This past Saturday, before heading to the Indigenous protest of the Land Run Monument in Bricktown, I decided to stop for breakfast at the recently renovated and newly reopened Old School Bagel Café, 10946 N. May Ave., mostly because they’re the best joint around town to get good bagels with plenty of lox and cream cheese on them.
You see, when I was a small child, my father was a cop in Houston, Texas. When he was off-duty, he’d sometimes act as security for a local synagogue that had been getting threats from random anti-Semitic types. They’d usually let my dad bring home leftover bagels with lox, cream cheese and so on; I would hope and pray he’d grab me a full one with onions, tomatoes and capers.
Since then, lox and cream cheese has been my preferred styling of choice and Old School, established sometime in the mid-aughts, always has them in stock, with each bagel having a perfectly chewy consistency that you’d normally have to go to New York to find; it might be that the restaurant uses the truly old-school method of curing bagels overnight and then boiling them in hot water before baking.
It seems to be working.
That morning, right alongside a cup of top-notch Nicaraguan coffee, I was judiciously serenaded by the coveted Lox and Cream Cheese Bagel ($9.99). A plain bagel coated with a schmear of brined salmon, thick cream cheese, onions and tomatoes and those capers as a well-earned coda, it was well worth the wait; with flavorful lox and plenty of cream cheese, it’s still my one and only.
But I had also heard good things about their Breakfast Bagel ($4.69), so I went ahead and ordered one as well; it primarily consisted of piquant sausage, a typical egg and a whole stringy mess of cheese. In-between a delectable everything bagel, it was a great boost of breakfast energy that, if I lived closer, I’d probably pick one of these up every week.
At least that’s what I thought, until I had the muy caliente surprise of a Firecracker Bagel ($4.69). Served on a choice jalapeno bagel, there’s of course the useful-enough eggs and so much habanero jack cheese, as well as a fat slice of red-emblazoned chorizo sausage that's enough to send anyone hungry right over the edge, man.
Looking at my watch, the protest was going to begin soon. I packed about three of my bagel halves into a paper sack and stuck them in the trunk of a car; after about six or so hours, they were still as edibly hot as they were that morning and twice as delicious. Cómpralo ya!
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