RTP-area local music and culture

[Lisa Drake <ldrake AT pobox.com>]

Chocolate chip bagels are just...wrong.

In article <200601051229.k05CTMpY003887 AT eddings.acpub.duke.edu>,
 bendy AT duke.edu (bendy) wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene