Chapter eight: A bagel a day

The first aspect he brought up was their current price; “the idea of paying $4 for an unsliced bagel was kind of anathema.” These breakfast sandwiches, Kaplan touts, are regular food working-class people have access to; something portable, something affordable. Moving into the Silver Lake area, which was becoming gentrified, he wanted to ensure his bagels were sold at a fair price. Akin to that New York atmosphere, Kaplan’s bagels are meant to be an affordable, everyday option for both financial expressions of his clientele. 

Funny enough, Kaplan’s “bagel origin story” mirrors a lot of these themes and histories I previously set up as to why Bagel and Lox Jewishness emerged as a form of practice. For one, he grew up on none other than Lender’s Bagels; the same ones that took over grocery store freezer section shelves, in large part thanks to California’s own Thompson Bread Machine. And second, as proudly stated on his website, his mom packed him a bagel for lunch every day, always with cream cheese, sometimes with lox. This simple act of Jewish mothers sending their sons to school with a bagel in hand is such a pivotal moment as it connects this new generation of bagel heads with some of the best memories of childhood — memories that pushed myself to write about it, and people like Kaplan to share them through his baking. Seeing my own childhood reflected in Kaplan’s upbringing is what drew me to interview him in the first place. So when I asked him about this inclusion of his website, he told me that he “wanted people to understand where I was coming from and to understand that I’m a real person with opinions about my bagels, just like they are, and I was hoping people would like what I liked.”

In yet another instance of New York’s rose-tinted and everything-bagel-seasoned glasses, when Kaplan came to Los Angeles in 2004, he was hard pressed to find a shop resembling the rolls of his days gone by, for “bagels in LA were derided for many years,” Kaplan said. For Angelenos, a fact of my own upbringing as well as Trevor Faris’ of Hank’s Bagels, our bagel benchmark is a chain. Kaplan contrasts this to how back East, these shops are mom and pop run, “whether you’re in New Jersey or on Long Island, your local bagel shop, there’s only one of them, that was your bagel, that was your benchmark.” Since chains like Western Bagel and Einstein Bros. Bagels are able to produce for scale, the new wave of bakers came in focused on producing their individualized, perfect bagel; a backbone of the Bagel Renaissance, which led to new businesses popping up with diverse interpretations of the classic roll. 

In complete and utter contrast to Joan Didion’s California where you can somehow live and die without ever meeting a Jew, a unique feature of Maury’s is in the kosher-style. Kaplan grew up kosher and wanted to keep to the diary style restaurants of his youth – something not much seen on the West Coast. Unlike other prevalent NY-influenced breakfast sandwich joints, you won’t find a bacon, egg and cheese with salt, pepper and ketchup (or as they say back East, “baconeggandcheesesaltpepperketchup”) here, as there isn’t even room for a griddle in Kaplan’s 800 square foot storefront. While Kaplan says it’s cool to reinvent the wheel, he wanted to reconnect with what he thought LA was missing. “There are plenty of people that can reinvent things and I just wanted to do the best version of the thing that I loved,” Kaplan said. While tradition necessitates the authentic East Coast experience — complete with smoked fish as far as the nose can smell — innovations abound, including “The Mori” bagel, which features a wasabi tobikko roe cream cheese.

In pioneering his idyllic sourdough bagels, Kaplan taste-tested them like donuts, treats that can be enjoyed plain and get sweeter as you chew them. He defines his methodology as a kind of “going back to basics,” for his usage of wild yeast not only makes his bagels healthier and more digestible, but tastes better too. But problems arose with the intentionality behind the craft, because if you do it in a certain way, Kaplan said, “you can’t produce a lot of bagels, and so you’re stuck just selling sandwiches and probably selling them… for $22 or even, $14 with just a few hothouse vegetables on them.”

The new-fangled $22 bagels are an unfortunate result of the “aesthetic bagels” trend on social media with the wildly surging popularity of places like Courage Bagels, also in Silver Lake, or Layla Bagels in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. While they are admittedly gorgeous, customers find themselves paying for an edible piece of art as opposed to a working man’s breakfast. However, Kaplan reveals that their lox, which they ship in from the East Coast every two weeks, is priced similarly to their cream cheese — which is of impeccable quality, I might add, and BruinLife’s travel writer, Blaize, can confirm. Maury’s keeps their lox bagel at $10 because it is important to Kaplan to, “make that option affordable for people,” despite it being a loss leader for them. But in the age of Instagram and TikTok, Kaplan agrees that every single sandwich is a potential advertisement, good or bad. 

“I think it’s kind of a bummer,” Kaplan said. “I work pretty hard to make sure that my bagel is a delicious product in and of itself. I think that once you start putting cream cheese and lox and capers and onions on top of something, it kind of blurs the lines of what’s good and what’s not good.”

Enhanced by Kaplan’s steadfast belief in a more old-fashioned way to enjoy a bagel, he is allowing Angelenos the ability to treat themselves to bagels as an everyday food as opposed to savoring them as a specialty brunch item.