The Quest for the Perfect Bagel

Wednesday, I had the pleasure of talking to a fellow food blogger about my blog. She currently lives in San Francisco, but is originally from New York. Being from New York, she has particular food tastes that lean toward the Jewish side of things. She also told me about her greatest food quest.

“I love smoked whitefish,” she said. “But it’s so hard to find in San Francisco.” She told me about her looking for it, and how eventually she found it at her Costco.

A lot of foodies have some form of food quest – the journey of obtaining that one perfect item of food that seems to complete our very souls. We get very picky, because almost nothing is good enough for us. While other people eat it just because it’s there, we are hypercritical. It has to be just so, or the experience is completely ruined.

So while my San Francisco friend has the quest for smoked whitefish, mine is simple: the perfect bagel. I have probably loved bagels since the day I was actually able to chew them.

Lucky for me, Papu and Nony only got I & Joy Bagels. These were the best bagels on the planet – crunchy bottom covered with cornmeal, chewy texture, topped with fresh onions and poppy seeds. To put it simply, they were perfect.

Unfortunately, I & Joy does not exist anymore – they became Manhattan Bagels. Luckily, they are still good, and they are made right. Some mornings, I would go in and actually seem them boiling the bagels. That’s authentic, people. I can never forget how many mornings my dad and I would share bagels as he was taking me up to the University of Judaism (now the AJU) for Hebrew High.

But the problem is Manhattan Bagels are few and far between now, and are not in Long Beach. Hence, I needed to find a great bagel here. I’ve had good bagels in this area – Grounds, a coffee shop near us, is pretty good, and Noah’s is a tolerable bagel if I am in desperate need, but not the best by any means. But for a long time, there was nothing great.

You’ll probably ask me if I have Western Bagels here. We do – and Western Bagels is my sworn enemy. They are the most evil bagels in the world. It’s bread trying to pretend that it’s a bagel, and when you take that first bite, you feel like the creators of Western Bagels are laughing at you as you have that icky look on your face. For the non-bagel connoisseur, I guess this works fine. Not for me. I’m particular. I want it all.

And then it happened: One day, I had a bagel from Katella Deli. From the very beginning, it looked good – the fresh onions and poppy seeds on the top were calling to me. Such attention to detail is always a good sign when it comes to bagels. And then I bit in, and the magic began.

It was all there – that crunch on the bottom, the chewy texture, that bursting onion flavor dancing on my tongue. It had been a very long time since I had a bagel that good. This was comparable not only to Manhattan Bagels – I would one up it and say it was very much like this amazing bagel I got from a hole-in-the-wall bagel shop near NYU when I was visiting New York City back in 2004. And, might I add, this bagel is in ORANGE COUNTY, the last place you would imagine finding a good bagel.

Of course, there is a huge downside – Katella Deli is way off the beaten path. There are very few things near it, and I am rarely in that neck of the neighborhood to go grab myself a bagel. Therefore, I must implore Katella Deli to open a bagel shop and bakery here in Long Beach. If they did, bagel-wise Long Beach would be a much better place. They are our only hope.

In the meantime, the quest continues…