Home of The Bagel Bakery - Pacific Grove Has Lox of Love

Years ago, in the ebb of the hippie tide, The Bagel Bakery hung its shingle in Pacific Grove and introduced us to bagels.    New Yorkers had long since been noshing bagels, but we granola-ites in California took notice of this ethnic bakery and really dug it.  At the time, everyone was growing sprouts in jars, making their own cheese and growing coleus and spider plants in hand-thrown pots.  We had packing-crate furniture and wine barrels sawed in half for tables.  Right on.

Birkenstock sandals, a leather jacket with fringes on the sleeves, embroidery-decorated jeans and yogurt makers had been on the scene for a while.  Definitely, hair was long and free flowing.  If you knew about the Bagel Bakery, you got bagels there nearly every day.  Bagels could be toasted, covered in herbed cream cheese, date nut cream cheese or honey butter. Kuppermans Delight was a bagel piled with alfalfa sprouts, cream cheese, tomato and a bit of onion.  The bagels were large, had a little bit of doughiness, a bit of crisp crust, an al dente quality that good honest fresh bread has. The bagels available in supermarkets now are tasteless and have a weaker character in comparison.

Bagel Bakery bagels have been a staple menu item at lunch and breakfast potlucks and buffets at businesses around town for four decades now.  Going to the beach in the morning?  Go by one of the Bakeries and grab a half dozen and various cream cheese spreads to share with your friends.  They're good for hikes at Pt Lobos or to take down to Big Sur for a walk at Andrew Molera State Park or a few dozen other places.  They hold up well in conditions like that, much better than muffins or rolls which get squishy or crumbly.  No, the lowly BB bagel is a road-tested local staple, proven long since.

Back in the day Bakery cooks wore floppy cook's hats - a modified beret - over dreadlocks or long braids.  The Grateful Dead played on the stereo speakers, or the Who.  Pink Floyd, too.  Bagels were bagged fresh out of the ovens, piping hot.  The bakery had figured out how to bake their product in the true, classic style using unbleached flours and they were encrusted with sesame seeds, toasted bits of onion or poppy seeds.  Most importantly, the bagels were produced with a key step:  Floating the rising yeast in a salt-water bath, actually a sort of water-borne float trip for the dough circles before they got to the oven for baking.  The bakery cranked out hundreds of dozens of bagels every day, and before long they had opened up several other branches all over the area.

Like almost all cafes and restaurants of the day, the interior of the bakery was made of unfinished pine with rounded corners and hand-lettered signs.  Everything was as hand-made as possible; it was the ethic of the times.  Espresso machines were very rare as were tattoos, Chinese manufacturing and plastics.  Farmers Brothers brewed coffee was still the thing, although tea was making a strong inroad, especially chamomile.    

Things have changed, of course.  Hippies became yuppies and went corporate, lapping up lattes.  The bakeries were sold and are now a modified version of what they originally were, although some of the favorites remain on the menu.  They are tasty, definitely, but the organic energy that was the basis for the bakeries' success has morphed into a local deli atmosphere, which is fine.

So today, I went down memory lane heading straight for the Bakery.  My car was struggling and needed repair.  Lucky for me, the repair garage is just uphill from the strip mall on Forest Avenue where the bakery lives now.  (There are about five other locations including Carmel, Monterey and Salinas.)  With a little time to kill,  I walked in and ordered a still-warm sesame seed bagel slathered in cream cheese, piled with thinly sliced tomatoes and red onion and then a few tender sheets of lox.  Bless you, broken car, for giving me an opportunity to relax and savor bagel-ness once again.  

Aromas do trigger vivid memories, and so it is with the fragrance of bagels coming to life in the ovens.  At least the flavor and aroma is still the same even if the tie-dyed shirts and headbands have long since faded away.