East Bay Tour de Bagel

Posted by Rachel

This morning, 6 of us completed a very important workout- a bagel challenge, dubbed "Tour de Bagel" by Brandon, one of the supposed authors of this blog who has actually not written a single word in it. (YET).

It began with a bike ride into the hills. Many of us in the group have done this ride before, so we pretty much knew what to expect. It's basically a good bit of climbing followed by a terrifying downhill, all of which we'll need to practice given the hilly IM we're considering.

I wonder if all this "we have to take a picture for the blog" is going to be disruptive to our actual training

The newbies did great, and that's all I really have to say about the bike ride because I'd much rather talk about bagels (obviously).

After descending from the hills, our first stop was Stag's Lunchette. This is an amazing place where every single thing I have ordered is awesome, and it changes every week. But as easy as it could've been to get distracted by their other offerings, today we were here with a dedicated purpose- a comparative bagel evaluation. (Which, for the record, the staff thought was a ridiculously cool idea.) My personal strategy was to order the same thing at each bagel place to have a benchmarked, controlled experiment. Not everyone took this approach, but you will see all of my pictures are the same so now you know why. And without further ado:

 The everything bagel + cream cheese at Stag's

Since I'm not a food critic I'm not going to try to articulate the taste and texture of this thing, but it was a bagel and it was delicious. Next we moved on to Authentic Bagel Co., which is only about a mile down the road.

The everything bagel + cream cheese at ABC

It's clear that this bagel is rocking the everythingness of the toppings, but what you can't see is the hint of salt that really puts it over the top. The texture and chewiness were ideal as well. I'll note here that I split my bagels at each stop so I only had 1.5 total throughout the tour, not 3 as it may appear (just in case you were secretly judging me as you read this). We completed the final leg of this journey with a stop at Beauty's.

The everything bagel + cream cheese at Beauty's

The line here was by far the longest, which was ok since we had already eaten an entire bagel before arriving. I'll mention that these are Montreal style bagels, although despite growing up near the Canadian border I don't have a clue what that means. The toppings look unimpressive in the picture but they were actually pretty good. This bagel did present the eater with subtle hint of caraway seed, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I have been to all of these places in the past but not on the same day. They are all really good bagels. Here is my personal summary:
Stag's- the bagel is great, but their other menu choices also really shine. Bagels are one of my favorite foods, yet if I get here slightly past noon when the bagels are unavailable (damn breakfast menu cutoffs) I'm not really that disappointed.
ABC- I think this is the best everything bagel + cream cheese I've found in the East Bay.
Beauty's- When I go here, I order their bagel with cream cheese and veggies on it. Their cucumbers are salted and make their veggie-topped bagel + cream cheese the best I've ever had.

Of course after all this work we needed some way to quantify the results, so each of the 6 of us had 10 points to allocate among the 3 bagel joints as we wished. Here is the result:
ABC- the winner with 23.5 points (3 people voted this as their favorite)
Beauty's and Stag's- holding their own with 18.5 and 18 points, respectively (1 person voted Beauty's as their favorite and 2 people voted Stag's as their favorite)

After all of this bagel tasting, we actually went new bike shopping. It was fun test riding some new types of bikes, and while I selected the one I probably want, I didn't make the purchase quite yet. I'll talk about this in a future post.