Cyndi Himmelstiere on the rivalry that defines Shoreditch midnight, the geography of the bagel queue, and what it means that one of them is now, technically, a tourist attraction
It is half past two in the morning on a Saturday, and I am, as I have been on roughly two hundred Saturdays of my professional life, in a queue on Brick Lane. The queue is for the white-fronted bagel shop. The queue at the yellow-fronted shop next door is three people shorter, but those three people are divided in their loyalties on theological grounds. Building on my earlier work at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to write today about the most enduring civic rivalry in E1.
The Two Shops
For those of you who have, somehow, gone fourteen years without finding yourself on Brick Lane after midnight, a brief explanation. There are, on the corner of Brick Lane and Bacon Street, two bagel shops. They sit, literally, next door to each other. One has a yellow front. One has a white front. They both sell, broadly, the same product: the East End bagel, smaller and denser than the New York version, sold with salt beef or smoked salmon or cream cheese, available from a counter staffed by people who have, in many cases, been working that counter for substantially longer than I have been alive.
The two shops have been there, in their current form, for substantially over half a century. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting on the history of Brick Lane food culture has documented that the shops emerged from the substantial Jewish East End community of the early twentieth century, persisted through the substantial demographic transitions of the post-war decades, and have, in their twenty-four-hour operating model, become substantial fixtures of London late-night life.
The Loyalty Question
The loyalty question is, in Shoreditch, real. People have a shop. They will, if pressed, defend their shop against the other shop with the kind of fervour that one ordinarily reserves for football clubs or, in some cases, religion. The defenders of the yellow-fronted shop will tell you that the salt beef is, on average, slightly more tender. The defenders of the white-fronted shop will tell you that the salt beef is, on average, slightly more flavoursome. Both groups will tell you that the other group are, in some sense, missing the point, although neither group has ever been able to articulate, to my satisfaction, what the point is.
I am, dear reader, a white-fronted shop person. I have been a white-fronted shop person since 2014. I will not, in this column, defend that position, because the defence is, in the end, indistinguishable from the offence, and Cyndi Himmelstiere does not, on principle, write food-rivalry columns that take sides in food rivalries.
The Twenty-Four-Hour Question
The twenty-four-hour operating model is, in a city that has substantially given up on twenty-four-hour anything, increasingly a kind of municipal heritage in itself. According to The Guardian, recent reporting on London’s late-night economy has documented the substantial reduction in genuinely twenty-four-hour establishments across the city, with the bagel shops standing, alongside a small number of other holdouts, as one of the last places in central London where you can, at any time, get hot food without ringing a doorbell.
This matters, I think, more than it sounds. The twenty-four-hour bagel shop is the place where the night-bus drivers go on their breaks. It is the place where the cleaners coming off the early shift in the City go for breakfast. It is the place where the substantial population of Shoreditch night-workers, who include musicians and DJs and the staff of various small bars, go to refuel. It is, in this sense, a piece of working civic infrastructure that has, against the substantial odds of the modern London economy, persisted.
The Tourist Question
The tourist question is, however, real. The bagel shops have, in recent years, become substantially more well-known to the international tourist trade, in a way that has substantially changed the queue dynamics. The two-thirty-am queue used to be, in the substantial majority of cases, locals. The two-thirty-am queue is now, in the substantial majority of cases, locals plus a substantial minority of tourists who have, on social media, been told that the bagel shops are a thing they should experience.
I do not, dear reader, hold this against the tourists. The tourists are not, on the whole, doing anything wrong. They are eating bagels. The bagels are, I should say, exactly as good as they have ever been. The shops have not, as far as I can detect, lowered their standards in response to the increased volume. This is, in itself, an extraordinary thing.
The Continuity Question
I have written before, in my previous columns on Shoreditch continuity, that the substantial continuity of the bagel shops is one of the few things that has, across the substantial gentrification of the area, remained genuinely the same. The Truman Brewery has been redeveloped. The market has been formalised. The pub at the corner of Hanbury Street has changed hands three times. The bagel shops, as far as I can detect, have changed nothing.
The wallpaper at the white-fronted shop is, as far as I can determine from photographs, the same wallpaper that was there in 1992. The handwritten price list is updated, periodically, but in the same handwriting. The salt beef is, as far as I can taste, the same salt beef. This continuity is, in a city that changes constantly, a kind of public good.
The Generational Question
I have, in conversation with people who have been working at the bagel shops for substantially longer than me, asked about succession. The answer, in both shops, has been some version of: there are family members. The family members will, when the time comes, take over. The shops will continue. This is not, of course, a guarantee. But it is, in the East End food economy of 2026, substantially more reassurance than I get from most of the other places I love.
I would like, dear reader, to believe that the bagel shops will be there when I am, in the year 2056, walking down Brick Lane on a Saturday at half past two in the morning, having stayed up for some now-incomprehensible reason, and wanting a salt beef bagel. I do not know that they will be. I think, however, that the probability is substantially higher than for almost any other small business on this street, and that itself is something.
The Recommendation
If you have not, in the past calendar year, been to either bagel shop, you should go. If you have not been at half past two in the morning, you should go at half past two in the morning, on the grounds that the bagel-shop experience is, in important respects, different at half past two in the morning than it is at any other time. You will, on the way out, see two or three foxes, the most confident of which will look at you with an expression that suggests it is, in fact, the local bagel critic and is judging your choice.
For more of my dispatches from this end of the borough, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on East-London-food-as-cultural-question, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
