Some cities just can’t do good Mexican. I had the worst burrito of my life in Paris. The tortilla was unheated and poorly folded, and the beans overcooked and mushy; and while the canned salsa was serviceable (if unexciting), the whole thing was rendered beyond redemption by an unexpected flourish of pimento-stuffed olives and a molten canal of the Euro equivalent of Velveeta. I kept it down for about 20 minutes before vomiting it all back up on the steps of Montmartre. The experience left me feeling both wretched and underwhelmed by whatever other charms the city might have offered. And there you have my one piece of travel advice when it comes to Paris: steer clear of the burritos.
While I don’t want to say I would die without good Mexican food, I’m also not convinced that life would still be worth living.However, I’ve learned that it’s best to save some things for their home turf. Desire, when transplanted, can turn swiftly into regret. Fashionable as it may be within a select community to moan that no baguette could ever compare to a Paris baguette, so I might add that a good burrito might be similarly geographically constrained.
The same might also be said of bagels. I grew up in New York — no, not that New York. Not the New York of James Baldwin, Alec Baldwin, Broadway, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Harlem. But the other New York. Dairy cows, apple orchards and towns with single stoplights. The New York that may as well be rural Ohio, where Saturday-night entertainment involved setting up lawn chairs at the crossroads and watching the traffic light change colors. And where “ethnic food” meant spaghetti.
Still, I know a good bagel. It may be sweet, or it may be savory, but it must have heft. It must have chew (which is not the same as being chewy at all). It must pull gently against your teeth as you bite into a heavy stratum of cream cheese while poppy seeds, sesame seeds, salt and other bits precipitate from underneath. And a good New York bagel is to be found in only one place.
Well-intentioned friends have taken me out to a few different quality bagel shops around the city. Yet a glimpse at the menus I encountered — tomato pesto bagels? dried-fig bagels? — reminds me of the old saw regarding our two cities: San Francisco is not New York.
A certain class of San Franciscans take delight in pointing out how their city is not that city. There’s the weather, the air, those shamelessly stunning vistas — fog sluicing through the Golden Gate, Alcatraz rising sly as a hip from a bath — and then there’s the overall slower pace. I can’t disagree with any of that. The City by the Bay is lovely, and things do run more slowly here. I have friends in the Haight who visit me in Oakland about once every other year simply because it takes forever to get anywhere. (The “R” is BART is suspect advertising, if not an outright lie.) And a bagel is fast food, meant to be eaten during a brisk walk or, at one’s greatest leisure, for three minutes on a park bench — tops. Which is also perhaps why there aren’t as many good ones in SF.
To be sure, there are some good bagels in San Francisco (though in my opinion, there are better ones in Oakland). And I have found bagels both sweet and savory — bagels that have heft, bagels that have chew. But still, I remain convinced that what I truly want is impossible to find in California because the principle ingredient of a New York bagel is New York. To paraphrase John Updike, bagels, even good ones, found anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
Of course, bagels alone are not enough of a reason to consider moving back. Though they just might be enough of a reason to visit. Which is why each December, when I purchase a round-trip ticket to JFK and begin the chain of trains to crawl upstate, my parents think I’m coming home for Christmas, when, really, I’m paying four hundred dollars for a bagel and a coffee at Zaro’s in Penn Station.
But East Coast. West Coast. When you’re debating which is better, you’re just arguing over bagels and burritos. There’s room for both. Sure, San Francisco is not New York City — how could it ever be? — but the reverse is true as well. And I’ve long since given up even trying to look for a good Mexican joint in Midtown.
And each time in Manhattan as I stroll breezily into yet another bagel shop, already I’m dreaming of the flight back to SFO, a pint of Anchor Steam and the excellent burrito I will soon inhale. “Delayed gratification” — I think that’s what it’s called.
Besides, I like having something to come back to.
