I will never forget the anxious grey-suited businessman who entered my local bagel spot on a gloomy Tuesday morning in March 2017, puffed up his chest, and demanded a “double toasted plain bagel with butter and mayonnaise”.
My boyfriend and I, completely flabbergasted, immediately wrote down the order in its entirety. Was it for posterity? Was it to look upon later to remind ourselves of the incredulity we felt that day? We still aren’t sure, but our reaction to a man’s personal meal choices begs the question: why do we care what people put on bagels?
I have often toyed with the salacious idea that bagels might create and carry significant cultural capital for certain groups of people, or certain geographic locations. The introduction of bagels into American society, where its cultural power is the clearest and most meaningful, came about due to the waves of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe in the late 19th century. Its place in the still-new canon of American cuisine followed a similar path that Chinese cuisine did in the US: it came, was regarded as a relatively bourgeois meal option for the cosmopolitan upper class, lost that position, then was popularized as a quick lunch option for working-class New Yorkers. Like many food items that worm their way into the already fractured psyche of the average New Yorker, bagels became a point of pride, an edible identifier, an inextricable part of the beating soul of the city. Of course New Yorkers become enraptured when they see it done right, and enraged when done wrong. But what, exactly, constitutes bagel “correctness” to the mysterious and elusive New York palate?
Consider Cynthia Nixon, notable former cast member of Sex and the City. In 2018, she unsuccessfully made a move for the New York gubernatorial seat, and one could argue it was her mystifying bagel order that killed her campaign. Gothamist, city folks’ favorite snark rag, reported on 9/10/2018: “SEE IT: Cynthia Nixon Orders Cinnamon Raisin Bagel With… Lox And Capers”.
Even the writer, Jake Offenhartz, agrees that, “There’s something about New York’s endless supply of authentic eateries that transforms hopeful politicians into weird aliens who’ve never before encountered the concept of food: Back in the 1970s, South Dakota Senator George McGovern was basically run out of town after ordering a glass of milk with his kosher hot dog. One-time presidential hopeful John Kasich came down with a debilitating case of meat sweats after inhaling a month’s-worth of carbs at a Bronx deli. And Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reputation still hasn’t recovered from the great Staten Island fork-and-knife pizza scandola of 2014.” (Gothamist 2018). While these erratic choices could be explained away by the fact that few of the aforementioned food aliens are from New York proper, and might have developed habits that strike city folk as bizarre or disgusting, they likely sound odd even to the average American.
But Cynthia Nixon not only directly contributed to media that shaped the world’s view of the city, but she has also lived in New York for decades and contributed to its politics all the while. So, we must ask: Cynthia, why? Personal taste aside, where did you even get the idea to put those together? In spite of her staffers (justifiably) making moves to avoid the harrowing exchange at Zabar’s being filmed, Nixon defended her order to horrorstruck passersby (we can’t agree with her, and profusely apologize to Zabar’s staff on Ms. Nixon’s behalf. You guys didn’t deserve that) and once the story made its way through the city twittersphere, the city responded in the only way it knew how: unabashed and hyperbolic rage. The Cinnamon Bagel x Lox order was lambasted as “basically criminal”; “an unmatched level of chaos”; and “…Really disgusting — I mean like, it’s terrible,” by a number of different twitter users. I myself recall that day, sneering at my phone as I licked cream cheese off the edge of my “Blasphemous Jew” (a personal invention — poppyseed bagel with cream cheese and crispy bacon — the latter ingredient being responsible for its eponymous blasphemy). Not once did I stop to consider that perhaps my high school-era invention could also represent a totally unacceptable error in bagel etiquette — especially in my position, as a reform Jewish woman whose only real ties to her faith are the Ashkenazi food she was raised on. Somehow none of my peers or deli servers have ever been perturbed by my ways — indeed, many of them have adopted the recipe for themselves or formulated a similar version they might typically order.
It could be one misplaced ingredient, one alien flavor profile, that brings the entire NYC bagel artifice crumbling to its knees. Sweet and salty, or fishy with meaty — some combinations are too odd to stomach. The grey-suited businessman’s order still rings in my mind as gross, awful, and wrong — two fatty sauces whose flavors don’t really complement one another, on top of the charred husk of an already inspid plain bagel (it is a child’s favorite… only lunatics make it to adulthood without having chosen a seed) would sound unpalatable to most anyone. And yet, this adult man made his choice, found whatever it is he likes to put in his body, and unashamedly sticks by that choice. There’s something admirable in that — especially if you consider that I’ve spent my time writing an entire article about bagels because of his bold choice. There is bravery in a bizarre decision.
The vitriol that people are faced with when eating bagels ‘incorrectly’ is too notable (and loud!) to ignore. We often take it very personally if someone does ‘weird things’ with bagels. Interestingly, the metrics for ‘weird things’ vary wildly, even in New York. While I balk at a double-toasted-mayo-butter-plain-bagel, another person might not. This rings true for any polarizing food item — look at pasta in Italy, poutine in Canada, Jollof rice in West Africa. Ask three people their thoughts, you’ll get seven opinions. A part of me wants to luxuriate in the petulant rage a ‘weird bagel’ might inspire — but another part wants to explore those strange choices… Choices made independently of the culture that informs how we eat bagels, choices made in spite of that culture. That’s innovation, whether we like it or not. And maybe that businessman was on to something, vibing on frequencies we laymen could simply never understand.
p.s. If you are that businessman, if this order feels familiar to you…. please contact me. I need to speak with you.
