I know what you're all thinking: "For once he reviews something close to Hopkins! Finally I'll have grounds to disagree with his ridiculous opinions!" Just what the doctor ordered. Anyway, this place is right on St. Paul, right near Eddie's, and a decent alternative to Subway. It's nothing special. It deviates in the usual way from what a bagel should be, it deviates in the usual way from what a pizza should be, and the coffee is too weakly brewed to be acidic when old, and so just gets a bit sour and wholly disappointing. Terrace does a better job with java than this place.
If you are a bagel eater from California, you will like this place. Among the kinds of bagels that they serve are the following: cinnamon sugar, cranberry apple, garden vegetable, Old Bay (a new one to me), cinnamon apple and even chocolate chip. This sort of thing shouldn't happen to a bagel. I also have no confidence at all, none, that these bagels are appropriately boiled along with being baked. It's a key part of the process, and not doing it is simply idiotic.
There are salt, onion and everything bagels, along with other things that are decent, but the quality of bagels and the attention to detail are lacking. If these bagels are fresh, then I'm something unlikely and comical.
There is an offer on the menu to pre-order bagels one day in advance so that you can pick them up fresh and hot -- this is a good idea, provided you have a large breakfast to host that you want to cater cheaply and decently. Just don't use their coffee.
I had a "Keys to the Lox" on an onion bagel. This involves lox, cream cheese, onions and capers. The flavors were insufficient. There weren't enough capers to have an actual salty presence, and there weren't enough onions to provide proper tang.
The cream cheese was there, all too much so, overwhelming the salmon, which, though tasty as all lox is, lacked smokiness. That could have been repaired by proper briny flavors in the onions and the capers, but it was not to be. Also, whoever wrote this menu forgot that red onions should be used, and that tomato should be available.
There are a bunch of special sandwiches, some labeled on the board as ??"Sam-wiches', a transgression that the kitsch-squad of the Baltimore police department is looking into.
There are other sandwiches with other equally irritating names. One of them is called, I kid you not, "George Dubya." It pains me to type a reference to that man. When he was first installed -- I would never use the word elected in reference to November 2000, never -- there was a notion kicked around that liberals might avoid the use of the letter W until he left office.
Of course, that's a little difficult, and it never caught on, but it was tempting. The offensively-named sandwich has turkey, ham, lettuce, tomatoes, Swiss cheese and ranch dressing. Most of the interestingly named sandwiches have comparably boring contents, and prices that match the names rather than the ingredients.
They have pizza. I didn't eat it, and I'm not going to. I saw one sitting in the plastic display case on the left of the photo -- the crust was uninspired, the cheese almost shiny. Sam's actually brags about using real cheese, as if this is some novel idea. On top of that, they boast that their pizza is made in their store. That is true everywhere.
In Lolita, Humbert Humbert complains of Lolita's need to stop everywhere that has a sign advertising ??"ice cold drinks' even though every drink everywhere is ice cold. When I eat a bagel, and drink a cup of coffee, being reminded of that book is not the greatest way to get me to come back.
