What is Criticism for?
On Thursday, we learned the devastating news: Absolute Bagels had closed. Suddenly and, apparently, for good.
A Saturday morning trip up to the bagel shop on the Upper West Side has been a weekly ritual for Kin since we moved here. He'd buy a dozen bagels – a couple for Saturday morning, the rest to freeze for the week. (You can read his rather poignant thoughts about Absolute – the trek, the bagels, the staff, its regulars – on his blog.) These were, he and I agreed, our favorite bagels – better than Ess-a-Bagel, where the owner of Absolute got his start. These were our ur bagel: perfect size, perfect chew, perfect crust.
We weren't alone in this assessment. Absolute Bagels consistently made "the best of" lists in the city – the best bagels according to Eater, The Infatuation, and The New York Times, for example – despite its very long lines, often full of frustrated tourists and Columbia students who had no idea what to order and who hadn't brought cash.
The place was dingy, no doubt – you can overlook these things when the food is good and the staff know your order. Still, the list of health code violations that prompted the city to shut the shop down on the spot were pretty shocking. That said, we have half a dozen left in the freezer, and I thawed one out for my breakfast yesterday, knowing full well that they'd been made in the company of rats and roaches. (As Tom Scocca put it, "the bagels were hot and they kept moving; it wasn't as if they had much chance to sit around absorbing bad influences from their environment.")
When Kin and I first came here for my Spencer Fellowship at the Columbia J-School back in 2017, we initially stayed in an AirBnB on West 103rd – its owner extolled the virtues of Manhattan Valley and insisted that it's much better to live in New York than to be a tourist. You know where to go and what to avoid. "Where to go," he insisted, was the bagel shop on 108th and Broadway – "the best in the city." My identity as a New Yorker is bound up in these memories, and I felt a little defensive, I admit – both of Absolute Bagels and my own bagel preferences – when various online commenters questioned, "how can you say a place has the best bagels when it was so obviously so bad."
I did say that, and yikes, maybe I still would, despite knowing better.
How I feel versus what I think and what I know – sort of like chit-chatting with the latest version of ChatGPT and leaning into that feeling of futurity, while knowing full well that computing technologies are built on extractive labor and data practices and every word that's spat back onto your screen is hastening the destruction of the planet.
And I mean, I get it! I ate my final Absolute bagel on Sunday morning, slathering it with Skippy (I’m a heathen) and gobbling it down, swallowing it along with just a few ghastly images of those health code violations.
