Bagel Sandwich

In June 1996 two Germans opened a bagel restaurant in Hannover and spent their first months explaining the product. Gregor Gerlach and Christian Kiefer had been in Chicago earlier that year, sitting on the terrace of a snack restaurant with a fresh bagel sandwich, and came home asking why nothing like it existed in Germany. Customers who walked into Bagel Brothers called the thing a doughnut, or a roll with a hole, and the partners fielded some very odd questions. The sandwich answered them better than any explanation: a ring split open, the cut faces toasted until the edge crackles, cold Frischkäse spread against the warm crumb, a slice of smoked salmon folded over it. One bite and the hole stopped being a question.

The build starts with a bagel that was boiled before it was baked, because the boil sets a thin shell and gives the crumb its chew. Kiefer went to New York, New Jersey and Chicago to learn that process, kneading dough in bagel shops and questioning bakers who each kept a private secret, then came back to Germany with imported machines and began baking with local ingredients. The salmon version stacks cleanly on that base: cream cheese thick enough to be a layer, red onion for bite, capers that burst salty against the salmon's silk, dill over the top. Overfill the ring and it skids apart in the hand. Skip the boil and the crumb turns soft and bready, and the filling sinks into it.

Berlin had its own start. Cynthia Barcomi, a Seattle-born Columbia graduate who came to the city as a dancer in 1985, opened Barcomi's café and coffee roastery on Bergmannstraße in Kreuzberg in 1994. By 2001 her cramped cellar kitchen held an oven, a mixer, a stove and a work counter shared by four people, and sent New York cheesecake, muffins and bagels out to the Hotel Madison, the Adlon and the KaDeWe food hall. A bagel sandwich in those years was a rare thing on a German breakfast plate: a heavy, glossy ring beside a pot of coffee that Barcomi roasted herself, with cream cheese soft enough to ooze when the knife pressed down and a faint smell of roasting beans drifting over from the machine.

The German menu stretches the format. Bagel Brothers lists bagel sandwiches next to plain bagels with cream cheese and salads, and has advertised eleven varieties of the round bread each day, so a sesame or poppy ring can carry salmon one hour and a savory cold cut the next. Sweet builds put cream cheese under berries or honey. The sandwich suits a station counter: a traveler with ten minutes between trains orders, takes the paper-wrapped ring and eats it standing, jaws working through a crust that holds together to the last bite, while the announcements echo off the concourse roof and the paper warms the palm.

Eating one takes the whole hand. The bagel's dense crumb tears and stretches, so each bite pulls away with a slow tug and the cream cheese squeezes out toward the edges. Salt from the capers and salmon arrives first, then the sweet bite of raw onion, and the dill lingers afterward. The weight is real: a filled bagel sits in the palm like a small stack of coins, and a toasted one stays warm against the fingers for several minutes. Strong coffee is the usual partner, and the sandwich works as a filling lunch for one hand and no cutlery in Hannover or in Kreuzberg alike.

Origin and history

Two dates frame the German start. Barcomi's café in Kreuzberg dates to 1994, and a second Barcomi's followed in 1997 in the Sophie-Gips-Höfen in Mitte. Bagel Brothers, the chain that built its menu around the bagel sandwich, opened in June 1996 in Hannover.

Kiefer, Gerlach and later a third partner, Mario C. Bauer, who joined in 2006, built the company on that Chicago visit. A commercial-register entry for Bagel Brothers GmbH is dated December 1995, so directories split between 1995 and 1996 for the founding, while the company's own history gives June 1996 for the opening. In 2000 the founders set up Bagel Bakery to produce the rings themselves, and the company says it has baked millions since.

The Hauptbahnhof branch in Hannover opened in 2008, about 90 square metres with 27 seats, a chilled counter of fresh salads and a lounge with background music. It joined existing Bagel Brothers shops at Lister Meile 50 and Engelbosteler Damm 21, and in January 2008 the company announced franchise openings for Oldenburg, Mainz and Prague among other cities.