> It is arrogant, at least. Are you trashing just the 340 million people in the US with this comment, or everybody not-Swiss?

You’re parsing discernment as a value judgement. Don’t do that.

New York City has America’s best bagels. This is because OG bagels are best fresh, and making them fresh multiple times a day takes a lot of work. (They stale super fast because gluten is a bastard. Hence toasting.) To pay for that work at a non-ludicrous cost per bagel, you need lots of reliable demand. That really only happens when you have an ecosystem of people who have been eating bagels all their lives made by folks who have been making them similarly.

You don’t find great bagels outside New York (at an affordable price) because the demand isn’t there. Meanwhile, if you haven’t spent time in New York, you probably don’t know (or care about) the difference. Which means you’re unlikely to give excess patronage to anyone who tries to do it right if they try to do it near you. That doesn’t make anyone outside New York who likes their local bagel wrong; it’s just that economies make it very difficult, and frankly pointless, to replicate the New York bagel elsewhere.

If the people in your town will pay extra only for great cheese and the guys across the pond will pay the same price for mediocre and great cheeses, the deck is stacked. (And to be clear, you can find great Swiss cheeses in America. What you can’t is great Swiss wines.)

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pclmulqdq 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not a fan of New York bagels. They're generally too doughy and "white bread" tasting for me. Plenty of places have excellent bagels that are pre-boiled with lye. The lye boiling process is not special. What is unique is the particular taste and texture, and it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer.

Your whole comment below about "discernment" and seeking New York bagels out sounds like a personal preference (bred by familiarity), not actually finding the creme de la creme of bagels.

The same goes for Chicago/New York pizza. It's not special. It's just the pizza you metaphorically grew up with.

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The lye boiling process is not special

It’s one element. The result, however, is highly perishable. You can make it last a full day in the counter, but that fucks with the texture.

> it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer

Sure. Same with various cheeses. Or beef.

Kobe beef is predominantly consumed in Japan. A bit makes it out. But you can generally serve someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time in Japan other wagyu and they’ll be happy. You won’t get away with that with a Kobe aficionado, and there are simply more of those in Japan for self-reïnforcing reasons. (I personally like a range of beef, and while Kobe is great, it’s not something I seek out.)

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pclmulqdq 4 days ago | parent [-]

Almost every city has several bakeries that make lye-boiled bagels and plenty of other things that are baked and stocked daily. Most bakers I know will donate their stock of all breads to a homeless shelter at the end of the day and start fresh on new bread in the morning. You don't need extremely high volume for that.

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-]

> that are baked and stocked daily

But not multiple times a day. A New York bagel noticeably stales after a couple hours.

Baguettes are the same, by the way. The little handies? If made plainly, correvtly, they change immeasurably once they cool.

When perishability is measured in tens of minutes’ intervals, your economics require a large city of aficionados. (Not applicable to cheese, obviously.)

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pclmulqdq 4 days ago | parent [-]

Most good bakeries everywhere stock multiple times a day as stock gets low. Even the ones selling American baked goods and things like cupcakes because all of these things have shelf lives of hours. Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread? Do you think it's the only place you can get a cake?

Having high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York. The specific type of bagel is, though, because it's a preference rather than a sign of quality. You have fewer bakeries per square mile outside New York, but you have fewer of everything per square mile outside New York. Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Most good bakeries everywhere stock multiple times a day as stock gets low The stuff that sells. In most bakeries, that doesn’t cover bagels. > Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread? Nobody claimed this. > high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York It absolutely is. New York has entire American cities’ worth of people in single city blocks. That drives niche culinary diversity in a way that’s impossible to sustain anywhere else in America. > Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods Again, never contested. But not as wide a variety. You can’t profitably make every sort of baked good fresh every few hours in a town smaller than a few hundred thousand. You can find that within walking distance for bagels, cubanos, naan and dumplings in a lot of Manhattan.

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sunrunner 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> bred by familiarity

Bread by familiarity, surely? Sorry for the awful bun. I mean pun.

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rootusrootus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm definitely not on the same wavelength as you this evening.

> New York City has America’s best bagels

That's a big claim.

You say it's because they are best fresh -- are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels? That's what I get from your first comment, but then you moved the goalposts a bit by qualifying "at an affordable price." So maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?

I see there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel ;).

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-]

> are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels?

Of the kind that stale in two hours? Yes. It wouldn’t be economical.

> maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?

Never say never, but I haven’t seen it. I have seen private chefs pull it off. But they basically required a sous chef to deal with the lye and boiling.

> there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel

Yup :). (I qualified the first reference with OG, btw.)

But I’m going further. You can’t make a New York bagel outside New York without hundreds of customers reliably streaming through the door who will fuck off if you try to take a shortcut.

Other cities have great bagels. (Montrèal.) But they’re not that. That’s what I mean by discernment. Literally, discerning one thing from another. If you’ve eaten New York bagels for a stretch, you can discern them from others. If you like that, you’ll seek it out, rewarding those who do the work and punishing those who dope them with preservatives. That creates symbiosis between the bagel eater and maker.

Same with cheese. Same with barbecue. Or chivitos or chaat or all the other local, perishable yummies that are peculiar in an infuriatingly-tedious way.

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com2kid 4 days ago | parent [-]

A minor correction to your base premise - There is a bagel shop in Newton MA that is open for a few hours in the morning that has bagels just as good as NYC.

People line to before they open and the bagels are quickly sold out in a mad rush.

There is a French bakery close to me in Seattle there makes croissants in the morning and they sell out in less than 2 hours. IMHO they are the best croissants in the city, although we have quite a few good local bakeries.

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> There is a bagel shop in Newton MA that is open for a few hours in the morning that has bagels just as good as NYC

I love this!

	▲	com2kid 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is a near 5 star restaurant in Duvall Washington called Flavor Bistro. If you ever find yourself in Duvall for whatever reason, go eat there! The chef is super nice and the food is amazing. Random lolwtfbbq quality restaurants are some of the best finds.

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MiddleEndian 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Which bagel shop in Newton is this?

	▲	com2kid 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think it is Rosenfeld but that is just random Google search, I haven't been to Newton in probably a decade. My fiancée (now wife) used to live there and I'd fly out every other month to visit her. I also remember Johnny's having pretty good corn beef hash. 90% of the corn beef hash here on the west coast is way under seasoned. The bagels at Rosenfeld aren't the exact same as NYC (water yada yada) but they are quality wise really good and the toppings are amazing. Random fact - to pay for my trips I'd right up a patent application on my Windows 8.1 tablet on the red eye JetBlue flight. My LD relationship is why I hold so many patents!