A Bagel Central bagel is a different kind of bagel

And Bangor likes it that way, thank you very much

A few years back, I met a guy for an interview for a story I planned to write. We chose to meet at my preferred downtown Bangor spot for a friendly chat with a stranger - the much-loved, always-bustling breakfast and lunch cafe Bagel Central.

This person had recently relocated to Maine from New York City, and as we waited in line to order, he told me how excited he was that there was a bagel place not far from his new home. Out of all the things he missed from his former life in the city, an NYC bagel topped the list. I told him to wait until he got his meal to form an opinion.

He took a big bite of his bagel with cream cheese, and then fixed a puzzled look at me.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It’s a bagel,” I replied. “A Bagel Central bagel. They are… different from New York bagels. They’re pretty tasty though, right?”

The newly minted Mainer told me in no uncertain terms that the food before him was not a bagel. I suggested he might consider expanding his definition of a bagel. He told me he would do no such thing. I said that I respect strong opinions (I have plenty of them myself) but that he’d meet strong resistance if he went around trashing things that his new neighbors in this part of the world love.

In the ensuing years, that exchange always stuck with me. In part because it was such a clear-cut example of a Mainer getting their hackles up when somebody from away tries to put down our way of life. It’s equal parts righteous indignation and defensiveness, like when a well-heeled tourist looks at a gas station employee on a smoke break with thinly-veiled disdain, and the employee tells her to take a picture, it’ll last longer. It pisses us off when people make assumptions, or act like we’re yokels - especially when they’re the ones that paid way too much for a hotel room or a home and chose to come here.

It also stuck with me because, well, my lunch companion wasn’t completely wrong. By most generally agreed-upon standards for bagel-ness, Bagel Central bagels aren’t really bagels, in the traditional sense. Aside from being round and having a hole in the middle, it bears little resemblance to the chewy, boiled NYC bagel, or the dense, wood-fired Montreal bagel.

Bagel Central bagels are delicious, though – round, pillowy, carb-o-licious treats, with a smooth exterior and fluffy, yeasty interior. You eat them thickly plastered with cream cheese or butter, or as a breakfast sandwich. My usual order is a sesame water bagel with green olive cream cheese, but if it’s on special, I’ll get the Hungarian cream cheese, studded with feta cheese and swirled with paprika. It’s among my favorite forms of comfort food - it reminds me of Sunday brunches, of long working lunches, of old friends and acquaintances, waved to across a crowded dining room. Bagel Central is the crossroads of Bangor, and sitting at a communal table and tucking into a bagel is a powerful, palpable feeling of home.

Why then, is the Bagel Central bagel so unlike the ones in New York and Montreal - or, for that matter, the ones at Dunkin’ Donuts or Hannaford? What makes it so unique? Why is it, for lack of a better term, that way?

It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. The story begins in 1978, a few years after Richard Zabot and his wife Toby relocated from New York City to Maine. According to former Bagel Central owner Sonya Eldridge, the Zabots lived in the Hancock County town of Sorrento, in a rambling old sea captain’s home that they spent many years fixing up. The Zabots began attending Beth Abraham, the Orthodox synagogue in Bangor, and were quickly welcomed into Bangor’s close-knit Jewish community.

The Zabots, both talented home bakers, were inspired to start a small Jewish bakery by a fellow congregant at Beth Abraham, local property developer Abraham Shapiro, who was preparing to sell the Bangor House Hotel to another developer. Shapiro gave the Zabots the remaining contents of the Bangor House’s kitchen, and in 1978, the couple began selling bagels out of 130 Hammond St., the street-level storefront that is now home to Novio’s Restaurant.

A clipping from a 1988 New York Times article profiling what was then known as The Bagel Shop.

The Zabots moved their bakery from location to location - sometimes due to Bangor’s draconian zoning laws, and sometimes due to tragedy, as when a 1983 fire destroyed their space at 73 Central St. By the mid-1980s, it was at 1 Main St., a place lovingly remembered for its dingy, secondhand fixtures and permanent aroma of garlic and cigarettes (you had to be there). It wouldn’t move to 33 Central St. until 2000, a spacious, light-filled, tidy space where it’s been comfortably located since.

Wherever their address was, Richard Zabot - who moved back to New York in the late 1990s and died a few years ago - became a fixture of downtown Bangor, selling Jewish and Eastern European baked goods and deli treats like knishes, blintzes, challah, borscht, matzo ball soup, pastrami sandwiches and, of course, bagels. For many decades, it was the only kosher eatery in Maine, and was supported not just by Jewish customers in the Bangor region, but also by anyone lured in by the aroma of baking bread and then won over by the food. Though Bagel Central ceased to keep a kosher kitchen in 2008 - now you can have bacon and cheese on a sandwich - many of the items on the menu remain exactly the same as they were 48 years ago.

For a place that was proudly, authentically Jewish, its bagels - arguably the most well-known and beloved Jewish food in America - weren’t anything like the New York City-style bagels you’d expect them to make, given that the Zabots moved here from New York.

“It was a pretty common occurrence that somebody with a New York accent would come in and say something like ‘You call this a bagel?’” said Eldridge, who started working at Bagel Central in 1982, bought it from Zabot in 2000 and then sold it to current owner Scott Bryson in 2019.

“Where do you see anything about us making NYC bagels?” Bryson said. “We never have and we have never claimed to. I focus on this place and on making a product that people love. That’s all I care about. And besides, when we used to ship our bagels, 8 out of 10 mail order customers were from New York and New Jersey.”

The morning bagel rush at Bagel Central.

Bryson is understandably reluctant to share specific details about the bagel recipe, and I’d surely never ask for it - I’d never ruin a secret like that. That said, he did confirm that Bagel Central bagels are indeed boiled before being baked - not in a big kettle boiler, as you might expect, but in a deep fryer filled with water instead of oil, as Richard Zabot used when he first started making bagels in 1978.

Bryson said that despite his more than 30 years working at Bagel Central and having the original handwritten recipe for the bagel on hand, he’s still not exactly sure why the bagels are the way they are. He has a hunch, however, that it’s got something to do with the fact that the Zabots made do with what they had, and made some of it up as they went along. The strudel recipe belonged to Richard Zabot’s Russian grandmother, and the cheese blintzes came from Toby Zabot’s family. The bagels? Who knows.

“They started out in this tiny, tiny kitchen, with cobbled together equipment. They were figuring it out,” Bryson said. “It was his bagel recipe, and that was that. I couldn’t tell you why. That’s just the way it is.”

Out-of-towners that pooh-pooh the Bagel Central bagel are missing an important truth about how food changes as the people that make it move from place to place. That’s especially true in the U.S., where every foodway under the sun has found a home and a new life, and has been tweaked and adapted depending on the circumstances its makers have found themselves in.

Pizza - once a simple street food made in southern Italy - now has infinite variations, and each kind has its devotees. A Chicago hot dog is different from a New York hot dog, and those are different from a Maine red hot dog - and not just because in Maine we won’t arrest you if you put ketchup on it. White people taco night is not authentic compared to the vast and complex cuisine of Mexico and its diaspora, and General Tso’s Chicken is not a wholly accurate representation of centuries of refinement in Chinese cooking. Does it taste good? Does it make you feel loved? Does it fill your belly, whether you have never wanted for anything, or you have felt the sting of hunger on far too many nights? Mission accomplished.

“We have people that have been coming here for almost 50 years, through all these changes,” Bryson said. “They’re not coming here because they want something you can get somewhere else. They’re coming here because they want what we make. They’re coming here because of this community, and the people. Why would we change something people love?”