The Cholent Does Bagels
A walk through Capitol Hill's bagel scene with It's a Shanda.
I almost named The Cholent The Bagel.
The bagel is round, connected, nostalgic, both crunchy and soft, only really authentic in New York, sometimes amazing but mostly embarrassing, and everyone has an opinion about it. I thought it made a good metaphor for Jews. In the end, I thought The Cholent was just funnier. And aren’t we a hot mess?
So it was a revelation to discover It’s a Shanda, a newsletter by one Sean Keeley who lives in Seattle and has been documenting his journey through Seattle to discover the best bagel. I had to meet him.
Sean and I planned to tour a few local bagel shops on Capitol Hill on a recent Thursday at 7 am, before we both had to get to our “real” jobs. We started the day at Eltana.
Sean eats bagels as if he’s a sommelier evaluating a new vintage. He looks at it, assesses both sides, sniffs it, takes a bite of it plain, then digs into a cream-cheesed version, all the while mulling and chewing.
This is his second assessment of Eltana — what he calls a “second schmear.”
“It’s on its way to golden brown,” he says while prodding an unadorned bagel. “Maybe not all the way there. Very, very hard on the top. That’s interesting. Bottom’s a little softer. You don’t usually get it where the top is harder than the bottom. I like to do a rip on the plain bagel, so I got a little bit of crunch, a little bit of crispiness on the roof.”
He chews contemplatively, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Even I’m like, this is a little silly,” he admits. “It’s evolved over time. Early on, I felt like I wasn’t taking into account things like the smell and all that stuff. So there was a little bit of crispness on the rib and a little bit of a sweet smell, which we figured because they bake it with honey.” He chews. “Kind of more roll than bagel.”
Sean is looking for something specific yet elusive. A yeasty smell, the flavor of nostalgia. “It’s pretty cool when you do get it, because you’re like, that’s right. It’s a total sense memory.”
The mystery of the morning is whether Eltana is indeed a Montreal-style bagel place. So we call over owner Stephen Brown, who has nothing better to do than to talk to us.
“We learned how to bake in Montreal,” he tells us. “[But] we won’t be quoted talking about ourselves as Montreal style. It’s not because we don’t think that they make delicious bagels in Montreal. We have a couple of points of difference with Montreal bagels. And basically, Montreal bagels don’t mean anything to the vast majority people on the West Coast. People think Montreal on the West Coast, they think cold, French. And those two things have nothing to do with bagels. Most people, of course, in Seattle, don’t know that Montreal has a thriving Jewish population.”
Mystery solved: Eltana is both Montreal style and not Montreal style.
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Over the years, I have worked with some acclaimed food writers on Seattle’s bagel scene. It’s a topic that causes a lot of emotions. Sean is not a food writer or a baker or otherwise credentialed to review bagels, whatever that might mean. He grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Jewish mom and Irish Episcopalian dad. He got into writing — screenwriting (he once wrote a feature-length screenplay called “Jew”), writing about his alma mater (Syracuse), blogging about sports, and editing, until he had a veritable writing career.
Like The Cholent, It’s a Shanda is a sort of passion project side hustle, something Sean felt compelled to launch. “I lived in LA, Seattle, Chicago, New York. And I feel like invariably wherever I would move, I would eventually run into the headline, “Our bagels are just as good as New York’s, if not better,” or something like that,” he says. “I started an Excel document, and I visited every bagel place in the Chicagoland area, and I gave them all ratings. I figured out the places that were actually really good bagels. I always planned to do something with it, but I just never got around to it. So then when I moved back to Seattle, that was definitely kind of gestating in my brain. And then sure enough, the Seattle Times does a piece last year: ‘Seattle Bagels are just as good if not better than New York’s.’ And I was just like, alright, we have to do this now.”
Sean has been ranking the bagel spots. Currently, Bagel Oasis is in the #1 position. This may or may not come as a surprise, depending on who you are.
“What’s funny is, I looked at all of the existing rankings that were out there — the Seattle Times, Eater Seattle — all of them. And they all pretty much included the same places, and none of them included Bagel Oasis,” he says. “I went to Bagel Oasis and I was like, what am I missing? This is really good. It’s really unassuming. It’s kind of like a classic Jewish deli kind of vibe in there.”
Could it be that Bagel Oasis, a staple of the bagel scene that can be traced to the ’90s bagel craze (there is an amusing article somewhere in the Jewish Transcript archives about this) is the OG, Seattle’s secret bagel weapon that outlasts all the trends?
“It definitely feels like a lot of Jewish people who have been in Seattle for a long time have identified that ‘this is my spot,’” Sean says. “There’s the shiny new toys over here, but this is the place, this is the go-to. This is what I know.”
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After thoroughly evaluating Eltana, we head over to Westman’s, the hole-in-the-wall on Madison that’s owned by Monica Dimas. The website proclaims that “Westman’s is a love letter to NYC.”
Sean might recommend not sending that letter. Westman’s is currently ranked 14th on his list. That’s two above Eltana and 13 below Bagel Oasis.
“The biggest critique has been that their bagels seem a bit stale,” he says. “I came here on like a Saturday early in the morning. Talk about a shanda.”
But today, Westman’s throws a cream cheese curve ball.
“The cream cheese is really good,” Sean says. “I don’t remember the cream cheese.” (Actually, in his original review he does compliment the scallion cream cheese.)
In addition to a plain untoasted bagel, he always orders an everything untoasted with scallion cream cheese, and there is a reason for this. “It just feels like if you can do that [well], you’re probably pretty good. But at a lot of places, you can see that there’s scallions or chives in there, but you don’t taste anything.”
The bagel-schmear relationship is important. “I know this sounds very pretentious, and it probably is, but I just think a lot of people just have never had a really good bagel,” Sean says. “They don’t have a basis for knowing when they’re eating a good bagel. And I think a lot of people will get a bagel, and they’ll load it up with schmears or lox or some kind of sandwich, and they’ll eat that and they’ll be like, ‘oh my God, this is a really good bagel.’ Well, that’s not technically the bagel.”
Sean bites straight into the bagel-hole-glob. I’m taken aback by this bold move.
“If I think the cream cheese is really good, I will go for it. If I’m not enjoying it, I won’t. But I will say this is probably the best Westman’s bagel I’ve had.”
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Like cholent, “shanda” is a Yiddish word, and it means disgrace. Sean acknowledges that from an SEO perspective, he probably should have gone for something like “Seattle Bagel News.” But he couldn’t resist making his newsletter an in-crowd joke.
Yet Sean doesn’t believe Seattle’s bagel scene is truly a disgrace.
“What’s cool about the Seattle bagel scene is that there’s so many different types of places and so many styles. I’ve been asking a few people like, ‘is there a Seattle style?’ And nobody really has an answer, and I don’t know that there is one.”
The bagel scene has shifted here over the past few years. Some of the newer establishments started with the pandemic lockdown home baking phenomenon (Aaron’s Bagels); others are businesses that pivoted to bagels during Covid (Old Salt). And there are the surprises: Little Market on Portage Bay has excellent, crispy bagels, which, Sean suspects but can’t prove, are made from leftover pizza dough.
And he’s not confined to Seattle. Sean’s got plans to taste his way through Olympia, Anacortes, Gig Harbor and beyond. He’s already started a secondary ranking system for outside-of-Seattle bagels. Howdy Bagel, which started as a pandemic-era popup in Seattle, moved to Tacoma and now has lines out the door.
Our last stop of the morning is a new establishment here in Seattle: Ben and Esther’s Vegan Delicatessen.
Ben and Esther’s is one spot lower than Zylberschtein’s in the rankings, and at the counter we learn a tidbit of local bagel incest: Ben and Esther’s bakes their bagels in Zylberschtein’s ovens. The dough thickens.
In his original review, Sean has lackluster things to say about Ben and Esther’s. Despite the success of the chain and my personal enthusiasm for vegan dining options, the non-dairy aftertaste of the tofu cream cheese is hard to ignore, and the carrot lox are…not anything like lox. Sean commits to coming back for a second schmear.
I’ve heard that you’re not a Jewish journalist until someone from your community says you’re worse than the Nazis. This can be a thankless profession. So has Sean received any hate, any outraged bagel eaters or restaurant owners demanding he take down a review?
Thankfully, It’s a Shanda has been well received, even in spite of a following of opinionated bagel lovers who all claim to have pure knowledge of what a “good bagel” is. Based on his interactions, he guesses his main demographic is older Jewish transplants to Seattle. After all these years in the Northwest, they’re still searching for the elusive perfect bagel.
“I’ll have people just say, ‘I like this bagel. I know you're not a big fan.’ It’s very cordial,” he says. “I don’t think bagels don’t tend to elicit anger. At least not yet.”
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As he works his way outside Seattle, needs try Whidbey Island Bagels in Clinton, Oak Harbor and Mt. Vernon....really high on my list.
Might be considered heretical, but could Safeway or Costco bagels ever be considered? Just seems so convenient to buy them when shopping. Can bagels be stored in the freezer, later defrosted, toasted, and schmeered?