| Issue #33, November 10, 2006 |
Weird Science?
The Ongoing Battle to Make a Good Bagel in San Francisco
By Dan Rattiner
A man goes into a Chinese Restaurant, sits down and the waiter hands him a menu. All that’s on it is pizza and spaghetti.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“We’re in a Jewish neighborhood,” the waiter says.
* * *
Every morning, when I was growing up, my mother toasted bagels for breakfast. We lived in a suburb of New York City. They were excellent bagels. And she toasted them dark, just a whisker short of burnt. That’s how I like bagels today.
I was fifteen when we moved to the East End. What a shock that was. I loved the East End. I loved the beaches, the sea and the harbors and the farms. But the East End had no bagels. None. Occasionally, friends of my parents would come out from the City and bring bagels. This was a very big deal. I was very influenced by this and afterwards, in my travels around the world to various places, I came to measure, at least in part, the quality of life where I was by the bagels or the lack thereof. Paris — great place, no bagels. Tokyo — great place, no bagels. Miami — okay place, bagels. Los Angeles — not so okay place, bagels. And so forth and so on.
Bagels of the beefy, amazing kind began to be produced in the Hamptons in the early 1980s. I was living in Bridgehampton at that time. I can actually recall the first day I went into this new bagel store on County Road 39. It opened at four in the morning and you could buy them fresh out of the oven. The place is still there.
As for other destinations around the globe, I am here to report an infinitesimal step in the right direction in the City of San Francisco.
I have always liked San Francisco. My daughter lives there now, so I go there all the time. I like the hills, the weather, the views of the sea, the hipness, the edge and the fact that fun is a big deal. It’s probably the most ridiculously happy city I have ever been in. But in one regard, they are a bunch of phonies. They have bagels. They think they are good. And they are crap.
San Franciscans, who think it is cool to have bagels, say there is really nothing you can do about it. It is their wonderful, life-enhancing, humid, hazy weather. They say in New York City you can’t make good sourdough bread and it is true. So they make good sourdough and very bad San Francisco bagels. So what? And they LIKE their bagels.
In previous visits to this town, I have had long arguments with counter people and managers in such places as Noah’s Bagels in Potrero Hill, which is just one link in a chain of miserable bagel stores that, god forbid, has from time to time tried to open a branch outside of this town.
The people sit out front at tables in the sunshine wearing granny sunglasses and talking on the telephone or working their laptops, and they think they are just so cool. It’s disgusting.
Noah’s says they make good bagels. But they have no idea. They also don’t know about promoting a bagel store. They have pictures of the Lower East Side and the Brooklyn Bridge on their walls, and they have a slogan that reads “schlep home a bag today.” They don’t even know what the word schlep means.
The only frame of reference I could give you as to what a so-called good bagel tastes like in San Francisco is to say they taste like Lender’s Bagels, which are those frozen Styrofoam bagels you used to be able to get in the freezers of unsuspecting grocery stores. They thaw and they turn to goo. You toast them and they turn back to Styrofoam. That is your typical San Francisco bagel.
And then there was my recent visit to San Francisco, and I am hurrying home with the good news. Or at least the not-bad news.
A friend of my daughter’s named Kelly dropped by for brunch when I was there bearing a bag of bagels for our breakfast. I was disappointed, of course, but I feigned delight and surprise. Bagels!
“These are not bad,” I said, after biting into one. “Something has happened.”
“What?” Kelly asked.
“These are better than the bagels I had last time I was here.”
My daughter concurred.
“We always have nice bagels,” Kelly said. She’s San Francisco born and raised.
“Nice bagels are hard and crunchy on the outside,” my daughter said, “and soft and feathery on the inside. If you toast them and then break them open, steam comes out.”
Kelly listened. She was apparently amazed.
“On a scale of from one to ten, these are about a five,” I said, instantly realizing I had exhibited bad manners to somebody who brought a gift. “But they’re better than the one or two that they used to be,” I continued. “Something’s changed. They’re onto something.”
“Something what?” Kelly asked.
I let it go at that. I went back to a couple of bagel stores I’d been to before, later in the week. The better bagels were in some places, but not others. They’re moving slowly into the neighborhood. It’s like half the town has gotten the first half to the secret of Coca Cola.
Next trip, I am going to try some more. I’ll report back. I’ll even go back up to Noah’s, and see if I can schlep a conversation with somebody. If I find out something new that they know, I’ll let you know.
* * *
Some day I’ll writer about what television used to be like out here in the Hamptons. This was before Pay Per View, before On Demand, before Satellite, before Cable, even before Color TV. Here in the Hamptons, the only channels we could get were Channel 3 and 8 out of Connecticut and, on a good day Channel 12 out of Providence, Rhode Island. We became experts about what was going on in southern New England, which was an utterly useless waste.
I don’t know how we got along.
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