Boichik Bagels Owner Responds to the New York Times Declaring Her Bagels the Best in Country
By: Thomas Smith
Tags: Food, San Francisco, Culture, Jewish, Strawberry2021

Last week, the New York Times sent shockwaves through the country when food critic Tejal Rao declared that America’s best bagels are no longer in New York, but instead, right here in Berkeley, California, at Boichik Bagels on College Avenue.

As a Jew, bagels have an almost sacred status in my culture. Every simcha (or Jewish life-cycle event) is accompanied by the circles of dough, beginning with a bris (or alternatively, a baby naming ceremony) and ending with shiva (the ritual mourning after a Jewish person dies). On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, it’s standard practice to break a 24-plus hour fast with bagels and shmear.

So, I take my bagels seriously. To be honest, as an East Coast transplant, California’s bagels were always a source of embarrassment. Visitors would come to California and marvel at the ubiquity of our farm-to-table restaurant food and the year-round quality of our produce. But then, there’d always be that caveat:

“Yes, but you can’t get a good bagel out here, can you?”

Until recently, they were right.

No more.

Boichik Bagels in Berkeley doles out bagels every bit as good as those on the East Coast, and according to the Times, even better. With due respect to the Times, I’ve been covering Boichik since well before the paper made its declaration, both here in The Bold Italic and as a photographer. I called their bagels the best in the Bay back in January and have been telling everyone that I know about them ever since.

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I admit that when I first heard about Boichik through a friend, I was highly skeptical. When I used to travel to New York City for work, I’d often fly back with a dedicated suitcase filled with up to two dozen bagels from Absolute Bagels on the Upper West Side. I know good bagels when I see them. And most of what I found out here didn’t come close to New York standards. Boichik’s bagels do. And a big part of that comes from the seriousness with which Boichik’s founder Emily Winston takes her venture and the bagel-making process.

According to Boichik’s website, Winston grew up outside New Jersey, and her father would often bring back bagels, whitefish, and chive cream cheese from Zabar’s on the Upper West Side and H&H bagels, the Manhattan gold standard. When H&H closed, Winston said that she “took this news like the death of a loved one I just hadn’t been in contact with in a long time, and grieved, and said I didn’t want to let those bagels cease to exist.” There began a “five year quest, through trial and error, to create a bagel I longed to eat.”

Winston started Boichik as a cottage food business out of her home but quickly outgrew her limited space. Her main motivation in growing the business was personal.

“I had a very specific goal in mind,” she told me. “I didn’t have a business plan for many years. It was an intellectual pursuit of finding that lost bagel for myself.” In an interview with the J, Winston called herself “a picky Jew who just wants an H&H bagel.”

Winston’s Jewish background informs much of Boichik’s menu. Even the store’s name is a Yiddish term of endearment for a young man. (Winston says on the store’s website that the name came from her grandmother, who Winston believes “would tell you that my bagels are the best!”)

The store also sells such items as a Balabusta iced coffee—a super strong coffee drink which gets its name from the Yiddish term for a powerful woman—and the Big Macher party platter, inspired by a term for a big shot or a big spender (the platter costs $245).

Winston told me that she was raised as a Reform Jew, but has never been very religious. “The culture was way more significant than the actual religion in my family,” she said. Food — bagels specifically — were central to that culture.

“Food was huge,” Winston told me. “Zabar’s and H&H were considered holy places, way more holy than our temple. When my father would take us there, it was a very significant, special occasion.”

Her memories of those bagels — eaten with her mother, sisters, and grandmother while listening to a bootlegged Jackie Mason cassette — provided the ideal inspiration for the bagels she creates at Boichik today.

Why are Boichik’s bagels so good? A big part of it probably comes down to the steps Winston takes in making them — or more specifically, the steps she doesn’t take. When the New York Times last considered West Coast bagels in 2015, their conclusion was that West Coasters couldn’t make a good one because they tried too hard to innovate. Rather than putting in years of practice to hone and perfect old-world techniques — and to obsess over tiny details like the alkalinity of their water — they tried to create new twists on the traditional bagel, adding in sourdough starter, cooking up gluten-free varieties, and the like.

With bagels, Mitchell Davis of the Beard Foundation told the Times in 2015, “the effect of artisanship does not always produce a better result.” A great bagel is fundamentally traditional, steeped in long-developed cultural trends and a peoples’ collective memory. It’s not something that benefits from “updating” or from the artisanship and personalization which West Coast chefs often bring to their trade. With a goal of creating a bagel born of her own childhood memories and Jewish upbringing instead of an ego-driven quest for innovation, Winston may have been the perfect person to create a real East Coast bagel out West.

Winston largely agrees with this, although her success still seems to baffle her a bit. She told me that she sometimes asks, “Why me?” and wonders why she should be the West Coaster to “break the bagel code” when so many chefs out here are doing so many “lovely and creative things.” Her best guess is that it’s because her background isn’t in food but in engineering.

“I wasn’t trying to be an innovative chef, and I wasn’t trying to make something new. I don’t have a horse in that race,” Winston said. Instead, she was “trying to make something that already existed,” combining her engineering skills and her powerful memories of childhood bagel experiences in order to craft something perfect.

She has succeeded. Boichik’s bagels are malty, dense, and chewy — the polar opposite of the dry, crumbly bagels which are so common on this coast. They’re hefty and intensely salty, with just a background hint of onion — which may actually be present, or may just be evoked from decades spent eating bagels like Boichik’s with lox, capers, onion, and tomato. Winston’s bagels come in traditional flavors like Everything, Pumpernickel, Salt, Onion, and Egg, and there’s just a tiny hint of innovation in combining some of those flavors to create new bagels like the Eggything (an egg bagel with Everything seasoning).