The beginnings
Growing up in New Jersey, I was spoiled by great bagels.
Sunday mornings meant my mom coming home with a brown paper bag from Bagels Royale, the shop just up the street from our house. Inside were warm, oven-fresh bagels: crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, and gone far too quickly.
So when I moved to San Francisco, I naturally went looking for the bready circles of goodness I loved so dearly. I was optimistic. This was San Francisco, after all—a city with a serious bread reputation, especially when it came to sourdough.
That optimism did not last.
I waited in line for nearly half an hour at Boichik Bagels on Fillmore, a well-regarded spot, only to pay almost $40 for a dozen deeply underwhelming bagels. The crust had no snap. The interior was chewy, technically, but without any real character. Nothing about them separated the batch from something I could have pulled from a Costco sleeve.
Then came a string of similar disappointments: Noah’s Bagels, Schlox, Laundromat, Drewish Deli. Different shops, similar problems. The bagels were fine, but they lacked the thing I was chasing: that crisp-chewy balance, that crack when you bite in, that dense but simultaneously light interior, that unmistakable character of a real bagel.
For a city that knows bread, San Francisco had somehow missed the bagel.
This is where it all started.