Restaurant Review: Original Bagel

Restaurant:

Address: 2914 West Chester Pike Broomall, PA 19008
Rating: ★★★★
Style: Bakery specializing in bagels and cookies
Food: Heaven for carb lovers
Atmosphere: Neighborhood bake shop
Parking: Relatively easy
Service: Friendly and casual
Price Range: Inexpensive
Unique Features: Menu offers unique bagel flavors like French toast and peanut butter in addition to old favorites like plain, everything and onion. Extensive selection of cookies including pretty hand decorated ones worthy of your next party.

When you leave the East Coast the quality of bagels goes down dramatically. The same skilled baker in New York who tries to make bagels in Los Angeles will not be able to produce the same quality. What is the factor that makes East Coast bagels taste so great then? It’s the water. A friend of mine from cooking school actually packed two gallons of NYC water in her suitcase so that she and her father could make their own bagel dough when she went home to Chicago. She reported back that they were some of the best bagels she had ever tried.

 offers a dizzying array of bagels in wacky flavors like French toast, cinnamon swirl (with or without raisins), an onion rich everything bagel and a positively blueberry-riffic blueberry bagel. Despite the anti-carb crusade by many crazy dieters out there, I still am a sucker for a fresh bagel with cream cheese, tomato and smoked salmon. To toast or not to toast will always be a conundrum for the die-hard bagel aficionados out there but I have to agree with the purists that a truly good bagel does not need to be toasted to be delicious.

The bagels at Original Bagel do not need to be toasted—they have a slightly crunchy bottom and wonderfully doughy centers. I could actually hear a snap when I broke off a piece of bagel. The number one selling veggie cream cheese spread is one of the most delicious ways to eat your vegetables. Loaded with spinach, carrots and more, the spread tasted like cream cheese veggie dip and improved the flavor of everything it touched.

The cookies come in every variety under the sun and while I enjoyed the cinnamonic snickerdoodles and buttery sugar cookies, I think the clear victor was the chocolate chip walnut cookies. Sweet and satisfying with sudden bursts of rich walnut flavor, these cookies also had a wonderful texture. They tasted like someone had baked them in their home kitchen with plenty of love and care.  My dining companions favored the oatmeal raisin and while I agree that they too were tasty, I just didn’t like the texture of those cookies nearly as much.

The service is very friendly and everyone who walks through the front door is treated like a friend. With the advent of all the conglomerate bakeries and corporate monsters, it’s nice to stop into an independent mom-and-pop bake shop where things are done the traditional way—the right way. You can taste the difference.