A rivalry conducted with warmth for decades, and the most levelling three am democracy left on the street
Brick Lane’s Bagel Shop Wars Are the Most Honest Thing Left in Shoreditch
Everything in this part of London eventually gets a rebrand, a new lighting scheme, an artisanal repositioning that adds a pound fifty and a hand-drawn font. Everything, it seems, except the two twenty-four hour bagel shops on Brick Lane that have sat almost directly across from each other for decades, selling essentially the same salt beef bagel at essentially the same price to essentially the same 3am crowd, in what I have come to regard as one of the last genuinely unpretentious rivalries left in the area.
A Rivalry That Predates Everything Around It
Both shops have been there since long before the street’s transformation into the tourist thoroughfare and nightlife strip it now is, and both have, by most accounts I have gathered from people who would know, survived largely by staying exactly, stubbornly the same while everything around them reinvented itself twice over. No seasonal menu. No collaboration with a trendy chocolatier. No queue-jumping app. Just a counter, a till, a case of salt beef and smoked salmon, and a loyalty to procedure that borders on the religious.
The rivalry itself is conducted with a warmth that surprised me when I first moved here expecting something closer to open hostility. Staff at each shop will, if pressed, offer a good-natured opinion on the other’s bagels, generally some variation of theirs are fine, ours are better, delivered with the easy confidence of people who have had this exact conversation a thousand times and enjoyed every iteration. It is competition as a kind of long-running friendship, conducted in public, nightly, for the benefit of whoever happens to be standing at the counter at an hour when most sensible establishments have long since closed.
What Survives When Everything Else Doesn’t
I think what actually draws me back to writing about this, beyond simple affection for a very good bagel, is what the shops’ survival says about the difference between an area’s marketed identity and its actual, lived one. Shoreditch as a brand has been sold, repeatedly, as endlessly reinventing, always the next thing, a place defined by turnover and novelty. And yet the two most reliably busy, most consistently loved institutions on its most famous street are two shops that have deliberately, stubbornly refused to change anything meaningful in decades. The cultural press has periodically rediscovered the bagel shops as a story in their own right, with feature coverage appearing over the years in outlets including Time Out London and A Lady in London, both of which have treated the shops less as a novelty and more as a genuine institution, a status earned through sheer, unglamorous consistency rather than any marketing campaign.
The 3am Democracy
There is something genuinely levelling about who you find at the counter at three in the morning, and I do not think I have encountered a more honest cross-section of this city anywhere else on a single street. Clubbers still buzzing from a night out stand next to night bus drivers on their break, next to the odd besuited insomniac who works somewhere in the City and cannot quite explain why he is here either, next to tourists who found the queue on a map and joined it out of curiosity, next to the area’s older residents who remember a version of Brick Lane the rest of us only know from photographs. Nobody is dressed for the occasion because there is no occasion to dress for. Everyone just wants a bagel, and for a few minutes at the counter, that is genuinely the only thing that matters about anyone present.
What I’d Actually Miss
If either shop ever closed, and I sincerely hope neither does, I think it would sting more than any of the other, flashier losses this area has absorbed over the years, because so much of what has closed here was, in some sense, always going to close, built on a trend with a shelf life its owners understood going in. The bagel shops were never trying to be trendy in the first place, which may be precisely why they have outlasted almost everything that was.
More Shoreditch dispatches, hungry and otherwise, live at my author page, with the wider paper at The London Prat.
I asked one of the counter staff, on a recent 2am visit conducted, I should admit, partly in the name of research and partly out of genuine hunger, whether he ever worried about the shop’s future given how much has changed around it. He shrugged in the specific way that suggested he had heard the question many times before and considered it, gently, slightly beside the point. People will always want a bagel at three in the morning, he told me, handing over a salt beef that needed both hands to hold properly. Everything else changes. That doesn’t. I have thought about that exchange more than I expected to since, mostly because I suspect he is right, and because there is something quietly reassuring about at least one certainty surviving in a neighbourhood that otherwise seems to reinvent itself every eighteen months whether it needs to or not.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
