Round and Round

In the last days of the ‘70s, when performance art was a growth industry and punk-rock was in flower, I used to go on what I called “bagel walks,” long strolls through Los Angeles, less inspired by art than by gluttony, though I never would have admitted it then. (That year, I heated my pocket change each night until it glowed cherry-red, then embalmed the coins in a big block of wax. I also had a little thing for Wizard American Beauty-scented air freshener, but that’s a different story.)

I’d take a bus to someplace downtown or in the Valley, usually ditching an art-history class on a Wednesday afternoon, and walk along a route I’d plotted out the evening before. At each bakery or delicatessen I passed, I’d stop in and order a single water bagel by pointing--I didn’t allow myself to speak. At the end of the day, I’d stagger home with an armload of bagels, each marked with price and place of origin, and affix them to a giant, crude map of Los Angeles that covered half of my living room floor.

The theory was-- my theory was--that bagels would provide insights into the texture of L.A.’s Jewish diaspora that years of temple brotherhood meetings could not. I thought glossy, tasteless Beverly Drive bagels would be easily discernible from the rough, honest bagels of Pico-Robertson, that Fairfax bagels would be somehow more haimish than those from Encino. Know how a man bakes, and you . . . well, you know what kind of bagel he eats.

I’d been reading altogether too many French poststructuralists.

But the basic problem was that half the places in town sold what was substantially the same bagel: a fat, semi-gloss jobby with a dense center, a small center-hole and a mildly sweet aftertaste; a brittle, crisp crust that gave way to a skin chewy as good beef jerky; a deep golden-brown color that lightened to a pale tan at the edge. This bagel, which the delis bought wholesale from Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, was pretty good, but it blew my theories all to heck. What would Levi-Strauss have been able to puzzle out if the Yanomamo had survived on Mr. Salty and takeout from Burger King?

When I ate bagels back then, I usually took a number at the crowded Beverlywood Bakery, then scooted next door to Charlie’s for homemade cream cheese--by far the city’s best--and to Gordon’s for lox, getting back to Beverlywood just in time for some (OK) bagels and half a dozen awesome onion-cheese bialys. Or I’d stop at Back East Bialy & Bagel Factory for bagels and beautiful, crunchy garlic bialys that could perfume a bus in less than a minute. Or I’d skulk into I & Joy and get a couple of onion bagels for the road. They were artisanal bagels. They were fine.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, I discovered that my route to work took me past the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery mothership west of downtown, a big hangar of a bakery in a multiethnic neighborhood where you’d expect to find halo halo and pupusas but not lox, bo pho but not bagels. And you can get it retail. I always have the water bagel crusted with poppy seeds and stinging bits of coarse salt.

The bagels are fresh in the mornings, sometimes still hot from the oven, fragrantly sweet, soft without being bready, ready to ripen into the moist, day-old chewiness most people associate with their morning bagel.

Early in the morning, you can stop by, watch the women from the secretarial school down the street do stretching exercises, and drink a cup of freshly brewed Yuban from pots the bakery keeps going. Downtown attorney-types march up to the glass counter and grab a dozen for the boys in the office; locals get a couple to go, neatly buzz-cut in two, ready to schmear with cream cheese. Sometimes you can tell just by looking who’s going to ask for an oat-bran bagel (which is better than it sounds), or a blueberry bagel, or a highly antisocial bagel sticky with odoriferous bits of caramelized garlic.

The oat-bran fans have the wild look in their eye you might expect from people still following last year’s health fad. Perhaps they’re just killing time until the rice bran bagels come out.

* Back East Bialy & Bagel Bakery, 8804 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 276-1531.

* Beverlywood Bakery, 9128 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 550-9842.

* Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, 2217 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 413-4114.