I live in Kansas but for three years I lived and worked in the greater Lansing, Michigan area. An acquaintance just sent me an article from the Lansing State Journal, dated May 26, 2002.
It tells how the Bagel Haul Deli has closed. Aaaaagghh!! Best bagels I ever ate! Made from scratch and boiled before baking, as a proper bagel should be. And I worked there for two years as a baker(although someone else does/did the bagels.) The Bagel Haul was in Haslett, which is, more or less, connected to Lansing/East Lansing.
I think I will go into mourning. First the Grand Gourmet in Lansing closed, now the Bagel Haul in Haslett. Well, as long as Curious Books on Michigan Avenue in East Lansing remains open, something good will still be there.
I see no way a franchise chain could even come close to the quality of a independant bagel shop like Bageltown of Levittown on Long Island, aka The Western Hemisphere’s version of the Promised Land.
This strikes me as rather like mourning the last Catholic church in Tehran. Sad, yes, but not exactly a threat to Christendom.
So of course, you must make a pilgrimage to Rome, meaning New York. Although the West Side H&H are the traditional favorites, I think they’ve slipped in recent years (and they’re up to .95 apiece!). I’d suggest a newcomer, Murray’s, an operation whose very name promises bageliciousness.
We do not countenance goyische bagels, berries and pesto and and bran and such (although I confess a weakness for cinnamon raisin, the flavor which I suspect started this whole slide to perdition). My definition of an ur-bagel would be egg with poppyseed: a sort of hardened hallah. But I manage choosing one or the other, or usually one of each, and maybe whatever’s hot from the oven…
You see, there’s a fundamental difference between bagels in Montreal and bagels here:
In Montreal, what bagels there are tend to be of high quality. There just aren’t very many of them.
In New York, you could pave the streets in bagels. The sad, ugly secret is that with about 80% of the bagels available, you should.
I would still say that the best New York bagel is slightly superior to the best Montreal bagel, but choosing is much more difficult here.
From your comments, I’m wondering if you suffered from a Bagels On The Square bagel, down in the West Village on Carmine St? Unaccountably popular (I suspect because so many tourists and NYU students don’t know from proper bagels), they specialize in 6"/13cm diameter, puffy, pasty monstrosities. And there are a lot like them, I’m afraid.
So you need to stick with the better bagels: H&H (west side preferred over east side - they’re different operations), Ess-a-Bagel, Murray’s, Pick-a-bagel (in a pinch). View most others with great suspicion.
I can also attest that this is a darn good bagel shop. Then again, good bagels are the norm on Long Island, to the point that I am surprised whenever I find a bad one. In fact…
…I didn’t know that anything made any other way could be called a bagel.:eek:
The local Bruegger’s no longer carries salt bagels…there is no reason for me to ever go in there again. If I had a bigger kitchen I would start making my own from scratch again.
