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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: bendy <bendy AT duke.edu>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: why you should never move to Boston
  • Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:29:22 -0500

Chris Calloway wrote:

I guess it's more like a doughnut than you think. As far as I'm
concerned, a doughnut, meaning a KK, should be eaten within five
minutes of coming out of the oven.

It is my belief that the bagels success is just a case of natural selection; at a time when a big segment of the population started believing that a daily doughnut was a bad thing, they found a doughy circle that came in several different flavors that was good with coffee and could be eaten in its stead.

The eventual demise of the salt bagel will be confirmation of this theory. I'm surprised there hasn't been an echinacea bagel. Or maybe there has, out west.

I spent most of the 90s living in a Pittsburgh neighborhood that had two local, independent bagel shops. For a while, I lived above the larger of the two- I remember getting bugged all winter by this noise, an electronic *scrunch...scrunch...scrunch* that sounded like a giant dot matrix printer. In the spring, the back door to kitchen was open, and I finally saw what it was; a machine, sorta like a tennis ball serving machine, that was hooked up to the hoppers of bagels. Employees could dial in a order- 12 poppy, 4 sesame, 4 plain - and it would suck the appropriate number *scrunch...scrunch...scrunch* from the appropriate hopper and shoot them into a bag. Then the bags would get delivered to the offices that had made the order.

Anyways, this shop supplied most of the city, and the other served just the neighborhood, and you could hear the mumblings about which was better, but both served dense, three-inch rolls that came in about seven flavors, all savory, none sweet.

First, both shops started in with the extra flavors- chocolate chip was one of the first. Then Bruggers moved in, and the smaller shop closed. Chesapeake moved into the smaller shop's storefront. All the chains did decent business, and eventually the old shop closed it's neighborhood store, retreating to is large-scale bakery in the 'burbs and going wholesale.

A traditional bagel isn't like a rock in the stomach first thing in the morning, 'cause it's only got a bit of cream cheese on it, and it's a small portion. It's a pleasant little buffer for black coffee.

At any rate, if a local bagel shop can't make it in a neighborhood that supports a kosher Chinese restaurant, it's folly to expect dense, crunchy, thin-schmear-of-cream-cheese bagels to survive in these torrid climes.

And if the 90s made it through a bagel expansion and swing revival without a prominent cover of Slim Galliard's *Dunking Bagels* the war was over before it began.

- bendy







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