The Weeds: #009

Bagels, Bagles, Bagels!

The Lede

Is Richmond a Bagel Town now? I’m starting to think it is, or at least, it’s headed in that direction. This past weekend, I had the chance to try Sunday Bagel, a pop-up helmed by NYC transplants, Jesse and Julie Roberts. These bagels were totally unique, with a chewy but airy crumb, a nicely charred exterior thickly coated in sesame seeds (There’s a plain bagel too, but trust me, you want the sesame.) They aren’t exactly NY-style, though you can taste the nod to New York; instead, they are their own thing, a new thing — a Richmond bagel.

“The Malt is from New York, the tear-apart style of our concept is from Montreal, and the way we pick our produce and products is very locality-driven, so I would consider how Los Angeles and San Francisco [bakers] source their produce and other products,” says Jesse Roberts via email. “At the end of the day it's a mash-up of all three of those locations, plus adding our own twist on things using locally-sourced flour from Virginia mills. Richmond style!!”

It’s fitting that whatever ‘Richmond-style’ bagel will emerge from the great bagel renaissance of the 2020s will be influenced by other cities—a reflection of the tendency of folks who leave Richmond to always, somehow, find their way back.

Friend Bar Everything Bagels

Pizza Bones owner and baker Ashley Patino has drawn on her travels and extensive baking experience to inform her own bagel baking process. Patino serves bagels weekly on Saturday mornings at Friend Bar. For her, it’s less about defining a style than is about nailing what tastes good to her: “Honestly, it is similar to the pizza approach,” Patino explains. “I go for making what I want to eat and not any specific style. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside is what I’m looking for.” That’s another element that feels quintessentially Richmond—the desire to make something to please, first and foremost, the maker.

There’s one more piece that makes a bagel Richmond-style, and that’s natural fermentation. Both Sunday Bagel and Friend Bar bagels are fermented using what Roberts calls “ambient yeast.” The same is true for the bagels from Chewy’s and Nate’s Bagels, two shops that helped kick off Richmond’s bagel awakening.

throwback to 2016, when Nate’s Bagels was the only game in town, and you could find them at the Birdhouse Farmers Market

Before 2018, it was close to impossible to find a really great bagel in Richmond. Then Nate’s Bagels entered the chat, first as a pop-up in 2016, and things started to change. Nate Matthews turned his meticulous brain toward the art of bagelry, eventually opening his corner shop on Cary Street, which continues to draw long lines of bagel lovers.

Likewise, Chewy’s queue snakes around the parking lot at Carytown Court before the doors even open. Owner Ashley Cricchio told Richmond Magazine's Eileen Mellon that she, like Nate Matthews, was a hobby bagelist before opening her brick & mortar.

We’ll soon welcome another brick and mortar bagel shop to RVA, and if those long lines are any indication, there’s more than enough demand for all three. Patino says she plans to open her bagel shop, Julio’s, within the year. (This is what we call a buried lede.)

Maybe what makes a bagel Richmond-style is that it defies simple definitions and bucks expectations. It’s got a punk streak, a hint of wanderlust, and a dash of untameable wildness. What could be more Richmond than that?

The Read

Oh to be a bus tub full of bagels!

Just as I was digging into my Sunday bagel this weekend, I scrolled upon this article, “Are We Living Through a Bagel Renaissance” by Hannah Goldfield for The New Yorker. (TL;DR — Yes, we are.) Goldfield suggests that the new wave of bagel arts has its pros and cons. It’s a boon for innovation, but it comes with the cost of inspiring some bagel abominations (she references a French Toast bagel that rankles me more than I would’ve imagined). The new wave spans from L.A. back to Brooklyn, with nods to Louisville, New Orleans, Miami, and Washington DC, and features photo-ready bagels that represent a notable departure from the dense pucks of dough that epitomized the category for the last hundred years.

Bonus Read: It was one of the great honors of my career to have written The Jewish History of Lender’s Bagels for The Nosher. Every day of my childhood, my dad ate the same thing for breakfast—An onion Lender’s bagel with Philadelphia Cream Cheese and a slice of swiss cheese, with a tall glass of Tropicana Orange Juice to wash it down. (We are a family of brand loyalists.) Talking to the ACTUAL LENDERS blew my little mind.

The Feed

Homemade tuna salad on a Sunday Sesame Bagel

Instead of a recipe, today I’m sharing my go-to bagel order from our four Richmond-style bagel spots:

Nate’s — The Veggie (avocado, cucumber, pickled red onion, greens, cream cheese) on a Poppy Seed bagel.

Chewy’s — (Light) Scallion Cream Cheese on Asiago

Sunday — Pickled Pepper Cream Cheese on Sesame (But if you have time to whip up a super pickle-y tuna salad and put THAT on Sunday’s sesame bagel, for god’s sake, do it!)

Friend Bar — Trick question, they only serve one kind of bagel, an everything with plain cream cheese. But our move is called the ‘rip and dip,’ coined by Byrd, who likes to pick off chunks of bagel and dip them in the little souffle cup of cream cheese.

xox,

SG