Someone Wrote Another Think Piece on Why New York Bagels Suck and Montreal Bagels Rule

Bagels have been a hot topic in 2014. Not Cronut™ hot mind you but sufficiently trendy to merit a slew of essays and blog posts about bagel supremacy.

The field is small, of course, with usual suspects New York and Montreal up for ceaseless consideration as "the best." (This site even ran a Montreal bagel poll in May.)

The impetus for the resurrection of the age-old debate was the emergence this past April of Black Seed: a Nolita schmear shop and homage to Montreal bagels from Noah Bernamoff (Mile End Deli) and Matt Kliegman (The Smile).

Now Vice Munchies has rebuked New York and hailed Montreal regent supreme in the bagel department.

In "New York Bagels" suck, David Heti writes:

You’ve no place here, New York. Your bagels are shit.

"Never in my life did I expect to have to speak so forthrightly on a subject so simple, so immediate, so self-evident. I mean, we’re talking about bagels here. Yes, New York has Mickey Mantle and the Empire State Building and there’s good jazz and lots of people there. But, when it comes to the bagel, you’ve simply got to let it go."

"You’ve no place here, New York. Your bagels are shit."

This is just the first two paragraphs. It rapidly gets worse for New York bagels from there, as Heti extols the bagels at St-Viateur (specific references to Fairmount, home of the original Montreal bagel, are strangely absent).

For champions of New York bagels, this paragraph will probably sting most of all.

No one in Montreal has ever said, 'Bring me back a New York-style bagel.'

"No one in Montreal has ever said, 'Bring me back a New York-style bagel.' But don’t they sell "Montreal-style" bagels in New York? Didn’t some guy drive down to Brooklyn from Montreal every single Friday—for two years—with hundreds of dozens of bagels in back, only to sell out each Saturday?"