off a New York street. Racks of fresh bagels sit on one side of the register, with open plastic bins of multiple varieties of cream cheese in a glass cooler on the other side. Predictably weak coffee urns rest on the counter in front of the windows.
I don’t make the trip for the ambience, or the coffee, but instead, the bagels. Boiled before being baked to a golden brown crust, these bagels are puffy but not gargantuan, large enough to fill me up for several hours, but not so big as to invite a sense of gluttony.
Finally, a note on cream cheese: while living for multiple years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I relied on a ersatz Jewish deli and gourmet foods juggernaut named Zingerman’s, just a block away from my home, for bagels and sometimes cream cheese. The less said about the bagels, the better (apart from the fact that they were “buy six, get six free” on Tuesdays.)
Zingerman’s also offered an “Original Cream Cheese,” made with a “traditional recipe” and “handicraft techniques”, and free of mysterious additives like Xanthan Gum. I have no shortage of enthusiasm for traditional recipes and handicraft techniques, especially with regard to cheese. But “artisanal” just doesn’t taste right to me on my bagel. Give me the supermarket stuff any day. Here, at least, I can count on the name “Philadelphia.”
