I LOVE salt bagels, but watch the bastard when he picks one for you. The last one I bought was completely coated with coarse salt on the bottom, and I had to sliver it off with a bread knife.
Even then it was TOO salty, so I only got to consume 60 per cent of my purchase.
An everything is a safer choice, but they sometimes don’t include coarse salt with all the seeds and onion bits.
I like salt bagels okay, but agree with the OP. Bagels are indeed meh (NYC bagels included).
A nice big toasted plain bagel, or even a raisin bagel, with heaps and heaps of Philadephia cream cheese and a massive glass of orange juice could possibly be my choice for my last meal.
Unfortunately, that’s tons of salt, carbs and straight up sugar and I shall never taste such enjoyment again.
Once a year maybe I’ll get me a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese and have The Best Week Ever, but never again for the OJ 
I like bagels.
I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned the famous line:
“A bagel is a donut that’s been dipped in cement.”
This description is both funny and completely accurate.
I got off to a very bad start with bagels; we had a family day out when I was a teen, and my Dad did a picnic to bring with us. Unfortunately, he’d never had a bagel and got them (from a UK supermarket, so hardly great ones anyway) thinking they were like big donuts, for a bit of a treat. So the main part of our lunch, after walking several miles, was a plain solid bagel each. Not toasted, nothing on it and nothing we could put on it, not even cut in half. I was really hungry, and there was no other option as we were somewhere in the countryside, so we just ate them as it was.
I don’t recommend the experience. I’m not sure I’ve even had one since, it put me off so badly.
The Wegman’s by me boils them, then bakes them, as it should be done. They are pretty good.
First of all, if you like 'em, that’s perfect and eat them to your hearts content. I’m sure thing I find heavenly are a big fat meh… for others.
That is true, but it’s also true of most decent breads.
The cultural aspect seems very important. It makes regular food something special.
My problem with this is that if you need to have only the really good ones then it goes on to show they aren’t that great.
I’m gonna steal this line.
Funny, sure. Accurate, only with the worst bagels on the market.
I used to like them, but I OD’d on them in the 90s. If I see a poppy seed one in the break room on bagel day, I might cut off a quarter of it and eat the seedy part, but that’s just because I love poppy seeds.
Nowadays I’m more into croissants and brioche.
Well, pretty much every time I eat food, I try to get “the really good ones.” YMMV.
I am from New York, and this is absolutely true. The only bagels outside of New York I can tolerate are the ones from one small, single, unfranchised coffee shop in the Midwest (but the owner is a New Yorker), and the ones my aunt makes. And I can tell you for a fact that there is something going on with New York vs. every place else, because when my aunt made bagels in New York, whether in Manhattan or Brooklyn, they were the best bagels in the entire world, no exceptions. When she makes them in Indiana they are still pretty good, but just not as remarkable. They are probably the best bagels in Indiana, but I can get several from different stores in New York that are better than the ones my aunt makes now.
If you get one in New York, get it from a place that sources its bagels locally. If they are baked on the premises, all the better, but if it’s a place that has them delivered fresh every morning from a local bakery, that works too. There are lots of places that have more than one outlet in NYC, but a single bakery, that makes bagels every night, and sells them every morning.
What you don’t want to do is buy a bagel in NYC from a place like Panera. They may mix the dough somewhere else, and send to the location from who knows where, or even half-bake the bagels, and send them boiled and frozen, but not baked. That’s how you end up with really terrible NYC bagels.
There’s actually a place in Penn Station that sells really great bagels. They’re one of three or four outlets for a local bakery. That is fantastic. They had bagels first thing in the morning, and bread a little later in the day. You could get a bagel on your way to work, and a baguette on your way home.
They get Einstein Bros. bagels for us at work every Friday as a perk, and I never eat one. They aren’t very good to me, and I get some from my aunt every few weeks when she makes them. People who have never had a NYC bagel think they’re great, though.
I wouldn’t say that. Most movies are terrible, and the really bad ones are painful to watch, but that doesn’t make movies as a thing, bad. The good movies that are out there are worth waiting for, and even worth wading through the mediocre ones.
In my experience, most OTC meds don’t work for crap, but the ones that do, I couldn’t live without (acetaminophen, I love you!) I certainly would never say that OTC meds as a thing are bad.
If you need to have the really good ones, to have a good experience, it just means that someone is trying to ride the coattails of the really good ones with their inferior products. That’s really pretty common. How many mediocre musicians do mediocre covers of great musicians’ songs?
Point taken.
My point was that if a very popular item is not good until you get to the 95th percentile then it’s not clear why it is so popular, aside, of course, from cultural reasons.
[Exaggerating for effect] It’s like someone said “beef is meh…” and my answer was “go to Tokyo and get actual Kobe from a restaurant that has an experienced chef” then beef IS meh.[/Exaggerating for effect]
But 95% of the bagels on the market are mass produced, non-boiled, donuts with seeds. It’s no wonder they’re just “meh”, they’re barely bagels. They are pale imitations of the real thing. Now, while NYC bagels are indeed the best, you can get very good bagels pretty much anywhere there is a good-sized Jewish population. That means any major city in the US has at least some excellent bagels. But you’re not going to find them at the supermarket, even Wegmans (which are just OK, IMO). Find a nice Jewish bakery and you’ll find some good bagels.
It would be like comparing macro-brew lagers like Bud, Coors, and Miller with a Heady Topper. Yes, the crap outsell great beer 100 to 1 but it doesn’t mean there isn’t great beer to be found everywhere.
Agreed.
There’s a new Kosher restaurant in Lima. I’ll have to go there and check their bagels.
Isn’t the reason New York’s bagels are reputedly better than everywhere else because of the water? Same as the pizza, no?
Anyway, the less bagels [Aji de Gallina** eats, the more for the rest of us (but I get all the pumpernickels)
There’s a place here in L.A. now called the Brooklyn Water Bagel Company (or something like that). They claim to import their water for making their bagels. I’ll admit they’re pretty good. They make them on the premises and are only open until 3:00 pm. I usually call ahead if I want a particular type (poppy seed’s my fav), because they sell out fast. Once I went without calling first, and someone came to pick up their order for a movie location. They carried out bags and bags. The bins were nearly all empty.
The also make nice bagel “sandwiches.” I love their lox and cream cheese one (generous with the lox!) except that capers are extra and used to cost too much. I just went to check what the exact price was and – hallelujah! – they’re lowered the caper price to $.39. Mmmm, maybe I should go pick one up for lunch?
I might argue that bagels actually AREN’T that popular except in the places where it is good.
(From 2005, but I think instructive)
It’s not just that. Malt syrup in the boiling water produces a shiny, brown, slightly crunchy crust.
Another thing about bagels is that they must be fresh to be any good. They go stale faster than any other type of bread. A day-old Kaiser roll is fine, but a day-old bagel is like a lump of lead. A two-day-old bagel is like a brick. This is probably why many store-bought bagels are so unbagely; the manufacturers add things like fats to keep them from going stale as quickly, which also keeps them from being real bagels.