GREENWICH VILLAGE — It's a shonda.
New York City staple Murray's Bagels is now agreeing to toast their freshly made bagels, marking the death of a long-held New York City tradition.
Old-school New York bagelries have long refused to toast their freshly made, hand-rolled and boiled bagels.
New York bagel pioneer H&H stood their ground, until they closed in 2011. Ess-a-Bagel's original location on 1st Avenue, now closed, also didn't toast. (Their remaining Midtown location does.)
And there are still some favored neighborhood holdouts, like Park Slope's Bagel Hole, proclaimed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to be the purveyor of "the most authentic, traditional authentic New York City bagel.”
These bagel elders refuse your toasting demands not (only) to be crotchety, difficult New Yorkers. They do it because you don't need to toast a chewy-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside freshly made bagel.
In a tweet announcing the change in policy, Murray's tried to explain that.
Murray's Bagels will now toast. Although we still firmly believe that a hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, fresh Murray's Bagel is superb, our customer's satisfaction is paramount to us. We will now toast bagels upon request and hope that everyone will enjoy New York's best bagels any way they choose.
Quartz, which first reported on the Murray's change, attributed it to pressure created by newcomers like Black Seed Bagels. Black Seed's bagels are fired in a wood-burning oven, the way bagelries in Montreal do it.
