THE GREAT CALIFORNIA BAGEL MARKETING MACHER
Noah Alper: The Man Who’s Not-So-Great Unboiled Bagels Started Bagel Mania
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
Oct. 19, 2023
Note: This was written before the war between Israel and Hamas began – in a more “frivolous” moment. In thinking about whether or not I should publish this piece, I concluded that by explaining the context in which it was first written; and also to allow us all to have a few moments of lightness, I’ve concluded that I’d – and hopefully you -- prefer the following:
Noah Alper didn’t make good bagels. But man, that self-named “business mensch” was a helluva marketer. The “serial entrepreneur” (also by his own sobriquet) knew what he was doing when he started Noah’s Bagels in 1989 – thus opening California bagel culture. By doing so, he ruined real bagel ethos. But it was nearly a generation later when the Bay Area started to become really hip to bagels. It has resulted in Bagel Mania, and Bagel Wars and we’re all the better for it. Thanks to Noah.
So, what does today’s column have to do with wine and wine media relations? Nothing. Save for the fact that it’s really about marketing, which is the older sibling to public relations.
The situation is, I’ve been waiting almost 35 years – since Alper opened his stores, first on College Avenue on the Oakland-Berkeley line – to set the record straight about bagels. Alper was a wonderful guy. I know this having visited his bagel-making plant all those years ago for a piece I wrote on him and his boil-less bagels.
Traditionally and authentically bagels for Millenia have been boiled before baking. Alper, for various business decisions, figured out a shortcut, bypassing the crucial boiling step, to turn out thousands and thousands of decent bagels.
The main thing about Noah’s product, was that they were soft and not traditionally dense and chewy. Alper’s reasoning I thought, and likely queried him, was to appeal to a much wider California sensibility. A sensibility at the time, that was averse to hard-crusted, chewable, European-style bread. Alper knew his constituency. He realized that most of his customers hadn’t really experienced “real” bagels, save for those of us -- mainly in Berkeley in those days – dyspeptic bagel-maven New York Jews, who grew up with the holy-less bagel.
I was/am one of those. I can speak from experience and with authority as a bagel genius, I was one of those who railed against Noah’s bagels, but ate them anyway. (But don’t tell anyone because my reputation is on the line. Know what I’m sayin’?) I ate them because there was nothing else around, except for San Francisco’s House of Bagels, which held down the fort until us East Coasters began arriving here in the ‘70s, which were still the ‘60s.
Things though, began changing about the end of the first decade of the fin de siècle when like manna, bagels started raining down on us from all over the Bay Area. A good hard (bagel) rain was beginning to fall. Suddenly, dense, chewy, boiled, good bagels started spawning like Eastern European hard rolls, sans holes. They were good; some. They were using heirloom or special flours. Blueberry things began disappearing, usurped by “everything” bagels as if to make up for lost time. You can now have it all, all at once. But at a price. Three and $4 bagels are de rigueur. My grandma would roll over in her grave.
But if she tasted Ethel’s Bagels – made in of all places, Petaluma (which used to be the country’s egg capital, farmed by a lot of Jewish farmers). To my palate and standards – Ethel’s has been the best bagel in the Bay Area for about four years now. I used to think Baron’s bagels of Berkeley – found only at Saul’s Jewish deli there, were the best. But new ownership at one of the few such meccas left in the Bay Area, has a new owner; and I haven’t had his inhouse bagel yet.
I can almost forgive San Francisco’s myriad bagel makers of late for offering ham/bacon/sausage (which I love, but not on a bagel). My other grandma would have died from this trend. But that’s but a quibble (nay, a complaint), but I’m grateful that bagels have reached critical mass here.
One other thing I’d like to kvetch (please pronounce as one syllable) about as regards to Mr. Alper, who had the kup and business acumen to sell to Panera, that other purveyor of ersatz bread.
He had the foresight and temerity to call the cream cheeses with which he festooned his creations – schmears.
Where I come from and in the olden days, it was normal (gevalt) practice, when ordering a bagel and cream cheese, that said item would arrive piled at least an inch-and-a-half high with artery-clogging Philly cream cheese. In the age of enlightenment, around the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, folks would tell the deliman to only put a “schmear” on it; a smear; a little dab will do you.
But schmear has gotten into the vernacular and there’s nothing I can do about it. I suppose I should be grateful that people are using Yiddishisms as though they’ve been saying it all their lives.
So, a big geschrei to Noah Alper. What a marketing man. Bagels forever!