I’m not going to lie. This week I had planned on doing something a little blingy-er and less biased, you know, like fruity cocktails. Unfortunately, I got sick and far too sniffly to put on a mini-skirt for the sake of my art. So, sorry, you’re going to have to deal with a somewhat unprecedented and fever-fueled rant instead. On bagels.
Let’s just start out by saying Oxford, and really, the whole of the United Kingdom does not have a ‘best’ bagel. On my first grocery trip in Oxford my elder English sister asked if I wanted bagels, and held up a plastic bag filled with deflated, raisin-y, something-or-others. If you believe that bagels come wrapped in plastic, I say put the bag down and step away slowly.
Oh, G&D’s. Ice cream and bagels: they’re strange bedfellows, and this is from a girl who used to eat in a cafe called the ‘Sea Cliff Coffee and Sushi Company.’ Still, these after thoughts are really the only ‘bagels’ being readily offered, and thus we shall now dissect the menu.
Given that it consists of ‘bagel sandwiches’ involving deli meats and jam, not necessarily in the same sammie, I think it’s safe to say that bagels here are just round pieces of white bread. And, apologies to both G and D, but most of the time they’re stale. The cream cheese is Philly, a good choice but hardly impressive, and they only have three varieties of bagel. There is so much more to life than that. I have even seen green, pink and blue bagels so dyed for respective holiday and sports’ occasions. Come on!
The pizza bagels, seemingly perfect hangover food (also the food most often made by pubescents in every Home Economics class), were flavorless. The breakfast bagels, I assume because there is no real oven in the establishment, use poached eggs, not fried. We no like.
G&D’s make good salads, but beyond finding this irrelevant, given the nature of the establishment, it’s also kind of upsetting, no?
