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Food guide

How to find a good bagel

A real bagel is boiled before it is baked, and that single step is what produces the dense chew and the glossy, slightly blistered crust. Almost everything sold as a bagel in America is steamed or simply baked, which produces a soft round bread roll with a hole in it.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Boiled, and they will say so — Shops that boil advertise it. The crust should be shiny and slightly wrinkled, with small blisters.
  • Dense enough to have weight — A good bagel feels heavy for its size. If it is light and airy it was not boiled.
  • A chew that resists — You should have to work slightly. Soft, fluffy bagels are a different product.
  • Baked that morning, sold out by afternoon — Bagels are at their best within a few hours. A shop with a full case at 4pm is not turning over.
  • Not toasted by default — At a good bagel place, toasting a fresh bagel is mildly frowned upon — and that attitude is a signal.

What to order

  • Plain or sesame, first visit — Nothing to hide behind. Judge the bagel itself.
  • Everything — The benchmark for whether their seasoning is made or bought.
  • Lox and schmear — Cream cheese, cured salmon, tomato, red onion, capers. The full construction.
  • Whitefish salad — The deli test, and better than it sounds.
  • Before 10am — Genuinely a different product than the same bagel at 3pm.

Where to find bagels

Open listings put 5,431 bagel shops across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 217 Chicago, IL 40 Philadelphia, PA 38 Las Vegas, NV 31 Portland, OR 30 San Francisco, CA 29 Los Angeles, CA 29 Denver, CO 26 Seattle, WA 25 San Diego, CA 25 Austin, TX 23 Pittsburgh, PA 21

Campuses with the most within a mile

Baruch 46 CUNY Graduate Center 44 Touro University 42 The New School 42 FIT 42 NYU 38 Hunter 28 BMCC 24 Pace University 23 John Jay 18

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Bagel searches read for boiled and hand-rolled language, and weight reviews describing crust and chew far above overall rating — because a bagel shop's rating is heavily influenced by coffee and speed, neither of which is the bagel.

Find bagels near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

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