Bagels amongst the dead
'A bagel isn’t just a food — it’s a moment.' How bagels in two different environments resulted in two dramatically different experiences.
When a guide to bagels in New York includes the declaration ‘a "5" bagel is not an objective achievement. It is a subjective combination of time, place and experience’, you can’t but take note. To follow such a guide, using it as a treasure map to lead you to pots of doughy gold scattered across the sprawling city of New York, is to take up an invitation to not only find a bagel that tastes good but one that encapsulates a mood, a moment that is snapped and frozen in time for posterity. It uses bagels as a metonym for what all food is, really: something that transcends the hygiene need of nourishment and the desirable want of pleasing taste to imprint the intangible into something concrete which is consumed yet lasts. How hot the sun was that day and how it felt on your skin; the scent of your favourite candle wafting around you as you sat down to eat; the miles of walking that went into finding the ingredients which have now been melded carefully to create the meal on your plate. Food has the uncanny ability to commemorate whether it was a good day or not. Whether your meal was the moment of redemption in your day or bore the mark of its demise. At the same time, Everything is Everything (‘EiE’) also provides a supremely practical guide to finding the best version of a food which is ubiquitous in New York, with the implicit caveat that the user’s experience will be influenced by their own life, what the guide’s creator Steve Vorley calls the ‘X factor’; that they will impart some of themselves and their own story to create a bagel ‘moment’ that is entirely their own.
With that in mind, I used Vorley’s guide to track down some of his highest scoring bagel spots and see how my Bagel Moments would compare, whether any of the ambiance and connection he identified is objective and can transfer to another person. The short answer is, broadly, no. Here is a tale of two bagels and two very different moments.
Bagel One: The Bitch ruined it
As I got onto the subway one scorching summer morning, I had my sights set on going to Vorley’s favourite bagel spot in New York. Carefully researching and meticulously scoring bagels from 202 bagel shops across the five boroughs, Vorley awarded the top spot to a small independent bagel shop in Queens, P&C Bagels. For a visitor to New York or even somebody living outside Queens, the location is decidedly inconvenient: the geographical equivalent to a hard-to-reach itch on your back, it was in Middle (of nowhere) Village somewhere in the ‘tween land of Queens and Brooklyn, at the end of an infrequent branch of the ‘M’ line. But Vorley had walked there from Manhattan as part of his bagel project, and considered his Bagel Moment at P&C an ‘incredible experience’, which cemented my own resolve to make the journey. He added that the environment influenced this: the family-run store itself has been around for 30 years, and he has family connections to the area which added a healthy layer of nostalgia to his bagel moment.
New York is not the same city I visited almost three years earlier. The murmurs suggest it is not as safe, and even though I shrugged most of this off as unnecessary fear-mongering, even the women I asked in chance encounters told me they no longer took the subway because it no longer felt safe. Even so, I took the M train without a second thought, it being almost noon and the train itself travelling overground rather than in the dark belly of the city, scooting over the busy streets on the network of track supported by huge wrought iron frames which decorate Queens like aged, tired rollercoasters. I was standing by the carriage door and peering out of the window at the city spread out beneath me when a woman, who had been lurching down the nearly-empty carriage, came up to me and first coughed in my face and then swiftly smacked me over my right eye. I was too stunned to react, it happened in a matter of seconds and so suddenly, but when she grabbed my wrist to pull me off the train at the next stop, I pulled free and raised the alarm. She then escaped, taking not only my peace of mind for the day but all the confidence and comfort I had grown through two decades of visiting a city I loved. What arguably hurt more was the fact that none of the other passengers - three men, all seated nearby - intervened to help. Didn’t even look up. That made me fucking angry. But what really stung, and left a wound deeper than the quick sting of being struck without provocation by a mad bitch, was that one of those men eventually eventually ventured up to ask me if I was OK, and went on to say that what I should have done was punch her on the nose. She thought I was a weak target, he said, because I made a slight move back when she came right up to me and put her face into mine. It was the accusation, laced in disingenuous kindness, that I had somehow allowed the assault to happen, that I was weak and that invited the violation, which I took with me, shaking and distressed, as I left the train at the end of the line.
I was thankfully not bruised or bleeding, and a couple of cops comforted me at the station (‘New Yorkers are fucking cowards!’ I wanted to yell at them in my loneliness) but as I started walking down the stretch of road in the blazing sun towards the bagel shop I felt drained and numb. My surroundings were bleak: this area of Queens is bumblefuck, and it was somewhat appropriate that the road was flanked by cemeteries on either side. In fact, the area is a constellation of graveyards, with several located in close proximity to each other, punctuated by the odd crematorium. This for Vorley was a contributing factor to his nostalgia: his late father is buried in a nearby cemetery, but for me the presence of death permeated the air and settled into my skin. My only hope was that the city’s best bagels would provide some uplift to my day, but I finally arrived at the shop to find out they had sold out of my favourite cinnamon and raisin. I was hungry and forlorn, but stubbornly refused to settle for another bagel to eat straightaway, buying 2 plain and 2 pumpernickel to take home instead. The shop did indeed have an independent family feel, but it was not comforting or particularly welcoming - not enough to outweigh the deep unhappiness I felt inside.
I walked back down the long, hot, straight, dull road back and then past the station. I couldn’t bear it, Hungry, sweaty and weary, I kept walking, seeking solace in the streets and isolation. I passed what seemed an endless line of auto shops and Dunkin Donuts before I finally crossed the invisible boundary into Brooklyn and then, eventually, sought refuge in Sey, a coffee shop with a familiar feel. There, sitting down, with an iced coffee, a tiny fragment of myself was salvaged from what was one of the most awful experiences of my life. Later, I would take the bagels home, freeze them and then defrost and eat them over the coming weeks. But they weren’t for me: too dense, too hefty, and too irrevocably infused with the memory of a moment I wish I could forget.
Bagel Two: Redemption for the living amongst the dead
A week later, and I emerge from the subway (which I cannot avoid entirely because I can’t walk everywhere, but now I am highly alert and aware of who is around me) at Grand Army Plaza. It is another scorching day, but as I get my bearings and a feel for where I am, I feel a comfort. An absence of bleakness. I am heading towards Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe, rated in EiE as best in Brooklyn and 3rd best in the City. ‘The question is not “is this a good bagel” but where it lands in the hierarchy of best in city’, is the guide’s summary, and the bagels here score a lofty 4.5/5 (P&C scored 4.75). I walk up Vanderbilt Av and enter what is a jaunty little shop, both bagel shop and local convenience store with tidily arranged rows of above-average food produce and household goods. I like this place: it has the air of life, with a slightly old-fashioned homely feel which is pleasant. I pick up my cinnamon and raisin bagel with blueberry cream cheese which I had called ahead to put aside because these seem to run out quickly in the smaller independent stores, to eat for lunch and a few more for later. The place itself has ticked the box, but my Bagel Moment still awaits.
On a whim I decide to visit Green-Wood Cemetery, about 30 minutes walk away through affluent Park Slope. One of the oldest cemeteries in the States and a Natural Historic Landmark, it is simultaneously cemetery, park and wildlife site, and, as I discover, the most organised graveyard I’ve ever visited anywhere. Every lane is named and marked on the map I pick up on the way in. I can wander without getting hopelessly lost. I start ambling, bagel tucked in my bag.
The cemetery has the air of the great Victorian cemeteries in London, with statuesque gravestones and mausolea celebrating the dead. Along one wall, there is a collection of mausolea like little homes embedded into the raised earth; all wealthy early (white) Americans who could afford to be well-homed neighbours in death as well as life. Another corner, with a collection of lanes named ‘Battle Lane’ and ‘Liberty Path’, marks the battleground between the American Revolutionaries and British in the Battle of Brooklyn. I stand on this elevated ground and have a superb view over a city for which I am now empty and hold confused, conflicted feelings. In another corner are the Freedom Lots, the burial section for Black Americans who were buried without headstones or markers.
But most of all, there is quiet. Not the jarring, morbid silence of the cemeteries in Queens, but a peaceful, restful silence. I am alone, and in this loneliness, with only the dead for company, I experience some restoration. The tranquility afforded by these half a million souls acts like a redemptive salve to atone for the misdeeds of the living. I am uncomfortable around people now, disenchanted with New York, a city which has held and healed me for so many years, but here I feel safe even if for a moment. Here I feel as I might be able to forgive.
Under the shade of a tree standing guard over a large mausoleum complete with a brick wall and iron chain around its perimeter, I find a place to perch and eat. I decide it’s not sacrilegious to sit on the brick wall surrounding the mausoleum, and carefully retrieve my bagel from my bag. I unwrap it, its weight and bulk reassuring in my hands. It parts neatly in two where it has been cut, and the brown swirl of the dough - pleasingly chewy-looking with bounce, studded with juicy raisins and contained in a solid, shiny carapace of boiled crust - is bifurcated by a thick layer of bright lavender cream cheese, where the blueberries have exploded into the cheese itself. This New York trip has finally made me capitulate to thick layers of cream cheese trowelled in between the bagel halves rather than the more modest layers I was used to. I arm myself with plenty of napkins and start eating, wondering for a moment midway if I should stop at one half because it’s a large, hearty serving but leaving that thought behind as I pick up the second half. The bagel tastes exactly as it looks: delightfully chewy, with the right amount of heft in density and resistance in the crust. It has absorbed its surroundings; I am eating peace. Afterwards I get up, tidy after myself and continue my journey around the quiet valley of the dead, where I gain enough energy and goodwill to eventually exit and rejoin the world of the living.
Love this! Beautiful writing as ever, Nazish. So glad you were able to harness that awful Part I to share with power; and had this wonderful Part II 👌