June 2018. Dana and I are in New York for the graduations of @angeline1112 and @xjoey74. We’re in the mood for a bagel, so we stop at a completely nondescript location. This place wasn’t a destination location or famous (it was just close to our hotel) so expectations weren’t high. Having said that our bagels were unbelievably good. Outrageously good, in fact.
How could this be? We asked the locals and they claimed that the key was the NY water. We had no other plausible explanation, so we accepted their attestations as truth. Despite all of our travels since then, we’ve never encountered another bagel to rival such greatness…until now.
“Inglourious Bagels” takes honoring its heritage so seriously that their name is an homage to the brave Jewish American heroes of World War II who participated in “Operation Greenup.” (For those of you seeking bonus points on this assignment, name the famous movie based upon this mission in the comments section below.)
We had the benefit of meeting with Andrew Brewer, one of the owners. He explained to us that there really is something to this whole “New York water” thing and he and his partners set out to replicate the authenticity of a NY deli here in San Diego. So much so that they hired a chemist to assay the water in NY so that they could formulate a process to recreate it here. 🤯 The water they use may be their opening salvo, but that is followed by the ordinances of initially baking their bagels on burlap covered cedar planks followed by completing the baking process over hot stones. These baking maneuvers necessitate the unilateral surrender of your taste buds. 🤤🏳️ (Yeah, don’t bother trying to convince me that these people aren’t serious about their bagel “mission.”)
Complimentary to this bagel experience was the 80’s Rock music playing during our visit, including the Beastie Boys (in my opinion @beastieboys are a musical genre unto themselves).
While you may have noticed that the names of their bagel sandwiches trace their roots to Yiddish insults, please swallow your pride and try one. You’d be a schmuck not to.
And that’s…Henry’s Take.
Inglourious Bagels
6955 El Camino Real
Carlsbad, California
(760) 444-0434
www.inglouriousbagels.com
