The New York bagel run is an endless process of disappointment and guilt

Even in the city of a billion bagels, this Big Apple staple can go very wrong. Holly Baxter on why she and her co-workers have such a tumultuous relationship with their local bagel shop

Getting the perfect bagel basically requires everything in the universe to align (Getty)

To be a true New Yorker, you need to be in an abusive relationship with a bagel shop. It’ll probably be a bagel shop near where you live where you get your weekend brunch or your Friday treat – like the mysteriously named Bagel Pub near where I live in Brooklyn, just one example, alongside tubs of “pub cheese” in Whole Foods, of Americans fundamentally misunderstanding what a “pub” actually is – or it might be an outlet near your place of work. For me (and most members of The Independent New York bureau), it’s the latter.

Every Friday morning at nine, we sit around somebody’s computer and pick out our orders to reward ourselves for a long week of hard work. Mine’s a toasted everything bagel with jalapeno cream cheese and pickled onions, in case you’re wondering, and no I don’t want your judgment. If you’re not familiar with Big Apple bagel parlance, an everything bagel is a bagel made with all the ingredients available to that particular bakery – usually garlic, sesame seeds, pepper, poppy seeds, pretzel salt and onion flakes. So you can imagine how great my breath smells on a Friday after 11am.

Everyone has a different bagel order, and everyone is very particular about it. Without the jalapenos in my cream cheese, for instance, the entire balance of spicy-but-not-too-spicy flavours in the bagel falls apart. And if the hot black coffee doesn’t arrive alongside the bagel, there’s no bitterness to balance out the sweetness of the pickled onions. If the bagel isn’t toasted, then it will become soggy from the cream cheese and onions in transit, and be impossible to eat by the time it arrives at my desk. In short, if the order isn’t followed to the letter, everything (quite literally) falls apart.

Hole lotta love: a gloriously tasty invention with endless possibilities (Getty)

But, of course, the order is never followed to the letter. New York bagel shops live by their own rules, rules which change daily and which patrons are never privy to. One day, no one’s bagel gets toasted; the next, your cream cheese might become the dreaded, inedible “American cheese”. Your onions could get left off entirely, or they might arrive sliced and red, rather than sweet, white and pickled. Your coffee could become a latte, or, more likely, it could fail to materialise at all. The entire order might get sent to another office with a similar name two blocks down. They might add bacon or lox (smoked salmon, FYI) just for the hell of it.

So every Friday morning at ten, we call the local bagel shop and request that our order be re-sent with the items we actually ordered in it – and we swear to never, ever use that bakery again. It’s just too many times, we say to each other; we can easily find somewhere else just as good. After all, isn’t this the city of a billion bagels? We can move on from this. We don’t have to accept that kind of treatment from a store we’ve given so much loyalty.

An hour later, everything arrives steaming hot and perfectly done. The people who yelled down the phone at us when we first complained come and drop off the new bag with a friendly smile and a “Have an excellent day, everyone”, which makes us all feel terrible for getting wound up. The bagels are newly made and delicious. The ingredients are generously apportioned and fresh. The coffee is perfect. Everything tastes even better after the disappointment of the first batch. It’s a classic case of love-bombing after a terrible fall out.

Next week, we’ll order from the same bagel shop again.