The Bay Area seems pretty bent on biting New York's style, gunning at everything from our walkability ranking to our record-high real estate prices—and now it seems they're trying to take our bagels from us, too. Apparently, a bunch of treasonous East Coasters have defected to Northern California and, dissatisfied with the sad lumps of circular white bread that pass for bagels there, started baking their own. And SOME people are claiming these new impostor bagels taste as good as the real thing.
One lapsed Brooklynite, Deepa Subramanian, ran a company called Schmendricks that sold what she marketed as "hand-rolled Brooklyn bagels." They supposedly taste like they came from Park Slope spot the Bagel Hole, though Schmendricks has recently gone on hiatus.
Dan Graf, a former New Jersey resident, began cranking out bagels under Oakland label Baron Baking earlier this year, and critics have claimed that he uses something called "science" (or is it witchcraft?!) to craft "the perfect New York bagel." And the bagel-stealing doesn't stop there: a Berkeley deli even hosted an event this summer titled "New York Bagel Education," in which thirty-to-forty wannabes gathered in a futile attempt to unlock our secrets. But until they run a water pipeline across the country from Brooklyn, we're not really sweating it.
