The best bagel shops in Los Angeles 53%
By Bill Addison0% Stephanie Breijo70% Danielle Dorsey0% Betty Hallock0% Jenn Harris0% Sarah Mosqueda0%
3/9/2023, 6:00:35 AM
Topics: Food, Los Angeles Dining
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Anecdotal, and Halo Effect, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 50.3% saturation with 1,830 hits. Analysis detected 9,357 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,640 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.7% and a BS Rank of 53% (10,393 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 52.50% of the article peer group.
A bagel renaissance is boiling over in Los Angeles.
For years now, local bagel makers have been perfecting recipes and styles.
While at first these bakers sought to replicate the nostalgia of New York- and Montreal-style bagels, regional styles have since emerged.
Often, the toppings highlight seasonal produce, and the bagels themselves are airier, with crispy and chewy crusts.
Some of the best bagel shops in L.A. are standing out by taking extra time to let their dough rise naturally.
It’s been five years since Arielle Skye and her husband Chris Moss opened Courage Bagels in a former panaderia in Virgil Village, but customers still line up daily, rain or shine.
Now, the perennially popular shop is far from an outlier, and you can find noteworthy bagels in just about every L.A. neighborhood.
In Highland Park, Mustard’s Bagels pop-up is selling out of its 72-hour-fermented sourdough bagels — sold loose, in bulk or as open-faced sandwiches topped with house-cured Nova lox or miso-scallion schmear — nearly every weekend.
Santa Monica bakery Jyan Isaac Bread supplies its bagels to numerous spots across the city, while next-door neighbor Layla Bagels expanded to a second Beverly Hills location within two years of its bricks-and-mortar launch.
Iconic bagel shops from the East Coast and Bay Area have planted roots in Burbank and Los Feliz, eager to gain notice in our city’s now-competitive scene.
You can grab bulk bagels and pints of schmear for an affordable price from most of the shops featured on this list, but be prepared for bagel sandwiches topped with pastrami-seasoned lox, an ounce of caviar (yes, really) or honey-drizzled mandarinquat to be priced accordingly.
From Irvine to Cypress Park to Long Beach, here are 25 bagel shops for a taste of L.A.’s overflowing scene.
A beloved bagel shop that's been holding down the East Coast for half a century just expanded to a Burbank location.
Bagel Boss imports its dough from Long Island and hand rolls it daily on-site; then bagels are kettle-boiled and baked in an array of flavors.
A bounty of shmear options is available, including classic flavors such as lox, scallion and cinnamon raisin, plus fun options such as olive, tofu and strawberry.
Breakfast sandwiches and items include a breakfast burrito, and deli favorites also are on standby, including tuna, egg and whitefish salad, black-and-white cookies, coffee drinks and more.
Read about Bagel Boss' new Burbank location.
It’s only logical that a half bagel shop, half pizzeria would make one of L.A.’s top spins on a pizza bagel, but Bagel + Slice nails each independently too.
Blaze Pizza co-founder Brad Kent launched this concept in 2022 using a blend of sunflower and whole-grain low-gluten buckwheat flours.
The everything bagel is the most popular, but the most inspired is the option flecked with dried rosemary and za’atar; they’re enjoyed a la carte, with cream cheese or as part of a bagel sandwich in options such as chicken cutlet with Oaxacan cheese or the quintessential pick: the open-faced Goldilox, which piles scallion cream cheese with lox, dill, capers, red onion and a drizzle of vibrant lemon-infused olive oil.
There are New York-style slices and whole pizzas too, but the bialy-like pizzettes are one of Kent’s most distinctive offerings.
The hand-rolled-bagel operation from Nick Schreiber and J.D.
Rocchio has lived many lives over the last decade-plus: A home operation grew to a pop-up out of La Perla, then moved down York Boulevard to a takeout window in the former music venue the Hi Hat.
Soon, it'll be evolving into its very own restaurant and deli along York, set to open later this year.
From a small table outside that restaurant’s front door is where you can currently find bagels to go, alongside schmears made with California dairy, onion-laden latkes and whole loaves of olive oil challah.
The stars remain the bagels, chewy with just the right amount of bite from the golden outer shell, in classic flavors as well as the more unusual (and fan-favorite) cacio e pepe variety.
The tomato jam, perfectly toeing the line between sweet and spicy, is a must-add on any breakfast sandwich.
A Bay Area bagel shop has debuted in Los Feliz with New York-style bagels that are kettle-boiled and baked, resulting in a chewy, slightly sweet bagel featuring an even, golden crust.
Bagels are available in creative flavors such as the "pumperthingle" with pumperknickel and everything seasoning, sandwiches or sold frozen and in bulk with cream cheese.
Additional L.A. locations are in the works for the bagel brand.
Read about the bagel shop in Los Feliz.
This place makes everything, from the butter to the cured lox, from scratch.
The bagels, which begin with a sourdough starter named Luna, are boiled and then baked in a wood stone oven.
The crust is crispy, wrapped in tiny bubbles.
Inside, the dough is chewy but not dense.
It's an excellent bagel I can enjoy toasted with butter.
But Boil & Bake specializes in spreads and toppings that will transform your bagel into a sandwich.
For a more classic open-faced bagel, lox and cream cheese profile, the Fully Loaded is exactly as advertised.
But I'm partial to the Don't Go Bacon My Heart, with a layer of scallion chive cream cheese, Neuske bacon and a thick slab of pickled green tomato.
Something about the Jerusalem bagel is awe-inspiring: Maybe it’s the impressive size, or its plump oval shape, or the amount of seeds its exterior accommodates.
And while the bagel is of Eastern European descent, the Jerusalem bagel is related to Middle Eastern breads such as Turkish simit and Lebanese ka’ak.
An important distinction is that it isn’t boiled before it’s baked, so it’s soft and fluffy inside rather than dense and chewy.
In Los Angeles, Jerusalem bagels are far less common than the New York-by-way-of-Warsaw round bread.
Ran Zimon, who grew up outside Tel Aviv, stocks his Arts District bakery with plenty of Jerusalem bagels, with sesame seeds or multiseeded, including zingy caraway.
Order a side of labneh and za’atar.
Husband-and-wife duo Alex and Sun Sohn went viral during the pandemic when they launched a garlic bread pop-up via Instagram, and now, at their Koreatown cafe, you can indulge in fresh, hand-rolled bagels that come stuffed with indulgent fillings such as the Ktown Not Philly bagel sandwich with beef bulgogi, mozzarella, arugula and spicy gochujang aioli.
Schmears also depart from your usual flavors, including bacon scallion, basil sun-dried tomato, fig pecan and cacio e pepe butter flavors.
Coffee drinks, loaded tots and creamy house soup round out the menu, with bags of bagel chips coated in everything seasoning available to go.
No current discussion of L.A.’s bagel scene can ignore Courage Bagels.
The game-changing business began nearly six years ago, when Arielle Skye started selling her compact, smoky-crisp, Montreal-inspired bagels from the back of a bicycle.
In October 2020, she and her now-husband, Chris Moss, moved into the Virgil Village space previously occupied by Super Pan bakery.
The lines have been legendary since; these are truly some of the best bagels in the U.S.
My standard order is the Winter in Sardinia — a sandwich layered with sardines, herbs, lemon and a fistful of capers — and also half of a purposely burnt bagel pounded with everything seasoning and draped with smoked salmon.
However, no matter what you order or when you show up, there will be a line, and it will be worth the wait.
On Thursday, the West Hollywood destination for Detroit-style pizza will give away free slices of pizza to first responders and evacuees whose homes were destroyed in ongoing fires.
The pizzeria will also offer discounted pizza to locals under evacuation orders.
The bagels at Gjusta are textbook good: crunchy shells with soft, chewy middles.
The place is more conservative than most when it comes to the amount of seasoning on the everything bagel, with more of a smattering of dried onion and sesame seeds that allows you to really taste the onion.
As good as the bagel is on its own, it's even better with a schmear of the labneh spread, a couple of slices of pastrami lox and pickled onions.
Jesse Furman knows a thing or two about a good bagel — especially when it’s done with a modern, sourdough edge.
The New York native grew up frequenting the city’s bagel shops and Jewish delis, and when it came time for the former Grá chef to take his holey hobby professional, he lifted inspiration from his New York haunts as well as L.A.’s baking scene, with Clark Street, Bub and Grandma’s and Tartine influencing his sourdough-bagel process.
The result is a flavorful, light-as-air center with a satisfying crust in straightforward flavors such as sesame, everything and plain, served with throwback accouterments: hand-sliced cured trout, house-smoked whitefish salad, crispy latkes, seasonal salads and chicken liver pâté.
For now, find Hot Water Bagels popping up around the city, both on Furman’s own and with collaboration menus via the likes of Maison Matho, Lasita and Pizzeria Sei.
Later this year look for a bricks-and-mortar location for bagels and other old-school deli favorites.
Baker Jyan Isaac Horwitz launched his sourdough business during the pandemic, and when he outgrew his home kitchen (because the Instagram orders kept coming), he opened his own bakery on Ocean Park Boulevard in 2021.
The line to the takeout window extends down the block for his whole grain porridge loaf, brioche, babka, rugbrod and sourdough bagels.
The bagel selection includes everything, sesame, onion, pumpernickel, plain and an especially beautiful blue poppyseed.
The bagel sandwich of choice?
For me, that’s wild Alaskan salmon roe with a thick layer of cream cheese, fresh dill and paper-thin slices of red onion on a sourdough everything bagel.
It costs $22; the half-sandwich version is $12.
Opened at the top of the year on a cozy stretch of Ocean Park Boulevard next to Ghisallo, Layla Bagels comes from brothers Harry and David Wexner and partner and general manager Kai Johnson, with Sammi Tarantino serving as head chef and Sergio España as head baker.
Sourdough bagels are hand-rolled, boiled and baked fresh each morning, available plain or sprinkled with poppy seeds, sesame seeds or everything seasoning.
The nearby Santa Monica farmers market lends seasonal fruit like blood orange and grapefruit to items like the Pre-Jam bagel slathered with cream cheese and drizzled with honey.
There's also a smoked salmon bagel sandwich and one with scrambled eggs, aged cheddar and chermoula chile oil, plus a handful of vegan options.
The bagel shop also just introduced sourdough challah bread on Fridays.
Some of the best bagels don’t need cream cheese at all, but if you’re looking for an array of plant-based options, Erica Daking's Kitchen Mouse Bakery has you covered.
The chef-owner’s bakery and cafe is located just around the corner from her full (and also fully plant-based) restaurant.
Kitchen Mouse Bakery's pastry case is full of chewy, fresh-daily bagels in options such as za’atar, rosemary fennel, everything and plain; they can come dressed simply with cashew-based schmear, or done up as sandwiches like a banh mi variant rich with lentil-and-walnut pâté but also tangy with cilantro and pickled vegetables; the deli-inspired Lox Down made with capers, red onion, smoked-carrot “lox” and dill; and even a plant-based breakfast sandwich with vegan sausage, egg and cheese.
On sunny weekend mornings, the crowd — flocking with kids and dogs in tow from the surrounding Silver Lake neighborhood — spills onto the sidewalk.
Just as popular as Jason Maury Kaplan’s everything bagels are the ones dusted with za’atar.
His are chewy, dense East Coast-style bagels to eat on their own or as the foundation for schmears, smoked fish and fish salads, served sandwich-style or open-faced.
Kippered salmon — flaky, baked chunks of it — is one of the corner bagel shop's best sellers.
And though the lemon-curd-topped bagels are no longer available, there is still the option of blueberry cream cheese, if you're looking for something fruity.
Get to Mustard’s early — or better yet, preorder — because fans line up for as long as an hour to taste some of the city’s best new bagels.
A morning at Mustard’s could include a nori-flecked everything option slicked with an umami-rich miso-and-scallion schmear; a toasted-sesame bagel with chimichurri cream cheese; or order-ahead boards of bagels, cured fish and all the accouterments.
The new pop-up is a partnership between brothers and Go Get Em Tiger vets Brent and Kyle Glanville, who draw lines in Highland Park every weekend with a tight menu of inventive a la carte options and open-faced bagel sandwiches, some draped in Nova salmon and fried capers, others in plenty of produce.The duo ferments their dough for 72 hours and boils it in malt syrup, resulting in a chewy sourdough tang that’s cocooned by a crispy, shattering shell when pulled fresh from the oven — and that’s exactly how they’re served.
There are a few rules at Mustard’s: no substitutions or omissions, no creamer for the coffee, no toasting the bagels (again, they’re already fresh from the oven).
Preorders open on Wednesdays for each weekend’s pop-up, which runs Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. or until all bagels are gone.
A new, dual-concept restaurant is lighting up the ground floor of the recently renovated Sonder City Center motel in downtown Long Beach, courtesy of sibling duo Philip and Lauren Pretty of Heritage restaurant and farm.
In the morning, the sun-drenched space opens as O&R Bagels, with naturally leavened rings from Costa Mesa's Boil & Bake topped with house-cured or smoked salmon or caviar, and a coffee program from Orange's Play Coffee.
For dinner, the space flips to Olive & Rose, a moody neo-bistro that departs from Heritage's tasting-menu format with a la carte plates that blend French and California influences, including a sculptural endive and date salad, roast chicken and foraged mushrooms soaking in jus and marinated pork shoulder with grilled lettuce.
For dessert, honeycomb brittle-topped marshmallow ice cream is spun in-house.
After six years of tooling around with recipes and scouring the city for a bagel that would match the New York-style rings to which his grandfather introduced him as a child, Zach Liporace officially entered the universe of bagel-making.
Pop's Bagels has expanded from an apartment operation in Los Feliz to locations in Culver City and Brentwood, with a third outpost in Beverly Hills coming soon.
Pick up tightly wound bagels generously dusted with sesame seeds, poppy seeds or everything seasoning, in addition to plain and cinnamon raisin options.
Dress them with buttermilk cream cheese that's made fresh daily; whitefish, tuna, chicken tarragon or egg salad; smoked Nova lox with capers, cucumbers, tomatoes and red onion; bacon, avocado and cream cheese; or roll the dice with "What Zach had for breakfast" — he rarely eats the same thing twice, and each bagel half features different toppings.
The pastry case at Rye Goods in Tustin can be overwhelming in the most delightful way.
Rows of caramelized onion and brie croissants, thumbprint cookies dotted with seasonal jam and morning buns that make Kouign-amanns jealous are just a few of the items baked fresh daily.
But it is the bagels that keep me coming back almost weekly.
The bagels, like nearly everything at Rye Goods, start with a rye sourdough culture that owner Sara Lezama has loving named Winona Ryeder.
The Tustin location is tucked behind a corporate office building and serves as the commercial production kitchen for Rye Goods' other locations in Lido Island and Laguna Beach.
The bagels are earthy and naturally nutty with an exterior that toasts up nicely and an interior that is perfectly chewy.
The menu offers sesame, plain, jalapeño cheese and everything bagels, along with three house-made cream cheese flavors to accompany them.
Choose from plain cream cheese, chive cream cheese full of threads of the mild green allium and garden, which uses seasonal vegetables so it is always a surprise.
A bright purple schmear studded with beets, a combination of shredded carrots and herbs and even a fresno chile spread with a dash of cumin for Southwestern flair are just some of the garden varieties that have graced bagels in the past.
Any combination of bagel and cream cheese makes an excellent quick breakfast on a weekday, but for weekend brunch indulge in the Egg Bagel Sammy.
A bagel of your choice gets a healthy smear of chive cream cheese before getting stacked with crispy smashed potato, an over medium egg, house made chili crunch, a bundle of fresh chives and a squeeze of lemon to brighten the whole thing up.
The Egg Bagel Sammy cannot be eaten with one hand while you drive, so grab a table at the communal seating area shared with the office building to dig in.
Of the L.A. bagels I’ve tried recently, I was most impressed with the ones at Saint-Raf Bagels, a business inside the 1802 Roasters coffee shop in Cypress Park — the bagel-and-coffee matryoshka doll that’s exactly what we all need in life.
The bagels are tender and chewy, satisfying to pull apart and with that slight alkaline shine characteristic of so many good ones.
You can’t go wrong with the classic smoked salmon and cream cheese combo, or a whitefish salad that goes particularly nicely with a poppyseed bagel that’s so densely covered in seeds, you can barely see the bread beneath.
My favorite might be the salt and pepper bagel, however, which has a sharpness reminiscent of a plate of cacio e pepe at a good Roman restaurant.
These hand-shaped bagels are worth setting a Sunday alarm clock for.
Helmed by Alex Crow and baker Saranee Muengfoo, Tomorrow Bagel popped up at coffee shops like Obet & Del's and Alibi before moving into its current stall at the Hollywood Farmers Market every Sunday.
The bagels are boiled and baked, but what makes them stand out is a barley malt syrup that lends a golden hue and a toasted and nutty flavor.
Available with za'atar and sea salt, poppyseeds, sesame seeds, everything seasoning or onion, the bagels are so thoroughly coated that hardly any of the dough is visible until you take that initial bite.
Stock up on bagels to take home or order a bagel sandwich with such toppings as lox, tomato, red onions, dill, capers and extra virgin olive oil, or scrambled eggs, cheese, bacon and Thai chili honey, with rotating seasonal options.
In early 2020, this downtown breakfast burrito specialist had freshly rejiggered its menu with some outside-the-box creations based on fillings like pesto quinoa.
During the pandemic the options have been simplified, and the power move now is to customize: carne asada and tater tots, say, with avocado, grilled onions, pepper jack, cotija and cilantro crema.
Uniting scrambled tofu, refried black beans, dairy-free American cheese and eggless chipotle aioli led to the standout vegan breakfast burrito among all that I tried during this gut-busting quest.
Wexler's is the "new-wave old school" deli founded by Micah Wexler and Michael Kassar with locations in Santa Monica and downtown's Grand Central Market.
Wexler, who is a veteran of restaurants such as Craft and Joêl Robuchon, opened the iconic Grand Central Market spot 10 years ago, slinging bagel sandwiches with house-cured lox, smoked sturgeon, white fish salad and pastrami.
Wexler's has the distinction of being one of the only delis in L.A. to cure, smoke and hand-slice all its fish and meat in house.
You can't go wrong with the classic lox, velvety slices draped over a thin layer of cream cheese, topped with a few slices of red onion and sprigs of dill.
A few key touches: The capers are sprinkled between the cream cheese and lox (so they don't roll off), and your sandwich is served with a side of either cole slaw or potato salad, along with pickles and wedges of lemon.
Husband-and-wife duo Tom and Tiffany Levy were raised in the San Fernando Valley but had parents and grandparents from New York so they made frequent trips to the East Coast growing up.
That's how they came to love East Coast-style bagels (including the ones made in Maine), and you'll find similar renditions at Uncle Stevey's Bagels, a small shop that the pair opened in old town El Segundo late last year.
Here, bagels are steamed and baked in a specialty oven, resulting in a crispy crust with a chewy interior.
Bagel flavors include plain, sesame and everything, as well as less-common options such as cheddar hot honey, rosemary olive oil and garlic and onion.
A selection of bagel sandwiches is also available, including a BLT with avocado and the titular Uncle Stevey with smoked salmon, cream cheese, pickled red onions and dill.
Pair your bagel with a coffee, soda or tea and find a seat in the cozy shop or on the street-facing patio.
Some of L.A.’s favorite bagels can be found at Yeastie Boys' roving food trucks, where founder Evan Fox shares his take on the New York-style bagel.
Yeastie’s hand-rolled bagels are designed to be plump, doughy and extremely squishable to stand up to the onslaught of schmear and other items they manage to cram between the halves.
These aren’t just bagels, they’re vehicles for folds of lox, slabs of hash browns, pit-smoked pastrami, jalapeño cheddar schmear, pucks of turkey sausage, yolk-oozing fried eggs and other savory options.
The $5 order of mini bagels allows for multiple schmears on two sized-down bagels, but for those looking to level up, the Reubenstein, one of the trucks’ most popular items by far, reimagines the classic Reuben on a heaped everything bagel that’s been flipped upside down for maximum grillage; it's a wholly satisfying meal in ode to the iconic sandwich by Reuben Kulakofsky — a distant relative of Fox’s.
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