New York Bagels Do Not Suck

In discussing the primacy of New York bagels over Montreal bagels, one needn't hold forth on the general excellence of bagels as a food stuff. Both David Heti and I agree—and I hope he doesn't feel that I am speaking out of turn—that bagels are simply the best. Leave it to other articles and books, such as to the Maria Balinska's stellar monograph The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, to enumerate exactly why. "Yes to bagels" is the fundamental assumption under which this debate operates.

We also agree on the characteristics typical of a New York bagel versus a Montreal bagel. New York bagels are larger, softer, and doughier. Montreal bagels are smaller, denser, and sweeter. Montreal bagels are boiled in honeyed water before baked whereas parboiling is a characteristic not all New York bagels share and our water has no honey in it.

Importantly, as a general rule, Montreal bagels are not meant for slicing whereas it is rare to find a bagel in New York—such as the bagels at Absolute Bagels, Russ & Daughters, H&H, and, yes, even the Montreal transplant Black Seed—not made better by bifurcation and the addition of third party flavors i.e. creamed cheese, lox, or butter.

The salient question at hand: Which bagel is better? To find an answer, one needs to look beyond the dough. On a chemical level, and as has been well documented, New York City water, that is the water that comes from our two watersheds—the Catskill/Delaware watershed west of the Hudson River and the Croton watershed east of the Hudson—has a ratio of calcium to magnesium ideal to the formation of gluten, the protein all your friends think they're allergic to (but aren't) and gives dough its elasticity. This, in turn, imbues to bagels made with New York City water the power to have a crispy carapace and a chewy interior.

But it almost seems cheap to rest our supremacy on the chemical characteristics of our water. Much in the same way that I disdain attractive people for profiting from an inherited bounty, I think it is wrong to hang our bagel superiority on an upstate aquifer. Surely the element of the human hand must be given due. In a way, of course, we can claim credit for the water, since it is our man-made laws that have protected the watershed from both pollution and the pernicious meddling of the utilities.

Even so, the water argument is based on the premise that a doughier bagel is a better bagel. David disagrees and ours is therefore a disagreement about bagel ideals. My assertion is that a perfectly executed Montreal bagel is no match for a perfectly executed New York bagel.

Our bagels are bigger. In the psychology of New York bagelry, we believe in the greatness of greatness and the propriety of grandeur. We believe in generosity of proportion, that the negative space should not overpower the positive. Moreover we believe in the power of a large doughy bagel that can be split and that is engineered for synthesis, that contains multitudes and is big enough for an incision, then inclusion. Our bagels are like a python's jaws. They can unhinge and devour an entire wildebeest and a schmear of Tofutti if we so choose. As opposed to the hardened ring of its Canadian cousin, the New York bagel isn't a circle—it's an invitation. And this enough merits an award.

But I'd like also to take a moment to note that New York, as opposed to Montreal, is a city of closed and small spaces and that the bagel was born here in the Lower East Side in the early 20th century, then a warren of dirty cramped tenement apartments. Though nowhere near as large as the obese epigones today, the original New York bagel was nonetheless large. The bagel was nearly the only locus of a substantial sense of selfthat could be realized. Montreal, on the banks of a river but not an island, can sprawl and Montrealers can stretch their limbs in spaces for themselves. Their bagels can afford to be impecunious, for their homes are not. Today, when the average price per square foot of residential real estate in New York is more than five times what it is in Montreal, the need for a substantial bagel to call one's own is more pressing.

Arguing which is better—the New York bagel versus the Montreal bagel—is like arguing whether French is better than Urdu. Each has its use and is best used in a certain place. A New York bagel is undoubtedly better than a Montreal bagel in New York but I'm not so arrogant—big bagel notwithstanding—that a Montreal bagel doesn't beat a New York bagel in Montreal. There, our bagels seem unseemly and garish. Here, their bagels seem miserly and strange. The most one can say is that nothing beats a New York bagel in its hometown.

Before I close this well-reasoned, temperate, and persuasive argument—not that Montreal bagels are shit but that New York bagels aren't—I'll say this: My opponent's arguments are, on the face of themselves, laughable, and if the bagels he champions are anywhere near as asinine, he should be doubly lambasted for defending a poor product poorly. He has based his entire thesis on the bagels of one shop—which he later hit up for free bagels. Further, he maintains that the very existence of less-than-ideal bagels in New York City proves our craven bagel lassitude. As if all of New York City's 8.46 million residents want, and can afford, or have access to our best bagels. Perhaps if David hadn't cantilevered his argument on a single data point, he might see Montreal might have some subpar bagels itself. Then where would he be?

Further, that New York City is large enough to encompass both excellent native bagels and excellent Montreal bagels surely can't be held as a demerit. What can be, however, is that Montreal is too close-minded to contain our larger bagels. This smallness of mind, mimicked by the meanness of the bagels in question, has no bearing on the quality of New York bagels. It just shows Montrealers are too foolish to see their glory.

I didn't start this piece mad. Perhaps I, too, am like a New York City bagel: inclusive, a bit doughy, but warm hearted. But when confronted with the ungenerous zero of this Montreal bagel defender, who premises his defense on dogma, doctrine, and a blithe classist assessment, my dander is up.

Fine, I'll say it: Montreal bagels are shit, if not for their own sake then for the sake of the fools they make their defenders become.