I Found It And I Ate It—NYC's Worst Bagel!
Plus! CAFÉ ANNE swag!! Bagel stats!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #189 of CAFÉ ANNE!
First, because I know you had to wait two weeks for this: the results of last issue’s Thanksgiving poll.
Only 12% said that, like me, they were planning to eat all the turkeys. I am disappointed in you people.
To make it right, please purchase some CAFÉ ANNE swag to gift upon yourself for the holidays. Once again I am offering:
-11 oz MUGS
-15x15-inch 100% cotton BUDGET TOTE BAGS.
You can buy either for $15. Please email me your street address (annekadet@yahoo.com) and then Venmo or Paypal me the $$$. I will make a couple bucks per sale, so if you want to pay more as a way of saying “Happy Holidays to ANNE” please do!!!
In other news, huge endless-possibilities-for-swag shoutouts to newest paid subscribers Chuck F., Carl G. and Chloe W. That’s enough $$$ to buy myself a CAFÉ ANNE tote, fill it up with mugs and throw it out the window!
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a little adventure trying the city’s (maybe!) worst bagel, plus an oven-load of NYC bagel stats. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
WORST OF NYC
I Found It and I Ate It—NYC’s Worst Bagel!
I recently wrote stories about trying New York City’s lowest-rated laundromat and then the worst-rated pizza. This was a lot of fun, so I asked readers what “worst of” category I should tackle next. The top request: bagels!
To get started, I consulted Jason Girouard, a Lower East Side tech genius and official CAFÉ ANNE volunteer data analyst. Jason made a beautiful spreadsheet based on a data scrape of every NYC bagel shop review on Google Maps. We filtered out all the shops with less than 20 reviews and sorted the remaining 1,068 locations based on star ratings.
The average score, citywide, was very high: 4.3 stars on a scale of one-to-five! That is because bagels are fundamentally good.
And the worst-rated shop in the city? Outside two located in airports, it was the Ess-a-bagel in Dumbo, with a 2.8-star average. I scanned the reviews. While it did get a few raves from happy customers, 69 of 167 reviewers gave it just one star:
“Literally the worst bagel I’ve ever eaten.”
“Expensive, dry and tasteless. Never again!”
“DO NOT COME HERE”
I was surprised. Ess-a-bagel is sort of an NYC institution—a family-owned operation going back nearly 50 years. And it just won the “Best of the Boroughs” award at BagelFest, NYC’s annual bagel convention and competition. How could it simultaneously be the city’s best and worst bagel?
I’m no bagel expert, so I invited an adventure sidekick, Sam Silverman, aka The Bagel Ambassador. Sam is the founder of BagelFest and has been giving NYC bagel tours for years.
While Ess-a-bagel is one of many BagelFest exhibitors, Sam promised to be objective. “Why would anyone trust me when I say an experience is good if I never say when an experience is bad?” he said.
And, yes, he lived up to his word.
Ess-a-bagel operates several storefront shops in Manhattan, but its Brooklyn location is in the Time Out Market, a big food hall in a former warehouse, “showcasing a curated lineup of local food and drinks.”
“Curated” is code for “annoying” these days, and the touristy food court, with its trendy industrial vibes and mood lighting, was no exception.
“Can I just say I hate this place?” I said, as Sam and found seats at one of the hall’s long communal counters.
“Oh yeah, it’s the worst!” Sam agreed. Food halls, which are geared toward tourists and office workers looking for variety, typically offer high-priced, lower-quality versions of food found elsewhere in the city, he said.
Food halls are rough on the vendors, too, he added: “Obviously, space-wise, it’s incredibly limited...You can’t actually make the bagels here.”
On Sam’s recommendation, we ordered three items: a plain, naked bagel ($2.15), an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese ($7.25!) and the “Signature Favorite” ($18.75), a bagel with cream cheese and lox.
I wondered if the bagels served here might be a different than those found at Ess-a-bagel’s higher-rated Manhattan locations.
“They are!” said Sam.
Turns out, Sam knows a lot about Ess-a-bagel. While its Midtown shop bagels are hand-rolled and baked on-site, he said, the Dumbo bagels are partially baked and trucked in from the company’s new factory in Harlem.
“I think the interesting part is the decision, as a brand, to go into a place like this,” said Sam. “You go into these situations knowing that you’re sacrificing quality and that people will associate that with your brand. It just isn’t possible to be as good as when you’re making everything fresh on site. But it’s a business decision. Do you want to open those new channels? And it’s good for awareness, good for marketing, hopefully profitable. Not everyone would make that decision.”
“We don’t judge!” I said, “Or do we?”
I’m not a fan, for what it’s worth, of NYC institutions like Katz’s, Sahadi’s and Junior’s morphing into mini chains. The sleek new locations typically feel like AI versions of the charming original.
But Sam is more forgiving. “Everyone—and especially the small businesses in New York—everyone’s just trying to do the best that they can to survive,” he said.
Before we dug in, Sam asked my bagel philosophy. “I love every bagel,” I said. “It’s really hard for me to find a bagel I don’t like. To me, they’re all just so delicious. And I toast the s— out of them!”
Sam shook his head. While toasting masks the sins of a bad bagel, he said, nothing beats a great bagel fresh from the oven.
“Taste-wise, it’s got to have that malty, salty, beautiful, robust flavor to it,” he said. “And texturally, the ideal bagel has a crunchy outside and that soft, chewy, dense interior, which is a result of the boiling. If it doesn’t have a beautiful, shiny crust to it, it’s not going to be a great bagel.”
“Size is something people disagree on a lot,” he continued. “Bagels used to be three-to-four ounces, but it’s evolved, partially because the bagel rollers, who actually hand roll the bagels, get compensated by the bag of flour. The quickest way to get through a bag of flour is to roll bigger bagels.”
It was Ess-a-bagel, he said, that pioneered the monster bagel—its Midtown bagels run six-to-seven ounces.
“It’s continually evolving and changing,” he concluded of the city’s bagel scene. “One of the things I’m constantly grappling with is, ‘What is a bagel?’”
“Well,” I said, poking at the plain bagel between us, “first we should decide if this is a bagel!”
“This is 100% a bagel,” said Sam. “And just from examining it, it looks like a pretty good one. We’ve got that brown crust. It’s a nice shape.”
“I’m gonna eyeball this and say this is about five-ish ounces,” he continued. “So it’s not too big, it’s not too small.”
He tore it in half. “Once we open it up, the next thing we look for is the crumb,” he said. “We basically want to see how dense it is inside. A classic New York-style bagel is going to have a very tight crumb.”
This bagel, he noted, had air pockets, indicating over-fermentation. “It looks a little breadier to me then bagel-ish,” he said.
And then we both took a bite.
Ooooh nos!
“You know how I told you I love all bagels?” I said, chewing hard and making my best frowny face. “I don’t think this is good at all!”
The bagel had good texture, but the flavor did not live up to its heavenly smell and good looks. It was a big mouthful of nothing, and for sure needed more salt. I gave it two stars.
Sam wasn’t as harsh. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a little dry. It’s a little bready. It could use a little bit more salt. But it’s got that textural contrast—the crunchy outside and the soft inside. It’s decent.”
He gave it 3.5 stars. “It’s above average, but it could be much better,” he said. “And I think a lot of that is just due to the preparation here. They have to bring these from off site, pre-made, reheat them to be ready for service, and then they’re just sitting out in the basket. Whereas, when you go to the Ess on Third Avenue, they’ll give you one that’s fresh out the oven. And that is a five out of five.”
We took opposite sides when sampling the everything bagel with scallion cream cheese. This bagel had been baked a deeper shade, so it was almost toasty—just the way I like it! And thanks to the seasoning, it was plenty flavorful. I happily gobbled my half.
But Sam was disappointed. The bagel was stale and too chewy, he declared. Plus, the cream cheese coverage was skimpy and uneven: “I would love for it to be spread across every little corner, although bagels don’t have corners.”
Our last test: the “Signature Favorite.”
“This almost a classic,” said Sam. “The signature New York bagel is a bagel with cream cheese and lox—and usually onion, tomato and capers. Here they’ve subbed out the capers and use lettuce instead.”
“I love capers!” I said sadly.
“Same,” said Sam. “They’re little salt bombs.”
And while the cream cheese and lox were top-notch, that’s not what distinguishes a bagel shop, said Sam. The vast majority in NYC use the same lox purveyor—Acme Smoked Fish in Greenpoint. And 80% serve the same Philadelphia cream cheese—although some whip it with seltzer or heavy cream to alter the texture.
Sam set his sandwich down. “This overall upsets me in the sense that I want New York bagels to have a good name, and this place attracts a lot of tourists, and I’m guessing tourists think this is representative of what a New York bagel is and can be,” he said. “So it just makes me sad, because it could be—it is—much better than this, if you get a good one.”
“Even Ess-a-bagel can do better,” I ventured.
“They do do better. They definitely do better!” he said.
A few days later, I went to the original Ess-a-bagel shop at Third Avenue and 51st Street to see how the “worst” compared to the original. The place was packed with office workers, construction guys, students and moms with kids.
In contrast to the sleek, dim decor of the food hall, the brightly lit shop featured Ess-a-bagel’s cheery white-and-green signage and a delightfully jumbled mix of finishes. Behind the back counter, I spotted men busy at the dough mixer, rack ovens and bagel rolling counter.
Thanks to its size, this place offered a much bigger selection—twice as many bagel varieties and three times as many cream cheese flavors as the food hall.
Even the prices were lower! $6.91 is steep for a bagel with flavored cream cheese, but it beat Dumbo’s $7.25. And the coffee was fifty cents cheaper.
As for the bagel? As Sam predicted, it was larger—a handsomely lopsided fellow that practically screamed “hand-rolled.” And yes, it was yeasty, malty and the perfect amount of salty.
“The bagel is phenomenal. I think it’s the best bagel ever.”
That’s what I heard from Ess-a-bagel CEO Melanie Frost when we spoke on the phone the next morning about the bagels made in her company’s new factory in Harlem.
To my surprise, Melanie was very friendly even after I explained the focus of my story—that they were rated worst in the city. “I appreciate you reaching out and giving me the opportunity to address the rating you saw online,” she said.
Before we talked bagels, she filled me in the company’s history. It was launched in 1976 after the family lost the lease on its Brooklyn donut shop: “They combed the papers, they found a bagel shop, they said, ‘Donuts, bagels—they both have holes, we’ll figure it out!’”
Melanie joined her mother running the business when her aunt died. “We said, ‘How do we take this incredible bagel and spread it across the country?’” she recalled. They started expanding during the pandemic, wholesaling to other bagel shops, which spurred the opening of the factory in Harlem last year.
The factory now supplies Ess-a-bagel shops in Dumbo, the Financial District and Newark Airport along with partner shops in places like Virginia Beach, Indiana, St. Louis and Connecticut.
The factory bagel, Melanie said, is the exact same recipe, prepared the exact same way, as the Midtown bagel—except it’s rolled by a machine. But that wouldn’t make a difference in flavor. “I did a blind taste test of the parbaked bagel at Time Out and the bagel at 51st Street,” she said. “I think they taste the same.”
The Dumbo location’s poor reviews, she said, were mainly due to customer service problems. (Indeed, it turns out the “Signature” sandwich Sam and I ordered was supposed to have capers.)
“It’s not the bagel!” she said.
I hung up feeling a little vexed. I truly believe Melanie when she says she thinks the bagels are the same. But both Sam and I felt they were a very different product.
Either way, the world is about to get hit with a lot more of those factory-made bagels. Ess-a-bagel will soon open a stand in JFK’s Terminal One, is looking to launch a franchise arm and is exploring opportunities in Spain, France and South Korea.
Shipping bagels made in a factory rather than prepared on-site will allow the company to ensure consistency and quality as it goes global, said Melanie: “I’m just looking to stay close to the heritage, close to who we are, and what the bagel is. This the way you protect the recipe and protect the brand.”
NYC Bagels by the Numbers
Average Score, city-wide: 4.3
Percent of shops with less than four stars: 13%
Average Score by Borough
Brooklyn — 4.36
Bronx — 4.36
Staten Island — 4.23
Manhattan — 4.21
Queens — 4.08
Best Neighborhoods for Bagels
(By average rating of shops with at least 20 reviews)
Ridgewood — 4.54
Greenpoint, Prospect Heights and Fort Greene — 4.50 (tie)
Cobble Hill — 4.47
SoHo, Fordham, Bay Ridge and Park Slope — 4.45 (tie)
Bushwick, East Harlem and Brooklyn Heights — 4.40 (tie)
Flushing and Astoria — 4.43 (tie)
Worst Neighborhoods for Bagels
(By average rating of shops with at least 20 reviews)
Gramercy — 3.43
Greenwich Village — 3.74
St. George — 3.77
Sunnyside — 3.91
Inwood — 3.94
Rockaway — 4.00
Chelsea — 4.03
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Zohran is about to become the first non-poly Mayor since at least Bloomberg.”
—Anders J Lee
CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
Thank you for your comment on "curated". My blood pressure goes up a few points and I have to walk away from my desk for a few minutes whenever I see it in print. Gaaaaahhhh...
I swear the bagels at Ess-a-Bagel on First Avenue in Stuy Town are better than the rest. It appears that they share the branding and the name but have different ownership and slightly different menus, as well as different promo campaigns than the other Ess-a-Bagels across the city and in the airports. I get the feeling that it’s two sides of the same family, some kind of succession struggle. Did you happen to hear any of that during your research?