February 24–March 2, 2000

food|dining guide

The Bagel Chase

photo: Shoshana Wiesner

Shut out by the F.B.I., a bagel lover goes in search of Philly’s best.

by Laura Spagnoli

A short time ago, I could honestly have shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know from bagels in this town.” I’d enjoyed many a good bagel when I lived in New York, but when I moved to Philadelphia I lost the noshing habit — perhaps laboring under the delusion that New York was the only place a good bagel could be had.

Then a funny thing happened last fall. I went to the Fairmount Bagel Institute (F.B.I.) in the Art Museum area — the only bagel shop I’d ever visited because it was the only place that seemed to offer a quick snack in that neck of the woods. But it was closed, permanently. No note of explanation, no message when I later checked by phone.

My lunch spot had disappeared, but not my curiosity. I started to wonder: Where do Philadelphians in the know get their bagels?

A couple of the chains, Einstein Brothers and Manhattan Bagels, cater to the hungry droves in office buildings and Suburban Station in Center City. With its Chicago Bagel Dog and the Powerbagel, a bagel stick containing dried fruit, seeds, and nuts that packs a walloping 27 grams of protein, Einstein’s isn’t making its proverbial dough off the traditional bagel. Nor is Manhattan Bagels on 18th Street, whose hot pastrami and Swiss cheese Ellis Island Sandwich Special is either a clash of cultures or an achievement of the melting-pot ideal, depending on your point of view.

Beyond the chains, the Metropolitan bakeries at Rittenhouse Square and the Reading Terminal include a couple of varieties of excellent bagels with their other fare. Le Bus bakeries also make a great bagel with more varieties, but there’s a slightly higher price tag for the fruit and nut and cinnamon raisin ones.

The largest purveyors of bagels in the non-chain category are the wholesale/retail producers that supply cafés, delis and restaurants. The bagels you get at Rachael’s Nosheri on 19th Street, for example, come from Redhouse Bagels in Bensalem. If you order a bagel at Tuscany on Rittenhouse Square it comes from the Philadelphia Bagel Company on Delaware Avenue. I visited owner Chris Cerreto at company headquarters, consisting of a retail counter and, behind it, a large kitchen for authentic bagel making.

“Authentic,” as Chris and other retailer/wholesalers explained, means the bagel dough is boiled before it is baked. It is this process that gelatinizes the starches in the dough and lends the true bagel its shiny, hard shell. This is the quality missing from the pre-packaged imitations that connoisseurs consider soft and “bready.”

Chris told me that the boiling process isn’t problem-free, since the iron content of the water could negatively affect the results. His comment at first seemed to back up the theory espoused by the bagel purists in New York — that the only good water for making bagels is the clean H2O flowing from upstate to the city dwellers down south. But bagel mavens in Philly need not fear: The iron content here is far less elevated than in the Midwest or California, according to Cerreto. It certainly didn’t seem to affect the bagels I tried. Try the spicy cheddar or wheat orange walnut (wow!) varieties. (See sidebar to find out where else you can buy his and other wholesalers’ bagels.)

On a tour of The Bagel Factory’s bagel/sandwich shop at Fifth and Walnut, boiling came up again as the key to avoiding the soft and dreaded “roll with a hole,” as co-owner Fernando Becattini Jr. put it. He mentioned the dubious steam-injection oven technology employed by some manufacturers who forgo boiling, but changing that crucial step brings the bagel that much closer to plain old bread. The bagels I sampled at The Bagel Factory were anything but.

The place bagel lovers mentioned most often in my search was South Street Philly Bagels, the shop with the brightly painted “Hot Bagels” sign on Third Street below South. Owner Michael Wagner has been in the business more than 30 years and explained the history of bagel making in pre-1950s New York, when learning the trade was difficult because closed shops were the rule. In other words, you couldn’t get into the business if you weren’t in a bagel family. That changed when unions opened up the shops and bagel techniques and traditions slowly made their way outside the city.

Wagner came to Philadelphia five years ago. He characterized the market as competitive; South Street Philly Bagels, like The Bagel Factory and Philadelphia Bagel Company, offers sandwiches to draw more customers. But if many people were tempted to try the bagel business in the ’90s, experience showed a lot of them “it’s not that easy to get into,” as Wagner observed. Making a great bagel requires a good kitchen that starts from scratch and hard work, both evident in the delicious bagels at Wagner’s shop. Fans of the bagel’s unboiled and holeless companion, the bialy, can find those at the South Street Philly Bagels shop as well.

The last wholesale/retail outfit I visited was the family-owned New York Bagel Bakery on Haverford Avenue at City Line, the only officially kosher place I saw. Bainish and Sarah Myer took over the Bagel Bakery a year and half ago, but the business has been a fixture at that same location for roughly 30 years.

A chemical engineering journal recently published an article on bagel production and received letters from readers mentioning the best bagels they’d tasted in places around the world. New York Bagel Bakery was among the 10 places cited, and with good reason. Their bagels are delicious and include varieties like the Black Russian, a dark rye number with raisins, sesame seeds and cinnamon devised by business partner Nick Abdallah. New York Bagel Bakery also makes its own cream cheeses and is well worth a trip outside Center City.

In the end, my bagel chase came full circle. The Fairmount Bagel Institute may have closed, but former owner Jon Rivkind is busy opening a new café/restaurant with his wife, Elissa. The extensive menu at Izzy and Zoe’s on 40th Street includes matzoh ball soup, potato latkes and, of course, bagels. When I asked Jon about shutting down F.B.I., he cited the loss of Wawa’s business (they stopped using F.B.I. as a supplier when they started up their own bakery) as well as the anti-carbohydrate Atkins Diet that persuaded people interested in slimming down to replace breads and grains with pure proteins. Fad diets aside, the Rivkinds will still bake bagels prepared at a larger, off-site location and seem to be looking on the bright side of the whole thing. As the words of bagel wisdom stenciled over their new counter remind us, “The optimist sees the bagel, the pessimist sees the hole.”