![the morning toast the morning toast](https://ic-cdn.flipboard.com/flipboard.com/332b239937e2d46b379ed23887ad5b6a2c86342e/_xlarge.jpeg)
It’s a bagel I loved and don’t think could be replicated anywhere else. I wouldn’t quite say it’s Montreal-style, at least not the way Black Seed has tried to take the founders’ hometown bagel and export it to the rest of the world. I like those bagels on their own, nothing really needs to be done to them because they’re so sweet and seedy and not what I’m really used to, so I enjoy it.Ĭourage is Montreal-influenced.
![the morning toast the morning toast](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eCjwwAQEsYg/maxresdefault.jpg)
When I go to a place like St-Viateur, I just get some bagels and some cream cheese. And the only time I’ve had a bagel prepared that way in Montreal that I can recall is at Beauty’s, which was a religious experience to me. As Rao mentioned in the Times piece, what Courage serves “looked like Montreal-style bagels.” That was also what I thought upon first glance. The six or so places that pass my personal test of being Very Good Bagels are New York bagel places. But that’s because I know what I want when I’m there. Can I find better bagels in New York? Sure. And here is my very short review of the Courage Bagels bagel: It’s very good. My friend who goes all the time told me everything bagel with everything: smoked salmon, cream cheese, tomatoes, onions, dill and capers. I hadn’t had coffee yet.īut I’m skipping all the way ahead and getting to the good stuff. I couldn’t tell if I loved that or if it chilled me to my core. I know it’s early, but it was dead silent. But what threw me off was nobody was talking. This was a very mixed crowd of people getting off overnight shifts, a couple of hypey 30- and 40-somethings, a bunch of locals and a couple of older people who probably wake up at that time either way and just like having something to do. I was instantly struck by the crowd because if I ever go anywhere on a Sunday morning and there are people waiting, it’s very much the parents who just want a few moments of peace from their kids’ crowd. So I got there and I waited and, truth be told, it wasn’t that bad. Or, in this case, Silver Lake at 6:45 in the morning. Whatever it is, I try to avoid having to line up and wait more than 10 minutes for anything, but especially- especially a bagel.īut, as the kids say, when in Rome. Or, maybe, the tourists are fans of them and we just get caught up in them because we have no other choice. New Yorkers, for some sick reason, are fans of them. And when I say really long, folks, I worked the door at Magnolia Bakery during the Sex in the City days and I saw the sad interns forced to wait to get a cronut for their tyrannical bosses in the early days of that freak show. Why wouldn’t there be good bagels out west?Īnd since-to paraphrase the late, great Bobby Heenan-I’m a Substack journalist and noted bagel eater, I decided I had to be brave, wake up at 5:30 in the morning and meet a friend to stand on line to get Courage Bagels before they opened at 7 and the line got really long. I still say Katz’s meat is the best, but the sandwich and the cost is too much) or Canter’s being one of the last of a certain kind of old-school Jewish delicatessens you can go and just sit in, drinking coffee, eating toast, reading a paper, kibitzing. Hence, you get Langer’s serving the best pastrami sandwich (note: not the best pastrami. and the Bay Area well enough to know there have been Jews and New Yorkers in these places for decades, and there were things they wanted to leave behind (the subway, Times Square, rising rents for such small spaces), but there were things they also wanted to import or build as a tribute to where they came from. The piece wasn’t Rao ranting about how bagels suck in New York and they’re better out west it’s more a California bagel scene report.īut New Yorkers love to get pissed off about things since we don’t already have enough to complain about and even I have been known to get in on the action even though I’m almost always joking.
![the morning toast the morning toast](https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0e/75/14/0e/the-morning-toast.jpg)
I like Rao’s work a lot and the piece was reported well, had a lot of good quotes and insights and then I suppose an editor-maybe or maybe not with the help of Rao, you never know-slapped a very good headline on it that would likely piss off a good portion of Times readers who would then share it with other people in a bout of righteous How dare they sort of way even though-sorry, it’s true-the quality of New York bagels have fallen off in many cases. Some of you might recall in March of last year there was a New York Times article with the headline “ The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York) ,” written by the Los Angeles-based Tejal Rao.