A Bay Area transplant devastated by H&H Bagels closing in 2011 decided to make his own instead. After trying local bagels and realizing New York water wasn't the secret, he became obsessed with cracking the recipe.
I had moved to the Bay Area in 2010, and I was really sad about the lack of good bagels here. I thought they were all terrible. I'm like, I'm just not going to bother eating them. I'll wait. My my family is all still back in New Jersey, so I'm like, I'll just go eat bagels when I visit home, and that's fine. And then in 2011, I got the horrible news that my very very favorite bagel shop in Manhattan. had been shut down for tax fraud, and that was H&H Bagels, the original H&H Bagels. Um, I was so devastated that my very favorite bagel was now no longer going to exist that I thought maybe I could figure out how to make it, because there had been a couple bagel pop-ups in the Bay Area. And I, you know, I went to one and it was like, well, this is a, this is a decent bagel. So to me, I'm like, well, that means it's possible. If they made a decent bagel, it wasn't like My dream bagel, but it was totally respectable. That means that the whole thing about it's the water is just a myth. If you can make a good bagel, a decent bagel with our local water, I said, okay, well, let me try. So it just became this obsessive new hobby.
