Monday morning of this week started just like any other Monday morning for Emily Winston, owner of Boichik Bagels in Berkeley. It’s one of her two days off, so she’s just relaxing when the phone call comes.
A friend and someone who has been closely following Boichik’s progress since it began – OK, it was this reporter – called incredible news: in a headline that many people can only regard as fire victims, the New York Times just said, “The best bagels are in California (sorry, New York).”
And not only that, but the author of the March 8 article, New York Times restaurant reviewer Tejal Rao singled out Boichik as her new favorite.
Rao begins the article by describing what a Boichik bagel looks and smells like, and then writes the following: ‘This is where the author (me), a former resident of New York (Brooklyn), complains that these bagels are good is for Bagels from California, by West Coast standards. But no, to be clear: Emily Winston’s bagels are some of the best New York – style bagels I’ve ever tasted. They happen to be made in Berkeley. ”
“I can now die a very happy and fulfilled person,” Winston told me 24 hours after the article was posted. “I achieved everything I wanted to achieve. There is no greater honor for a bagel shop, and no honor past the New York Times that best explains my bagels. ‘
The article also features Midnite Bagel, which is sold in San Francisco’s Ferry Building and Courage Bagels and Pop’s in the Los Angeles area. Rao briefly mentioned four other bagel shops in the LA area and Daily Driver in San Francisco.
The timing of the article was noteworthy that on March 5, Food and Wine Magazine published a list of the 50 best bagel spots in the country and that no Bay Area vendors made the list.
Bay Area bagel enthusiasts probably remember the cover story of New York Times Magazine in 2015 by local journalist Elizabeth Weil, with the headline ‘Why is it so hard to get a good bagel in California?’
Now, six years later, it’s not clear.
(It’s noteworthy that celebrated Jewish food writer Joan Nathan wrote in the Times a few years before that Berkeley’s Baron Bagels (available at Saul’s Deli) were ‘just as good as Brooklyn’s.’)
Boichik opened in Berkeley in November 2019, but 23 months earlier I had written about how there were lines around Winston’s home in Alameda, where she sold it briefly. New Jersey resident Winston quickly became a darling in the media because she dared to say out loud that she was taking a real New York bagel – based on her fond memories of the old H&H – to her adopted home wanted to bring.
This week, not surprisingly, Winston experienced an onslaught. As of Tuesday, she had already turned off the pre-orders for Wednesday, and she had one interview with a New York City radio station, with other interviews (a podcast and a local TV station). The store was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Winston obtained extra flour from a local friend of the bakery earlier this week and needed even more to meet the insane demand. On Wednesday at 07:30, when Boichik opened his doors, the queue for orders was already wrapped around the block.
While Winston noticed bumps in the business after being covered several times by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2020, it was a next level, a much larger scope, ‘she noted. She said she was thankful that her website did not crash (she could see people watching it from all over the world). Her phone is ringing constantly, and her Instagram feed is blowing as well.
She also got more wholesale inquiries, and people wanted her to send bagels to the whole country.
“I think the world needs something more productive to fight over than all the other things,” Winston remarked, adding that this is perhaps the biggest bagel news since actor Cynthia Nixon, then a candidate for governor in New York, her favorite bagel order declared. to be lox, plain cream cheese, tomatoes, red onion and capers on a cinnamon-raisin bagel.
While Winston could no longer be excited (as well as overwhelmed) to deal with all the expected madness of the next few weeks, saying that she is grateful to have a very capable staff, she also noted that Boichik Bagels is kosher is, store closes the entire week of the Passover, which begins the evening of March 27th.
“I feel very grateful for that at the moment,” she said, “because we can only collapse in a heap.”
A version of this story first appeared on J., the Jewish News of Northern California. Reprint with permission.