The dining room may look like an Einstein’s that time forgot, but the soul of a New York deli lurks in the counter's many bagel baskets. Bagel Oasis has been here since 1988, boiling and baking and earning fierce love that deserves to transcend the neighborhood. At their best, bagels are crackly on the outside, soft and dense within. (The shop makes a sourdough bagel, a separate creature from its mainstay varieties, and even bialys.) A staggering list of sandwich options includes fancy omelets, deli classics, and stacks of lox. The relatively small “egg on a bagel” menu will reward you with a pitch-perfect BEC sandwich.

Sea Wolf Bakers, one of the town’s most esteemed breadmakers, opened a meditative bakery in Montlake, a bagel-baking kin to their original spot on Stone Way. Oxbow fills its baskets with eight types of bagels, including salt, cinnamon raisin, poppyseed, and a restrained everything flavor where fennel seeds dominate the conversation. The kitchen even makes a pumpernickel, the delightfully underrated curmudgeon of bagel flavors. The doughy erudition that defines Sea Wolf also defines these bagels. A bit of sourdough helps achieve that elusive “soft, but not bready” texture. Sturdy exteriors crunch rather than crackle. Eight spreads range between peanut butter and various cream cheeses, including a warming version with Calabrian chilies.

Josh Grunig has boiled and baked a neighborhood anchor inside a tidy, semi-suburban Pinehurst strip mall. Zylberschtein’s is a sort of deli-bakery hybrid, serving croissants and chopped liver on rye—and lots and lots of bagels. They’re rolled by hand (thus the varied shapes) with glossy, dark surfaces and chewy innards. The kitchen has expanded beyond its original repertoire of the classics, adding cinnamon raisin, garlic, onion, pumpernickel, jalapeño, and (trend alert) cacio e pepe to the lineup. Most sandwiches here are of the non-bagel variety, but the kitchen has staples like lox, whitefish, and egg-and-cheese at the ready. 

Bagels became such a thing at the former Porkchop and Co. brunch destination that owners Paul Osher and Raquel Zamora changed the name and just…went with it. The restaurant still operates as a (busy) counter-service spot, dispensing darker-hued bagels in flavors like za’atar or togarashi or cherry-poppy, not to mention the classics (everything bagels make up about 50 percent of the kitchen’s bagel output). The menu of add-ons is ample—huckleberry or black truffle cream cheese, everything chili crisp, lox. But a lineup of 10 bagel sandwiches does the heavy lifting for you; combos like roast pork loin with avocado, cucumber, hummus, and sumac onions make it clear, this place used to be a full-on restaurant. In 2024, an outpost (Little Rachel's) opened inside the Elliott Bay Brewing's Lake City location.

The historical Carlton Ave Grocery space got a little less sweet when Deep Sea Sugar and Salt moved its cakes a half-mile away, but no less tasty. Chef Marisa Figueroa and partner Randi Ludwig took over the space in 2023, naming it after their one-time White Center restaurant, and filling the case with the bagels they’d been making as a popup under the name Bean’s Bagels. A sparse selection of groceries and handful of grab-and-go salads give it the feel of a mid-range lunch stop, which belies the impressively good bagels. Large, round, well-formed, and thickly coated with toppings, these bagels veer on the softer side, which makes them a good candidate for toasting. The only downside is ordering with a schmear nets a hefty slather of sub-standard cream cheese—if you don’t consider it sacrilege, try the house-made cultured butter instead.

Andrew Rubinstein left the eponymous bagelry he founded with Ethan Stowell in 2023 and we have been waiting impatiently for his new spot to open since—which it did in early January. It not only lives up to our hopes, but exceeds even the early high-standard of its predecessor. Crisp exteriors, mottled with tiny blisters give way to a lightly chewy interior. Hey Bagel’s choice to forgo toasting and slicing in-store in favor of focusing on baking fresh throughout the day sent some Seattleites into a tizzy. But having eaten one ripped-and-dipped in my car and a second sliced-and-spread when I got home 20 minutes later (it was still warm), no complaints here. Additional specimens reheated using the instructions on the bag? Also great. And while the bagels are (at minimum) vying for the best in town, I’m quite certain nobody else is doing a bialy at this level; the rotating flavors include traditional poppyseed with onion and creative options like cheddar with pickled jalapeños.

It’s no secret that we’ve loved this shop since its itinerant delivery days: We mourned when it left town, and celebrated its return. Its wild youth behind it, Mt. Bagel is settled into its location, tucked into the slope between Capitol Hill, Montlake, and Madison Valley. Though it does serve coffee, it’s very much a bakery and not a café, so, like Hey Bagel, it doesn’t toast or slice bagels. The gently crackly crust gives way to a fluffy, soft interior. While the shop’s growing pains mean they don’t quite live up to the standard it set in those early days, they maintain an excellent bagel and any flaws disappear under a layer of their powerful (and powerfully good) scallion cream cheese.