“My grandmother doesn’t like my bagels,” Maya Black, co-founder of the bagel bakery Bread Flower in Manchester, says with a laugh. It’s nothing personal, apparently; it’s just that Black’s New York-style bagels are a different beast from the bagels – or, as they are historically called, beigels – that her grandmother grew up buying from their local Jewish deli. There’s no salt beef, and rather than sandwich fillings, NYC bagels come with “schmears” – variations of cream cheese mixed through with anything from herbs, olives and horseradish, to honey and blueberries. Topped with seeds, they are larger, chewier and tangier. Some might even say they are tastier, though that feels sacrilegious given the hallowed place traditional bagels occupy in the hearts of the Jewish community.
What can be said with some certainty is that New York-style bagels are becoming something of a trend in Manchester, London, Leicester and Edinburgh – cities that have long been home to Jewish diaspora communities. It’s a trend that, in London at least, seems to have kicked off in lockdown, when many who could took to baking. Expat New Yorkers, or those who had lived in New York and fallen in love with the bagels there, missed their distinct flavour and texture and decided to recreate it.
“Normally I’d have gone back to New York every six weeks and pigged out on bagels,” says New Yorker-cum-Londoner Dan Martensen. “I’d bring back a bag for the kids, because they love them too, and when I couldn’t do that, we missed them. I’m a photographer by profession, so I had time to experiment during lockdown.” Now he’s a photographer and the co-founder of It’s Bagels!, which sell bagels and schmears outside Caravan Coffee Roasters in King’s Cross and online. He hopes to open a bricks-and-mortar site next year.
It’s a tale echoed by Gabriel “Papo” Gomez, a chef who has lived in London for four years but spent most of his life in New York. In New York, he says, bagels are a culture. Every district has dozens of bagel shops, and New Yorkers have a favourite in every district. “During lockdown I wanted something that tasted of home. I researched loads of recipes and techniques from New York and tried to make it as close to how it’s done there as possible,” says Gomez. This included adding malt to the water, using kosher salt imported from the US, and proving the dough for between 24 and 36 hours to get the precise texture and taste.
“Our neighbour who lived upstairs was also from New York, so we dropped a bag of Papo’s bagels off and she was like: ‘Oh my God – these taste like home!’ That’s how it started,” says Gomez’s wife and business partner, Georgia Fenwick-Gomez, from their east London shop, Papo’s Bagels. It’s an interesting choice of location, given that the East End is home to two of the oldest and best-known bagel shops in the city: Beigel Shop and Beigel Bake, both on Brick Lane. “We had no idea!” she says. “We were looking for a good community to raise our family in and took a liking to east London. We didn’t realise until months after we opened, when all these old-school Londoners came in and shared how the London bagel is part of their family tradition.”
Given how territorial people can be about the foods they grew up with, especially those with cultural significance, these conversations might have been strained. That they weren’t is testimony to the history of the bagel, and its travels around the world. Though the precise origin of the bagel is unclear, by the 19th century it was a staple food of Jewish communities in eastern Europe. From there it travelled with Jewish migrants across the US and Canada, evolving as it went. Montreal bagels are boiled with honey in the water and aren’t proved overnight. New York bagels are proved overnight and boiled with malt extract in the water. West coast bagels are similar to New York’s, but slightly softer, and made from local flour and yeasts. Yet in each place the bagel continued to represent the idea of home.
“It’s nice how a baked item has such nostalgia. That is how this business was created: out of our nostalgia for New York,” says Fenwick-Gomez. “Even if people are sometimes sceptical that our bagels will be as good as London bagels, it comes from a lovely, curious place.” Besides, this new wave of bagel bakers explains, they don’t think their bagels are better, just different. “I would not want to replace or replicate the bagels from our Jewish delis in Manchester,” says Black. “They do them amazingly and they have this incredible culture that I am a part of.”
“My bagels are no better or worse,” agrees Martensen. “At 2am after a night out in London, I’d probably still want a ‘beigel’ with salt beef from Brick Lane. I just wanted to create bagels I was familiar with in NYC here.”
That’s part of the fun, Gomez points out. “In New York, you go to different bagel shops because each one has a certain thing they do really well. Now it feels like that could happen in London – and that’s so cool.”
Back on Brick Lane, the long-established Beigel Shop and Beigel Bake show how broad the appeal of a bagel (or a beigel) can be. Both shops are open 24/7, serving builders, bankers and carb-craving boozers. It’s just the sort of culture Larah Bross wanted to evoke when she set up Bross Bagels in Edinburgh, whose products reflect her years spent in Montreal and New York: “I wanted a shop which, no matter who you were or what was happening, would bring people together. ”
“It’s not just food,” she says. When something has travelled so far, evolved so much and yet still represents home to so many people, it is “a lifestyle; a cure-all. Bagels cure everything. It’s a fact.”
