Welcome to the Great Bagel Boom, a series celebrating the vast creative expanses of bagel culture across America—because yes, you can find truly wonderful bagels outside of New York now. Read our full list of the best bagels in the country here.
“It’s not a New York bagel. It’s not a Montreal bagel. It’s a Korshak Bagel,” reads a description on the website of South Philly shop Korshak. These bagels begin with a sourdough starter named Helen Mirren, and ferment for 48 hours before baker-owner Phil Korshak arrives at the small shop around 3:30 a.m. to preheat the ovens and start baking. The results are crisp and bubbly, chewy and plush, accompanied by eccentric schmears like one that combines shredded carrot, roasted walnuts, and raisins soaked in cinnamon-spiked goat’s milk. Revolving bagel sandwiches are just as exalted and unpredictable: a chocolate chip bagel layered with chorizo, scrambled egg, and Cooper Sharp cheddar, or a sweet number called the Banana Foster Wallace that melds honey marshmallow fluff, cinnamon sugar, and banana tahini jam.
Korshak does all of this by hand, which means quantity is limited. Philly knows this and shows up early. “I didn't plan on having a line, and I lived in New York long enough to have complete contempt and hatred for them,” Korshak says. Still, he sees the crowds outside his shop as a bright spot, a sign that people are ready to treat bagels as more than convenience food.
Korshak Bagels, which opened in 2021, is part of a larger bagel boom playing out across the country. While 10 years ago making a traditional New York–style bagel was the North Star, national bagel culture is moving in new directions. In LA and New Orleans, bakers are topping open-face sandwiches with local produce and turning bagels into a carefully plated affair. There are devotees of smaller, wood-fired Montreal bagels in cities like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio, and in San Francisco, where bakers have been championing sourdough for decades, a tangy, slow-fermented sourdough bagel movement has taken hold.
Spurred in part by the pandemic, as bakers lost or left their restaurant jobs and launched their own businesses, a wave of craft bagel shops is emerging. Bakers are approaching bagels with the same fervor as French pastry and sparking local obsessions that rival New York’s. They’re turning bagels into a special event and carving out space for something new to grow.
“I think there's a better way,” says Korshak of his methodical approach to bagel making, “and very fortunately, I’m not alone in that.”
The bagel’s lineage stretches back much further than New York. In Poland during the Middle Ages, Jews were forbidden from buying or selling regular baked bread, and according to research by Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, they developed their own recipes for boiled breads. The bagel (or something like it) was born. When Jews from Poland brought bagels to New York in the 19th century, they remained largely relegated to Jewish communities. In 1946, The New York Times described bagels as “small, hard Jewish rolls with holes in the center.” Bagels began to break into the mainstream in the 1970s, when Lender’s marketed its frozen, presliced ones as “Jewish English muffins.”
Eventually in New York, bagels became an art and an obsession. New Yorkers ferociously defend their favorite bagel shop (of which there are…a lot), the many ways you should not order a bagel, and the whole New York water theory (which has been pretty much debunked). In a lot of other cities, bagels have been treated less as craft than convenience. They spread to grocery stores and breakfast chains like Panera and Einstein Bros., and a culture developed around grab-and-go bagels that could fill stomachs without emptying bank accounts. Of course, these bagels have their rightful place, and their low cost is a core part of this food’s history and identity. Now, though, they’re joined by a storm of craft bagel shops that are veering in the opposite direction, serving deliberately made bagels and attracting devoted fans.
This wave started to swell across the US in early 2021 when The New York Times published an article bravely titled “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York).” The story sparked deep pride and deeper discontent, but these bakers aren’t trying to make something better than a New York bagel. They’re trying to make something different. “Because tradition isn’t as established, there’s more wiggle room, there’s more space for experimentation and playfulness that might be harder to get away with in New York,” says Tejal Rao, the LA-based critic at large for the Times, who wrote that famed article. “I do think the New York bagel holds a very special place, and it always will. It’s just not the reference point that [these] bakers have.”
In New Orleans, baker Breanne Kostyk doesn’t describe the bagel she makes at Flour Moon Bagels as New York or Montreal styles. It’s just an “artisanal bagel,” as far as she’s concerned. Her sourdough bagels are cold-fermented and spiked with Louisiana cane syrup, then get hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, and baked at 500 degrees. They’re crisp and chewy on the outside, and supple once you break through. On weekends, people queue up outside the shop, which Kostyk opened in 2022 with her partner Jeff Hinson.
In San Francisco, the bagels Alex Rogers sells each week at his Bernal Heights pop-up, Chicken Dog Bagels (named for Rogers’s old chihuahua, Chicken), are colored by nostalgia. Rogers grew up in Connecticut, and it was always a special treat when his dad commuted home from Manhattan with a still-steamy paper bag of H&H bagels. Still, he doesn’t describe his product as a New York bagel—because it’s not. “Even though I’m not trying to replicate any kind of New York bagel, it hits enough of the points for people that they keep coming back,” says Rogers, whose bagels regularly sell out within a few hours of him opening shop on Saturdays.
Rogers worked at San Francisco’s iconic now closed 20th Century Cafe back in 2014, when he learned to make distinctly California-style sourdough bagels from chef-owner Michelle Polzine. Over the years, he developed his own style of bagel, which was slightly larger and less dense than what Polzine was known for. A Chicken Dog bagel is hand-rolled, made with organic flour, and dragged through the classic seasonings.
Beyond how they ferment or hand-roll, bakers outside of New York are turning their attention to creative, out-there toppings you won’t find at most shops in our bagel capital. And as a lot of bakers in a lot of different cities seem to have realized, the best way to show off peak-season produce and artfully made schmears is to un-sandwich your bagel.
In Portland, Maine, an open-face bagel at Rose Foods comes topped with horseradish cream cheese, avocado, and little pearls of tobiko. Starship Bagel, which has locations in Dallas and Lewisville, Texas, tops its avocado toast-inspired one with cream cheese, avocado, pickled onion, and a tangle of sprouts. And at Flour Moon, people line up for tartines (in this case, that’s French for “open-face bagel”). There’s one slathered with roasted carrot spread, tahini, and dukkah, and another that sports sunflower seed butter, tahini, bananas, dates, and a drizzle of honey.
It’s an admittedly impractical way to build a bagel if you’re used to eating it on the move. That’s at least partly the point, though: inviting people to spend a bit more time appreciating something they may think of as a food of convenience. “The style of dining in New Orleans is so different than places like New York that are always on the go,” says Kostyk. “We sit down. We take the time to have meals at any time of day.”
Courage Bagels in LA is largely to thank for sparking an obsession with ornately decorated open-face bagels, fueled by the shop’s 60,000-plus Instagram followers and a social media ecosystem that allows bakers to connect and draw inspiration from each other. Courage’s crisp, ever so slightly misshapen, aggressively browned open-face bagels show up regularly on Instagram and TikTok. They’re artfully topped with Courage’s signature style of cheeky toppings (sardines, jamón, chunks of aged cheddar) and straight-from-the-farm produce (plump heirloom tomatoes, wild blueberries, you get the idea). Since owners Arielle and Christopher Moss swung open the doors in late 2020, their weekend lines have rarely ever died down.
“Bagels are definitely having a moment,” says Andrew Dana, who owns Call Your Mother with his partner and the business’s executive chef, Daniela Moreira. The shop, which opened in DC in 2018, now has 11 locations across four states, fueled by a playful bright pink aesthetic and an extremely appealing social media presence. The style at Call Your Mother nods to New York, where Dana went to grad school and subsisted on bagels, but also takes cues from the sweeter, denser bagels of Montreal. Dana is Jewish, but Moreira, who’s from Argentina, is not, and her approach is less driven by nostalgia than a playful desire to experiment. There are classic-ish combinations, like pastrami and “bodega-style” eggs robed in melty cheddar on an everything bagel, but also pizza bagels and a cinnamon-raisin situation smeared with crunchy granola-spiked peanut butter and strawberry-mint jam.
A classic New York bagel with its traditional toppings will always be a gold standard for plenty of bakers. It’s just that now, it’s not the only one. Maybe your platonic ideal bagel is Korshak’s, slathered with tart goat’s milk schmear. Or Courage’s, topped with a garden’s worth of farmers market produce. If you look (and you really should be looking), you’ll find inspired and unique bagels popping up all over the US.
“When talented chefs and creative people are getting behind something, there are naturally going to be cool new twists,” Dana says. “When I was growing up, everybody was trying to mimic New York and doing the same old thing.” Now, he says, “People just want to know if the bagels are good.”