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, 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.

Few things capture the essence of Pike/Pine better than a Jewish deli where every last brisket sandwich and black-and-white cookie is plant-based. Since bagels are classically vegan, they fit right in, too. This Portland-founded chainlet has a dedicated bagel recipe, baked for them by the folks at Zylberschtein’s. Eight varieties are ready to be schmeared with house-whipped cream cheese, actually made from plant starches and refined coconut oil (aka no nuts). The flavor and texture can pass muster, even with omnivores. Bagel sandwich options include plant-free versions of (carrot) lox, steak and eggs, and a BEC that does a reasonable job harnessing the basic charms of a NYC bodega.

Thanks to bagel aficionados Melissa Santos and Sean Keeley for shining a light on the daily bagels at the grocer formerly known as Little Lago. Even under the new name, it remains a great Italian-leaning market that also dispatches pizza, pastries, and gelato. Are the bagels an outlier? Yes. Are they golden on the outside, bubbled with those tiny blisters? Also, yes. Clearly baker and co-owner Chaney Steinway knows her way around gluten. Each bite crackles like a potato chip; insides are softer than the fluffiest dinner roll. Steinway makes a few flavors a day, including most of the basics, plus a salt and pepper version that’s a nice swerve on the cacio e pepe bagel trend.

Sea Wolf Bakers, one of the town’s most esteemed breadmakers, has 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 include peanut butter and various cream cheeses, including a warming version with Calabrian chilies.

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.

Monica Dimas’s Capitol Hill walk-up serves nine types of bagels, plus some classic sandwiches centered on lox or avocado or whitefish salad. But this is the house the BEC built. It’s the thick pillow of egg and the marigold-yellow cheddar that stretches into melty strings that has people lining up on Madison in pajama pants on weekend mornings and jockeying for a yellow stool in the world’s tiniest open-face dining room. A new location in the University District has those same soft, chewy bagels, the same lines, and four proper walls (but no seating area).

Josh Grunig has boiled and baked a neighborhood anchor inside a tidy, semi-suburban Pinehurst strip mall. Zylberschein’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, jalapeno, 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 can sell out fast, but a bagel delivery club born during the 2020 shutdown is still going strong.