r/OaklandFood • u/jackdicker5117 • 2d ago
‘Blasphemy!’ Readers respond to Bay Area bagel rankings
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/restaurants/article/bagel-shop-bay-area-20826311.phpLol, they clearly read this sub!
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u/HeyKayRenee 2d ago edited 2d ago
They obviously read this sub because they stole the whole idea from this sub. They saw the engagement on the original post and needed those sweet clicks for themselves. Guarantee this “followup” article was planned in advance.
Groundbreaking unoriginality at work here.
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u/wentImmediate 2d ago
needed those sweet clicks for themselves. Guarantee this “followup” article was planned in advance.
This is one of the few local papers left. I don't see the Chronicle as Amazon or Walmart. We need journalists, right? Less journalists, less accountability for politicians, the police, and others.
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u/Janet-Yellen 2d ago
I mean I wouldn’t give the Reddit poster much credit. Blind taste testing isn’t exactly some revolutionary idea. They did 1 in 2022 (sfgate) and Berkeleyside did 1 last year. I’ve probably read hundreds of blind taste testing articles through the years
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/bay-area-new-york-bagel-17607113.php
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/11/21/east-bay-best-bagels-taste-test
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u/am8ur88 2d ago
and
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/05/10/best-bagels-berkeley-oakland-east-bay
ps the delirama guy is making bagels again at krispy joe's.
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u/TheCrudMan 2d ago
Some questioned the team’s methodology. We should have done a straight ranking instead of averaging scores, one Reddit poster suggested.
It's meeeeeeee
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u/Sure_Ranger_4487 2d ago
I want owners/bakers of NY city delis to come to the Bay Area and vote who has the best bagels. That’s an article and information I’ll trust about bagel rankings in the Bay Area.
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u/jackdicker5117 2d ago
This could be a very cool series. You take a city that’s known for something (bagels, nyc)and you have chefs/food writers give reviews on another cities attempt at it(Bay Area bagels).
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u/HeyKayRenee 2d ago
Imagine ranking Mexican food in, like, Madison Wisconsin or something. “Soul food from New Hampshire” was a punchline in The Good Place for a reason. LOL
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u/jackdicker5117 2d ago
Not quite the same thing but funny enough. https://www.thedailymeal.com/1333278/food-critic-famous-genuinely-loving-olive-garden/
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u/horses_in_the_sky 2d ago
It was easier for me to find good al pastor off the trompo on a daily basis in fitchburg wisconsin than it is here in oakland
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u/Super-Reception5386 2d ago
While I think people tend to underestimate how good Mexican food is outside of the known hubs, I find this incredibly hard to believe unless you’re only looking somewhere like Adams Point
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u/horses_in_the_sky 2d ago
There are only a few places with good trompo on the weekdays. Weekends there are more options. But my boys in those food trucks in fitchburg were out hustling almost every day
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u/Hoobam 2d ago
Hey, that’s where I live!
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u/Super-Reception5386 2d ago
I used to live there back before the pandemic and I loved it. Very walkable, safe, clean. Only complaints were having to hike K2 every time I wanted to go home. (And no good Mexican food nearby)
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u/photomike 2d ago
The health department wouldn’t allow it here for years. I think they’ve started to loosen up on it a bit recently but that’s why
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u/Sure_Ranger_4487 2d ago
My first thought when I saw the article was the bagel rankings looked like bagel rankings of people who grew up eating grocery store and Bay Area bagels.
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u/DickRiculous 2d ago
man I want owners/bakers of NY city delis to open a shop in Oakland. Give me Essa Bagel or give me death.
Just kidding, but seriously. I learned to make my own bagels from scratch because even the best ones out here don't cut it. Pizza is a little better, but hardly, and sandwiches here leave much to be desired.
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u/Sure_Ranger_4487 2d ago edited 1d ago
Sandwich scene here is roughhh. People just don’t understand lol. I’ve been here since 2009 and am shocked there still isn’t a decent sandwich/sub/hoagie/italian scene.
Pizza scene is okay. I’m still partial to Gioia after all these years but $45 for a pepperoni pizza is tough. Seeing Rose Pizzeria in all these top pizza lists in the country makes me shake my head. I just don’t get it. And I do like June’s but I also just fucking love a big ole wood fired thin crust slice of marg pizza with fresh basil that I can fold in half so clearly that checks all my boxes lol. I don’t need all the extra parm on top though.
I do enjoy Hella Bagels a lot. Definitely my favorite isn’t the Bay Area and the best I’ve had out west. Their salt bagel, untoasted (obvi), with horseradish/lemon/dill schmear is my fave.
Edit: added a bit more love to my description for HB. They deserve jt.
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u/lllllllllvlllllllll 2d ago
Hella Bagels is great. The only place where I’m actually thinking “damn this bagel is good”. Everywhere else is just a vehicle for cream cheese or toppings
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u/Sure_Ranger_4487 1d ago
They are. I actually had to edit my comment to give them more credit than I had originally.
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u/Janet-Yellen 2d ago
The nytimes said Boichik was the best in the country a few years back. Was quite the controversy
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u/bigolignocchi 2d ago
Did they all stand around a table and alternate bites of different bagels? Because that also seems deeply flawed
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u/violet_zamboni 2d ago
Something I think the people at the chron might not understand is: if you post reviews that are very ridiculous and make you look like a clown, people may not be looking for your opinion in the future
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u/black-kramer 2d ago
that ship sailed a long time ago so now they're stuck doing the circus act. circling the drain of relevancy with a second rate team. kinda reminds me of bon appetit after the fiasco a few years ago, but even more mediocre.
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u/Haunting-Donut-7783 2d ago
Would be nice if we could actually read the article
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u/blu3str 2d ago
If they want to steal the entire article from Reddit. This isn’t stealing either.
When the Chronicle Food & Wine team first discussed the idea of blind taste-testing bagels, we knew the reaction, no matter the results, would be fierce.
The results are now in. And readers have thoughts, which they shared freely with the Chronicle by email and in a survey.
Loveski Deli, a fine-dining chef’s modern Jewish deli in Napa and Marin, took home the top spot, closely followed by San Francisco-born Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen at No. 2 and Oakland’s Poppy Bagels at No. 3.
The rankings of many other popular bagel shops incited outrage.
“Hack job!!!!” one reader emailed.
“Blasphemy!” another wrote.
Many readers were particularly skeptical about the panel’s placement of Noah’s NY Bagels, a California chain, at the No. 9 spot. (Judges were also surprised by this outcome.)
“I enjoy a flavorful bread as much as anyone, but just because something is round with a hole in the middle doesn’t make it a bagel,” one reader wrote. “After reading your article, I came away thinking the taste test was really evaluating the judges, and half of them failed.”
By far, Berkeley-born Boichik Bagels was the shop most readers said in a survey that we missed. For the record: We did taste Boichik; it just didn’t land in the top 10.
Other readers bemoaned spots that weren’t considered. The team didn’t include popups or farmers market stands, and picked up bagels from as many cities as feasible to taste them fresh in the San Francisco office on a single morning.
Reader shoutouts included farmers market popup Dudley’s Bagels; Bagel Street Cafe and Posh Bagel in Menlo Park; Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels in Palo Alto; Berkeley Bagel; and Wingen Bakery in Livermore. In the North Bay: San Anselmo’s Barton’s Bagels; Sebastopol’s Grateful Bagel; Petaluma’s Bagel Mill; and Marla and Grossman’s Noshery in Santa Rosa. One supporter of Chicken Dog Bagels in San Francisco even offered to cover the cost of the popup’s bagel if it wasn’t superior to Loveski. (We didn’t include it in the tasting because it’s only available on weekends.) Another reader wished we had tried Costco bagels “just for comparison.” (We did include Trader Joe’s, coming in last.)
Some questioned the team’s methodology. We should have done a straight ranking instead of averaging scores, one Reddit poster suggested. Several readers argued that the results were skewed by tasting everything bagels that distracted from the bagel itself. This was a “serious mistake,” one wrote. “Toppings are just peripherals, and choosing ‘everything’ maximizes the chance for irrelevancies.” (For what it’s worth, we discovered that even seasoning can’t mask a bland bagel.)
Toasting the bagels, another wrote on Reddit, could have dramatically changed the ranking. Bagels are a notoriously fickle product, sensitive to temperature and time; one might be your ride-or-die favorite one morning, and taste different the next.
“Nothing like bagels to elicit rational and grounded reactions,” one person wrote on Reddit.
In the end, it’s a good sign that the Bay Area now has so many varied bagels to hotly debate.
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u/bigolignocchi 2d ago
Summarizes the original article and then one of those weird Reddit thread summary articles. No substance, take away is “bagels are contentious.”
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u/weirdhobo 2d ago
this is what happens when you have sloppy journalism and a bunch of people untrained and ignorant in sensory testing methods lol
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u/solarus 1d ago
Neck beard ass comment
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u/TheGoodDavid42 2d ago
Reader engagement must be low if you are writing articles about people disliking your articles.