As recent transplants to this fair city of New York, we have plenty to learn about bagels. We haven’t had a chance to develop brand loyalties and identify establishments we love — or simply refuse to patronize. We don’t have firm feelings about the Montreal bagel. We can’t yet bring ourselves to speak unironically of the superiority of “New York water.”
But there is one thing we know: There’s a difference between eating a bagel in New York and having a New York Bagel Experience.
The New York Bagel Experience is an idea, an amalgam of the bagels we actually grew up eating; the weekend rendezvous glimpsed throughout Nora Ephron’s oeuvre; the greasy egg-and-cheese hangover cures in “Broad City”; the sepia photos in dusty coffee table books purporting to chronicle “Old New York.”