Boston might have a better baseball team than New York; it might have better clam chowder and a better collection of universities, too. But bagels? New York has that one in the bag.
Or at least that’s what I thought until I took my first bite of a cinnamon-raisin “T-Rex” at Bagelsaurus, the Porter Square home to what Serious Eats calls “Boston’s Best Bagels.”
Being a purebred New Yorker, when I was approached to write about a bagel place near Harvard with an “awesome” smoked salmon sandwich, I had no choice but to let out a patronizing chuckle (oh, cute, you guys make bagels, too), and then agree to write the piece (damn, there’s a dearth of bagels in my life).
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So, I woke up early on a Friday and men- tally prepared myself to join FM Multimedia Executive Alana M. Steinberg for an excur-sion to bakery and café Bagelsaurus, to eat what I was sure would be a series of oversized, gimmicky breakfast sandwiches made by a bunch of Bostonian Philistines.
Boy, was I wrong.
Working toward the goal of creating “the best bagels in Boston and the world, [making] everything from scratch, [and taking] no short-cuts,” Bagelsaurus’s owner, Mary Ting Hyatt, is an artisan of the highest order. And her breakfast sandwiches, made from as many locally-sourced and all-natural ingredients as possible, are equal parts creative and simple.
Eating them, you can’t help but sympa- thize with the sensation a 10-year-old experiences when looking at a Jackson Pollack painting. “I could have done that,” you think, staring at the simple presentation. Well, you (I) didn’t. And you (I) couldn’t have.
But the simplistic nature of Hyatt’s sandwiches makes perfect sense. After all, she cares “first and foremost” about making food that is “super-delicious.” And so, it doesn’t really matter that her bagels look cool (they do) or that she uses buzzwordy ingredients (honey rosemary?). What matters to Hyatt— and what matters to me, when I eat a bagel— is that, after you leave the restaurant, as one diner next to me put it, you “want to pretend like [you’re] still eating that bagel.”
I’ve been playing make-believe since I left. As for the ambiance, Bagelsaurus feels likea place you’d see in HBO’s “Girls.” Armed with simple syrup and hot sauce, pineapple tarts and cauliflower soup, bagels and a high price tag ($2.50 a piece), Bagelsaurus makes you feel like you’re in Brooklyn without having to embody the Brooklyn hipster cliché. It’s the kind of café that has you wondering whether all of the employees are instructed to wear hoodies or if they just happen to share the exact same sense of style.
But the vibe is besides the point; Bagelsaurus is about food. And the sandwiches are truly exceptional. The aforementioned T-Rex, which consists of a bagel of your choosing topped with housemade almond butter, bananas, and bacon, is the kind of breakfast that would have Elvis wishing he had lived through the hipster food boom. The egg and smoked salmon sandwiches were also delectable, even though after eating the T-Rex, I was ready to accept a world of bagels without cream cheese.
“It’s a pretty limited sandwich menu,” Hyatt explained. “But we just wanted to nail all of them.”
Mission accomplished.
