Have I ever told you my bagel theory of coastal arbitrage? It goes a little something like this:
Someone fresh from New York City (ideally Brooklyn but honestly anywhere in the tri-state area works) moves to San Francisco or a nearby part of the Bay Area. After poking around for a little while and trying to get a decent bagel in town they think to themselves “this town is ripe for a real bagel joint to take it by storm.”
Setting aside any concerns about something in the water back in New York that differs from the terroir in the Sunset, they open up their new authentic place with clear references to Brooklyn or subway tiles or baseball stadiums or regional jargon or straight up Yiddish expressions out of context and word gets around!
There’s a place in town that makes decent bagels. They’ve got pretty good lox and whitefish salad too! Do they boil the dough? Well… that’s complicated.
And they are good, and we transplants do get excited and we even help spread the word. They open up franchises. Years go by. And over time things evolve. The American palate is a ravenous one. It likes buttery chardonnays and jammy reds. It likes things supersized and sugary.
The marketplace makes its demands suddenly, insistently, relentless, and before you know it the bagels at your favorite place have begun bigger, fluffier, softer, blander.
They taste good. It’s nice bread. It’s a good white bread roll with seed and stuff on it. It’s shaped like a bagel, but this is right around when a recent transplant from Murray Hill or Columbus Circle or Fort Greene decides they’ve had enough and they know just exactly what this town needs.
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