Outside of New York, bagels have been slow to garner the same sort of attention or cache of other viral foods. But that seems to be changing, especially on the West Coast.
On a sunny spring morning in Southeast Portland, a line was already starting to wrap around the block in front of
Pipsqueak Bagels.
“The bagels looked really good online, so we thought we would come give it a try,” said Regan Mandzij, who was here with her mom.
It’s only 8:30 a.m., but the pair were some of the 40-or-so folks waiting for a weekend bagel.
“We didn’t mind standing outside cause it’s warm out, but we did not know it was gonna be 45 minutes,” she said.
A wait this long may seem unheard of for a bagel, but the simple formula of flour, water, and yeast is much more than just its ingredients, Sam Silverman explained. He’s president of Bagel Up, an organization dedicated to “promoting bagels and the people, culture, and community behind them,” he said.
“Even though the cost of the goods is relatively low, the amount of time and effort that goes into it is much higher than a lot of other foods,” said Silverman, New York's self-proclaimed bagel ambassador. These artisan bagels go way beyond your grocery store bagged variety.
“To do bagels the right way, it's a minimum two-day process,” Silverman said. “You make and shape the dough by hand, and then the following day, after the dough has been allowed to cold ferment, it's then boiled, seeded, and baked.”
Silverman said one of the reasons he thinks there’s been a rise in popularity outside of New York City is the amount of people who relocated during the pandemic.
“The exodus of New Yorkers and Northeasterners who went to other places in the country and brought their standards for bagels with them was the perfect match for local entrepreneurs to fill that hole in the market,” he said.
That includes entrepreneurs like Andrew Rubinstein, who noticed the bagel void even earlier.
“I'd already been thinking about bagels in around 2016 — the fact that they just weren't what I thought were great bagels in the Seattle area,” he said.
Rubinstein is the owner of
Hey Bagel, and before he went brick-and-mortar last year, he was meeting people in parking lots to give them bagels.
“I was baking out of a commissary kitchen [and] loading up my Ford Explorer with bags of bagels,” he said. “I would poach in grocery store parking lots, in transit centers, and people would come and have their clandestine pickups.”
