Daily Driver
This bagel shop epitomizes San Francisco. I don't mean that as a compliment.
I’ve recently been working at a San Francisco art gallery called Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch neighborhood. And during my lunch breaks, I like to take long walks around the neighborhood, where I occasionally pass a shuddered rollup gate with the words “Daily Driver” painted on the front.
Allegedly, this is a bagel shop. But I’ve never seen it open, and wasn’t sure they really, truly existed. Until the other day, when I wandered past around 12pm to find them actually open.
Daily Driver advertises organic wood-fired bagels, so I couldn’t resist popping in for a bite to see what it was all about.
The first thing you notice about this place is that it’s enormous. Square footage-wise, it’s more like a Pottery Barn than a bagel shop. The tall ceilings and sparse industrial interior are on-brand for the Dogpatch, a formerly working class neighborhood that has been heavily gentrified in recent years.
And Daily Driver is nothing if not the epitome of gentrification. First off, check out this gift shop.
They’re really leaning in to the Pottery Barn aesthetic here, with expensive tchotchkes, fancy teas and glossy coffee table books on sale, alongside Daily Driver merch. Not sure who needs to hear this, but I came here for bagels, not overpriced gifts.
It’s probably the result of having so much space, they don’t know what to do with it all. The space is so big it took me a while to actually find the bagels. Finally, I spotted them, just a handful stacked haphazardly on a baking sheet behind the counter.
Baking just enough bagels to get by seems to be all the rage in California… a sad departure from the abundance we’re used to seeing back East. And the baking sheet balanced precariously is an odd choice of display. It’s the first indication to me that bagels themselves aren’t really what Daily Driver is about.
Typically when reviewing a new bagel, I get an everything (not toasted) with plain cream chesse. It’s the control in my experiment. But today I was feeling quite hungry, so instead I opted for the bacon, egg & cheese, which is priced at a disappointing $13.
It’s San Francisco, what are ya gonna do?
Add-ons for the BEC include avocado (+$2), kimchi (On a bagel!? Gag me with a spoon. +$2), and something called “the worx” (+$2) which includes “grilled onions and sauce.”
Weird. What is this mysterious “sauce” you plan to put on my egg sando? And who in god’s name came up with the idea of putting grilled onions on a BEC? That individual should be fired immediately without severance and blacklisted from ever working at a bagel shop again.
Not bothering to contain a deep sigh, I order the BEC without add-ons and paid a frustrating $14.95 for this sandwich (and that’s just taxes and fees without tip).
Waiting for the sando gave me some time to explore, and let me tell you, there is a lot to explore here. They’ve got fancy machinery and big stacks of firewood placed deliberately in eyeshot, to remind you that these bagels are in fact “wood fired.”
They’ve got giant sacks of flour stacked up against the wall. And towards the back, you can see the bakers hard at work, allegedly preparing bagels for the public to enjoy.
Wandering upstairs (yes, there’s an upstairs) reveals a spacious wraparound balcony complete with numerous tables, chairs and squishy looking couches. This section of the establishment is absolutely infested with techies. There are dozens of them, hunched over laptops, badly dressed, loudly taking business calls on their AirPods, all the while splurging on expensive bagel sandwiches and fancy coffee drinks.
It’s like a damn WeWork in here!
If there’s one thing about this space that does not annoy me, it’s that the walls are covered in local art. There’s an entire gallery’s worth of paintings on display, which gives me something to look at when I get tired of staring down tech bros with contempt.
After about 5-7 minutes (a respectable wait time for a BEC) my sandwich arrives wrapped in a simple wax paper bag. Longtime readers know there’s nothing I hate more than extensive and wasteful plastic wrapping, so they get points for simplicity. My name and order scrawled in sharpie is a wholesome touch.
At this point, my lunch break was over, so I headed back to work to unwrap this sando at my desk and find out if Daily Driver puts as much effort into their bagels as they do their interior design.
Spoiler alert: they do not.
At first glance, this sandwich looks pretty good. But as I dove in for the first bite, I spotted something goopy and brown spilling out the sides. With horror, I realized they mistakenly prepared my sandwich with “the worx” - grilled onions and some kind of special sauce (which seems like your standard burger sauce).
I understand mistakes happen, and I won’t run them over the coals for getting the order wrong. The problem here is the fact that grilled onions and this weird thousand island dressing is even an option in the first place. Now I’ve got sugary sweet goopiness on top of my eggs and it’s honestly pretty gross.
Good Lord, California, it’s an egg sandwich, not a cheeseburger!
The only redeeming quality here is that I paid $15, not $17 for this sando. Can you imagine actually paying extra for this?
The next problem with this sandwich is the way they cooked the eggs: slow and soft, like a country-stye omelette at a fancy brunch restaurant. Theoretically, they did a good job. These eggs are super soft and fluffy, and they taste really good. But what works for brunch doens’t always work on a bagel. The problem is, this style of egg is simply too soft for an egg sandwich. It causes everything inside the sandwich to squeeze out the side like this.
This problem is exacerbated by problem number three: the bagel itself. Despite being “organic” and “wood-fired,” this bagel is small, tough, and dry as a bone. It’s so dense and rigid that as soon as you bite into the sandwich, the entire middle goes flying out the sides like a bandit on the run. The result is a sandwich that completely falls apart.
Here’s where my job becomes tricky. Because in reality, these eggs are actually very nicely prepared by someone who clearly knows how to do eggs like a pro. And they actually taste really good (minus the onion fiasco). The issue is, this chef clearly doesn’t have any cultural experience with egg sandwiches, because if they did, they would know that a BEC is just not the place for soft and creamy eggs.
An egg sandwich lives and dies on the bagel (or roll) itself. And you simply cannot have leather-tough bagels and pillowy soft eggs on the same sandwich and expect that to work out. If this sandwich came on say challah bread, like they do it at Scolari’s (which I reviewed last week), I can see that making sense. It would emerge as a soft and creamy egg sandwich, that while certainly non-traditional, wouldn’t disappoint quite as much as this current iteration.
But alas, my job is to review bagels, and to do so with honesty. And despite the wood-fired hype, these bagels are awful. In fact, the only bagel I’ve ever tasted that is worse than Daily Driver’s is Beauty’s in Oakland. These are not as rock hard as Beauty’s, I’ll say that. But it’s a small consolation.
FINAL REVIEW
It’s obvious to me now that Daily Driver, like so many other businesses contributing to the gentrification of San Francisco, puts too many resources into marketing, interior decoration, and being a WeWork for techies, and not enough resources into learning the craft of cooking decent bagels. It’s a shame, because the ingredients inside the bagel were high quality and quite tasty. But when brought together as a whole, this sandwich failed spectacuarly. This simple fact, in combination with the bougie gift shop, the insufferable clientele, and the abomination that is “the worx” results in the following review.
EAST COAST: 3
WEST COAST: 5
I did appreciate the local art though. Until next time…
