Senior cooking editor Kelsey Youngman, who grew up in Santa Monica, California, especially loves Alvarado Street Bakery bagels, which are nutty, crumbly sprouted wheat bagels. Despite living in New York City, those plastic bundles still make it into her cart when she’s grocery shopping.
“It tastes like home, but I can get it at national grocery chains,” says Kelsey. “I’d never stand them head-to-head with a traditional New York City-style bagel, but they are in a class of their own.”
Associate social media manager Olivia Quintana, who grew up in San Antonio, Texas, never had bagels growing up, so her first exposure to bagels was the Einstein Bros. in the basement of the building where she had all her classes in freshman year of college. “It felt like a nice upgrade from toast, which is how I first saw bagels when I was figuring out what I liked.”
Unencumbered by the rules of regionality, where an uncommon bagel order can become newsworthy, lo-fi bagels can be whatever you want them to be.
For example, the cloying but beloved dessertified bagel-cream cheese combo that would make a native, bagel-loving New Yorker clutch their lox and shudder: “It gives me a headache to say this now,” says executive editor Sonia Chopra, who grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. “But I fondly remember regularly eating Einstein’s chocolate chip bagels with strawberry cream cheese before early morning high school band practices.”
For editorial director and Knoxville, Tennessee-native Serena Dai, “The Panera cinnamon crunch bagel was the holy grail of baked goods when I was growing up.” That sugar-shellacked, half-cinnamon roll/half sweet bun that somehow both burned and scraped the roof of your mouth feels worlds apart from the steamy windows of family-owned fresh bagel shops.
But try to find something equivalent to the nostalgia-infused, early-aughts, not-quite-bagel that is the Panera cinnamon crunch bagel, and you can’t. It’s a singular experience, equally beloved by teenagers loitering in a Tennessee Panera Bread dining room, home cooks eager to replicate the recipe in their own kitchens, and Americans abroad who can’t shake the highly specific craving. (“When my husband went to the US last month, he asked me what I wanted him to bring back with him,” writes Jenn, a travel blogger, in a 2011 blog post. “I had one item on my list: Panera cinnamon crunch bagels.”)