No it was definitely Brick lane for the bagels. I was working at the Homerton hospital in A&E in the early 90s and if it was busy (as it usually was) often the police would do a bagel run for us!

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

You made me realize how fortunate I am. There are two places that make their own, plus another place that gets good ones delivered every morning; all within a 10 minute walk from my house. Not the "best" around but quite good.

What a lot we have in common .... apart from Homerton Hospital that is .... I suspect A+E was a touch busy:D

Use to live at Barbican then Tottenham and I see you're currently west country .... well at this moment I'm looking at the waves lashing Goodrington and Brixham and contemplating the 303 back to Hampshire.

My favourite was the bagel place in Vallance Road. My recollection was that there wasn't a shop service as such so no fillings or butter .... you just bought them by the dozen at the door from the baker. Brick Lane has now become a destination in it's own right.

New York is so lucky with delis and bagels etc. Very envious. We have an abomination in the UK called New York Bagels. They're basically a plain bread mix .... a touch sweeter that has been boiled then baked ... but not the real thing. If you re-bake them then they become a mush.

But what happened to onion platzels? Never see them anywhere. I'm going to try and make some.

OK, I confess my first reaction to this thread was, WHAT? THEY HAVE BAGELS IN THE UK??? (born and raised in NYC, I've always felt like only WE had the real ones. And I haven't had a really good one since I left there over 20 years ago!)

And what IS an onion platzel anyway? Anything like a bialy?

Wow - Flyertalk is high on Google's page rank. The second item in a search for "platzel" is this thread. :eek:

http://www.google.com/search?q=platzels

Is this the same as a pletzlach?

NY Times Recipe: Onion Flat Rolls (Pletzlach)

Well ..... I think we probably had bagels in the UK earlier than the US as the influx of Jews after the pogroms arrived. Many of the people arriving in the Uk and Ireland thought they'd arrived in New York but they soon found their way to the East-end and Manchester. In fact I think I recently ate one of those original bagels.

The onion platzel is ... or was not really a flat anything. It was a crusty roll with a dimple in the top in which cooked onion was inserted. It was baked on stone and it had a sort of crunchy crispness to the rest of it as though some steam had been injected a bit like the crackling effect you get with a baguette.

This version doesn't look right because it's sort of high and batch baked and the ones I'm yearning for were seperate lower and had more crust surface - although the surface of these look nearly right. These look a bit better .... perhaps it's more a cross between the two.

They certainly aren't a variant of a bagel - an onion bagel has several variants one being onion seed and the other fried onion inside the actual dough mixture - sometimes with some dark onion little bits on the surface - so is completely different. The platzel has the onion just on the top in the dimple - pizza like.

Yeah - it looks like the term platzel is used more in the U.K. (run a Google search and most of the links are U.K.-related), whereas, for example, the term pletzlach would be used here in the States. I could be wrong, but it does appear that way.

im probably out of line to ask this, but: is there any way we can turn this into a compare-and-contrast-bagel-tasting-mini-do? id love to tag along if im in town.... if not, no problem!

Sign up for the BRT (see signature) in the Community forum. I know of plenty of good bagel places in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

What!? None in White Plains! How can that be?! :D

Okay, there must be at least one in Scarsdale, right? :D We gotta go to Brooklyn with you? :p

It's all relative isn't it? Have a bagel in St. Louis (or on a UA flight) and the ones in White Plains will stand out. I dont want to get into the "best bagel" argument (as long as no one claims it is the place with the giant fluffy abominations), you can get great bagels in the whole area. Sure, some are a bit better or worse but with the exception noted above most are really excellent.

I have it on good authority that the best bagels are from Queens anyway ;)

Everyone knows that IBM'ers can no longer afford even a bagel.

I'm from Queens, but I always found the best bagels in Brooklyn:D

And now I'm dying of curiousity-what is "the place with the giant fluffy abominations"?

TOS violation. :p

The right NY Bagel.
 

New York Bagels that are baked in the most authentic scenario are second to none. What is it that makes them taste the way they do? Water boiling method ? The water that nyc gets. Humidity. Attitude? Experience Air Altitude? Everybody has their own argument but the truth is noone can pin point the Exact recipe. The fact just remains that New York Bagels are second to none! For gifts and expats try www.BestNewYorkBagel.com