Welcome to the Great Bagel Boom, a series celebrating the vast creative expanses of bagel culture across America—because yes, you can find truly wonderful bagels outside of New York now.
It’s no secret that bagel snobs abound. Mention bagels and they’ll come out of the woodwork in online forums or restaurant reviews, fussing over flours, the quality of regional tap water, and debating the merits of steamed versus boiled. We know, because we’re often those people. But the not-so-secret secret? A bagel doesn’t really need to be good to be enjoyable. Just as frozen pizzas, Crunchwraps, and boxed brownies get their flowers, the humble lo-fi bagel warrants its own place in food culture.
A lo-fi bagel is likely from a chain restaurant or the bread aisle of your supermarket. Think Dunkin’, Panera Bread, or the plush Thomas’ bagel squished into your toaster at home. It’s assuredly not from a destination bagel spot. There’s a good chance it’s mass-produced and hurriedly warmed up in a rotary toaster oven. Bonus points if it’s handed to you through a drive-thru window, snagged from a hotel continental breakfast, or waiting for you in a conference room. They’re the plastic-wrapped and refrigerated doughy gas station bagels grabbed before a road trip and the crumbly bagels purchased bleary-eyed at the airport before an early flight.
But there’s something they give beyond that squishy Wonder Bread-esque texture. Lo-fi bagels are convenient, unpretentious, and, somehow, just as satiating and nostalgia-filled as the hand-crafted stuff.
When we chatted about our favorite bagel experiences in the Bon Appétit office, I discovered that many BA staff are Team Lo-Fi Bagel, or at the very least, have fond memories of them. The lo-fi bagel can feel like an entirely different food than bagels from storied generations-owned shops. That’s the point—it scratches a completely different itch.
For some people, especially those who grew up outside of bagel-centric regions of the country (like New York and the Northeast), most bagels are by default lo-fi bagels. In fact, sometimes those bagels are their first, and a formative experience.
Senior cooking editor Kelsey Youngman, who grew up in Santa Monica, California, especially loves Alvarado Street Bakery bagels, which are nutty, crumbly sprouted wheat bagels. Despite living in New York City, those plastic bundles still make it into her cart when she’s grocery shopping.
“It tastes like home, but I can get it at national grocery chains,” says Kelsey. “I'd never stand them head to head with a traditional New York City–style bagel, but they are in a class of their own.”
Associate social media manager Olivia Quintana, who grew up in San Antonio, Texas, never had bagels growing up, so her first exposure to bagels was the Einstein Bros. in the basement of the building where she had all her classes freshman year of college. “It felt like a nice upgrade from toast, which is how I first saw bagels when I was figuring out what I liked.”
Unencumbered by the rules of regionality, where an uncommon bagel order can become newsworthy, lo-fi bagels can be whatever you want them to be.
For example, the cloying but beloved dessertified bagel–cream cheese combo that would make a bagel-loving native New Yorker clutch their lox and shudder: “It gives me a headache to say this now,” says executive editor Sonia Chopra, who grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. “But I fondly remember regularly eating Einstein’s chocolate chip bagels with strawberry cream cheese before early-morning high school band practice.”
For editorial director and Knoxville, Tennessee, native Serena Dai, “The Panera cinnamon crunch bagel was the holy grail of baked goods when I was growing up.” That sugar-shellacked half-cinnamon roll/half sweet bun that somehow both burned and scraped the roof of your mouth feels worlds apart from the steamy windows of family-owned fresh bagel shops.
But try to find something equivalent to the nostalgia-infused early-aughts not-quite-bagel that is the Panera cinnamon crunch bagel, and you can’t. It’s a singular experience, equally beloved by teenagers loitering in a Tennessee Panera Bread dining room, home cooks eager to replicate the recipe in their own kitchens, and Americans abroad who can’t shake the highly specific craving. (“When my husband went to the US last month, he asked me what I wanted him to bring back with him,” writes Jenn, a travel blogger, in a 2011 blog post. “I had one item on my list: Panera cinnamon crunch bagels.”)
Some people feel similarly about the Asiago bagel, a style that rarely appears in traditional New York bagel shops but is a staple of suburban shops across the country. “The cheese melted on the bagel's exterior created these lovely crispy-crusty cheese bubbles,” says digital production assistant, Li Goldstein, who would order the bagel at a now-closed coffee shop in Providence called Blue State.
My favorite lo-fi bagel memory is, maybe counterintuitively, in New York City, where a wealth of non-lo-fi bagels abound. At the finish line of a half-marathon, when I was sweaty, dazed, and confused, a volunteer shoved at me a medal, a bottle of blue Gatorade, a cellophane-wrapped plain bagel, and a squeezie pouch of plain cream cheese. Was it the best bagel I ever had? Absolutely not. But as I choked it down with the coursing endorphins of running a race, the celebratory vibes of the finish line, and the incapacitating, stomach-rumbling hunger, it was one of the most unforgettable.
Whichever way you slice it, toast it, or schmear it, there’s no shame in loving the lo-fi bagel. It’s made delicious by the memories we associate them with—the challenges they fuel us through and the triumphs we celebrate them with. It’s reliable, readily available, and easy to eat on the go. (As TikTok user bagelratings captions: “Thank you Dunkin’ for being a constant in my life.”) And if you’re still a skeptic, that’s okay. Maybe the lo-fi bagel is just the bagel you eat on your way—on the road, at the airport, at a hotel—to visit one of the showier bagel destinations of the US.