Midtown Bagel Shop Ranked Among Best In America

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — An exhaustive new ranking of America's best bagels includes 11 shops in New York City, but just one with a location in Midtown.

Food and Wine Magazine's David Landsel released his list of the "Best Bagels In America" last week, naming nearly 50 shops as the nation's best.

The relatively small proportion of bagels from the five boroughs is due to what Landsel deemed a decline in authentic bagel quality in the city.

After a period of sustained greatness, Landsel wrote, "your average New York bagel started to look more like a pale, over-inflated tire." Meanwhile, bakers in other parts of the country discovered they were capable of making bagels just as well as New York did during its glory days.

Still, New York City favorites didn't escape the ranking.

In Midtown, Ess-a-Bagel was the only shop to make the list. The mini-chain has locations on Third Avenue near East 51st Street and on West 32nd Street near Herald Square, although the shop began near Stuyvesant Town on the East Side, where it still has a store.

Here's what Landsel had to say about Ess-a-Bagel:

"There are precious few classic mom-and-pop bagel bakeries left in Manhattan by now, Midtown Manhattan even less so; this makes the Wilpon family's ongoing contribution to the culture more important than ever. A larger-than-life presence on the East Side since the 1970s, you'll now find them in three locations, including one over by Penn Station, and at first glance, these look like so many oversized, underwhelming, latter-day New York bagels, except that these happen to be the finest of their type, still made with far more care than most. One with a schmear will put most people under the table, but what a way to go. A staple of many a New York pandemic coping strategy."

Find the full ranking here.

Patch reporter Anna Quinn contributed.