Brick Lane

For quite some time I've found myself talking about the famous bagel shops on Brick Lane, having never eaten at either of them, so it was great to discover yesterday that the Beigel Shop (Britain's First and Best) walks my talk. We chose it over Beigel Bake: Brick Lane Bakery on the basis that the queue was longer in our pick... the wisdom of crowds and all that. I kind of thought that this would be an OK experience but had no idea that it might be really, really good. First-up, while you queue it is rather like being in an exhibition in a cake museum, because you amble past cabinets full of amazing looking, many very heavy, cakes, including some super looking cheesecake. We decided to go for a classic bagel selection between the three of us: salt beef for the Merovingian, cream cheese and salmon for Ra, and cream cheese for me. Mine was the bargain of the bunch at £0.80 but all of them were terrific value. The big difference between these bagels and those you get in supermarkets was in the great difference between the interior and exterior texture. While this would be pretty uniform in a supermarket bagel, here the exterior had a thin layer of crunch and the inside had a fluffy lightness to it. The cream cheese was very, very liberally smeared into the bagel and was also top-notch: slightly drier and saltier than something like Philadelphia and both bagel and cream cheese had an admirable savouriness. I'll be back to try cream cheese with chives and to stage a festival of cakes.