Is Boichik Bagels really the best in the West?
NYT thinks so, but that might be bunch of bologna.
Sometime during the pandemic, my hometown paper the New York Times published an outrageous article titled “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York).” This ridiculous headline generated a great deal of controversy when it first came out, and that was clearly the intention of the editors when they published it. We call that “clickbait” in journalistic parlance.
The author, a respected food critic named Tejal Rao, was highlighting a purported “bagel boom” happening on the West Coast. And she opens her article with Berkeley’s very own Boichik Bagels. Rao is effusive, describing a bagel from Boichik in the following terms:
“The bread has a comforting squish — thick but yielding, chewy but not densely so, with a shiny, sweet-and-salty crust and a rich, malty breath that fills up the bag before you even get home.”
TBH, that sounds pretty tasty. So on a recent Tuesday morning, I headed over to College Avenue in Berkeley to see what all the hype was about.
The first thing one notices upon arriving at Boichik is the line. “Oh god,” I thought, “here we go again, standing outside in the cold for another overhyped California bagel.” Taking a deep breath, I realized there were only a handful of folks queued up. The line didn’t stretch out the door, it began at the door. It turns out Boichik does not allow customers inside the store at all. All of the orders are taken outside, in the line, pandemic style.
You wanna sit down to enjoy your bagel? Fuhgeddaboudit.
I’m not sure if this is an abundance of caution held over from the pandemic, an issue with lack of space inside, or something else but I definitely felt annoyed at having to order a bagel that I couldn’t physically lay eyes on beforehand.
Surely it’s my right to size up a bagel before purchase, isn’t it? Well, Boichik does enough business that they can dictate the rules to some extent.
It was about 12:30pm on a Tuesday when I arrived at the front of the queue, and they were disappointingly sold out of about half the bagels on the menu, including my flavor of choice, everything. I opted for a salt and pepper bagel (un-toasted, obviously) with lox spread ($6.50). I was craving that salty, smoky lox flavor but as a total cheapskate I couldn’t bring myself to pony up the cash for the full-monty lox experience.
I was about to order a small coffee as well, but then something curious caught my eye: Yoo-hoo, $2. For the uninitiated, Yoo-hoo is like chocolate milk, but it’s so artificial the FDA forbids them from using the term “milk,” so they label it as a “chocolate drink.” It’s the kind of thing you find at a bagel store in New Jersey. Not gonna lie, I was kind of shocked to see it on the menu. But the owner of this place, Emily Winston, is - much like myself - originally from the suburbs of the Garden State.
Encountering Yoo-hoo was a major coincidence for me. I literally had not thought about Yoo-hoo a single time since the 1990s until just last week, when I was at a party reminiscing with a buddy who also grew up back East. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Hey you remember Yoo-hoo?
Friend: Oh yeah, that shit was delicious.
Me: Yeah, dude nothing better than pulling up to the bagel store early in the morning and grabbing a fresh bagel and a Yoo-hoo.
Friend: Yoo-hoo in the morning?! You gotta be fucking kidding me bro, that sounds nasty. Yoo-hoo is an afternoon-only drink.
Me: What the actual fuck are you talking about, Yoo-hoo is a breakfast drink! Only a psychopath would drink Yoo-hoo in the afternoon…
Friend: [Gesturing to the crowd] Hey! Getta loada this fuckin’ guy, he drinks Yoo-hoo in the morning! What a creep…
It went on like this until the hosts of the party told us to shut up, because nobody cares about Yoo-hoo.
WRONG. I care about Yoo-hoo, and now here I am at the bagel store not a week later and there it is on the menu, beckoning me to indulge in the delicious taste of 90s nostalgia. If I were a hippie from Berkeley, I would call that “manifestation.”
Obviously, I ordered the Yoo-hoo.
My partner ordered whitefish on a sesame bagel. Then we began aimlessly milling about the sidewalk, because despite the laudatory praise from the New York Times and all the business it’s generated, Boichik apparently can’t afford to set up a single seating arrangement.
Actually, now that I write about it, this whole lack of caring about the customer does have a very New York feel to it.
The Yoo-hoo came out first and was served - get this - in a juicebox!
It’s honestly hard to put into words just how gleeful I felt clutching this tiny cardboard box full of artificially-flavored “chocolate drink.” If there was ever a turning point where I went from dying to talk shit about a place to genuinely rooting for them, this was it.
The bagels came out shortly after, and we took them back to the parking lot where we found a small patch of dirt containing several folding chairs hidden among the agave plants. Despite being surrounded by Teslas and Porches, I guess this is the best we can expect from Berkeley.
Unwrapping the salt and pepper with lox spread reveals a generously proper portion of cream cheese. See how it’s nearly a full inch thick? Take notes kids, that’s how it should be every time.
Another thing that jumps out at me: this bagel is topped with course chunks of salt and pepper, which is very exciting. You may recall that in my recent review of Beauty’s Bagels, I took issue with the fact that the salt and pepper were confusingly inside the bagel, not on top. Or maybe they used such finely ground salt and pepper on top that it was barely noticeable? Either way, that experience sucked.
This experience on the other hand felt like what a salt and pepper bagel is supposed to be. Crunchy and course… a textural delight. I should have snapped a photo of that, but I was too eager to take a bite.
First impressions: home. This bagel legit transported me back to New Jersey. It wasn’t that this was the greatest bagel I’ve ever tasted - it’s not. But this bagel genuinely tastes like an authentic east coast bagel. Rao’s choice of words - “comforting squish” - really nails it.
I do wish there were more pieces of lox in the lox spread. I could only spot a few specks of pink in the pillowy spread of white. But those specks did impart a delicious smoky, fishy, umami flavor to the spread, so I guess the mission was accomplished. My partner reminded me that I didn’t pay for the full lox experience, and this is the best I can hope for. They are probably right.
Now for the whitefish.
This portion of the review comes with an important caveat: I am not really qualified to review whitefish. In fact, I can say with certainty that never in my life have I personally ordered it. Not even once. I can actually remember the very first time I learned that whitefish exists. The year was 2016 and I was living in New York dating a Jewess from Park Slope. One morning I was about to go on a bagel run, and I asked my girlfriend what she wanted. “Can you get me a weird Jewy thing?” she replied, before asking for whitefish on a bagel.
Ever since that moment, whitefish has remained “a weird Jewy thing” in my mind. At worst, that’s problematic and at best it’s embarrassing for someone who claims the authority to review bagels. Either way, I have since grown to respect the whitefish spread. I’ve tried it several times, and while it’s a bit too fishy for my own taste, I see the appeal.
This particular whitefish bagel from Boichik struck me as rather skimpy in portion. I mean just look at that photo - the tomato is thicker than the spread! Personally, I find this unacceptable. But upon vocalizing this criticism, my partner responded that they thought it was actually the perfect amount. Maybe because of the aforementioned strength of the fishy flavor of this spread, you only need a little bit. Or not, I can’t really decide. I’ll let the audience weigh in on this one.
At this point, I am tempted to wrap up my review of Boichik. But there is one more important element to be discussed. A visit to Boichikbagels.com reveals a strange invitation to join their crowdfunding campaign. Owner Emily Winston has partnered with a very techy/corporate-feeling platform called SMBX which purports to be a marketplace for small business bonds. Essentially, they are asking for investments to open up new bagel shops. According to Emily Winston quoted on the SMBX website:
Based on the success of our first raise on SMBX, we’re back to raise funds to build new locations. Our factory is successfully up and running, which can support a whole network of shops all around the Bay Area! We are building spaces in Santa Clara and Larkspur, which will open in November, and we're planning to open in San Francisco soon.
They’ve currently raised $372,770. Wow. Okay, I feel very mixed about this. The shameless financialization of something as sacred as the bagel is extremely off-putting. On the flip side, maybe its a good thing that they’re having success and want to open a new shop?
I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt, but with all the merch for sale on their website, the fact that they ship bagels nationwide from their recently opened “factory” on 6th Street, and the choice of techie hellscape Palo Alto as the location for their 3rd shop, this whole operation reeks of big business. And that is a major turnoff to this reporter. I would not be shocked to see the quality slip substantially if Boichik suddenly goes full franchise on us.
Making a decent bagel is never enough for these Californians, they always need to take it to the next level.
But again… there’s a flip side. If this Jersey Boy were to ever buy bonds, I would definitely prefer to invest in bagels rather than Wall Street!
I suppose we’ll have to file this development in the wait and see category. Rest assured, I will be following Boichik’s expansion with keen interest and will report back with any major news.
Final Thoughts
As sensationalist as that NYT headline was, I can verify that Boichik bagels has indeed successfully recreated the taste and texture of an authentic East Coast bagel, and that is nothing to sneeze at. I was definitely turned off by not being able to go inside and inspect the bagels in person. And the crowdfunding campaign is giving greedy capitalist/tech startup vibes for sure. But in the end, I paid less than $10 for an absolutely delicious bagel with lox spread and I got to sip a damn Yoo-hoo at the same time. Taking all these qualities into account, they receive the following rating.
West Coast: 9
East Coast: 7.5
P.s. After finishing my bagel right about closing time, I slyly enquired about what they do with the bagels they don’t sell for the day. “I’ll gladly take them off your hands, at a discounted price of course,” I said with a smile.
“I’m so sorry,” the girl at the counter replied, “but we donate the excess bagels to Daily Bread [a local organization that feeds the needy].” OF COURSE making good bagels isn’t enough for these people, they gotta go out and do good for the community, too. Classic Berkeley.
