Bagels have always been Sam Silverman’s favourite food, which is pretty much a given for the creator of New York’s only known bagel festival.
Silverman is the brains – and bagel-driven appetite– behind New York BagelFest, the first and only bagel-centred food festival in New York City. This year’s BagelFest, scheduled to take place on 28 September, will showcase the talents of 29 bagel exhibitors from around the globe, each vying for an award that will set their bagel creation apart from the rest.
“Some of them are just going to stick to super traditional,” said Silverman, who kicked off the first BagelFest in 2019. “Others are going to get wild and out there: all these different schmears and toppings; sandwiches and caviar and things of that nature.”
Exhibitors, including Brooklyn Boy Bagels from Australia and St-Viateur from Montreal, will offer participants two to three bite-sized samples of a bagel with toppings of their choice, which several expert judges and members of the public will vote on to determine the winner of Best of the Fest. The other main competition is for Best Bagel, a blind taste test of each exhibitor’s rendition of a plain bagel.
(Photo: BagelFest)
“We have eight breadheads, as I call them – very frankly nerdy bagel lovers who can get super deep into the nuances of the differences of 29 different plain bagels. And together those eight judges are going to determine which is the best pure bagel on its own,” said Silverman.
With other awards for the Schmear of the Year, Best Bialy, Most Creative, and even a bagel rolling championship, there is room for everyone at BagelFest, which is what Silverman was going for when he created the festival as part of his quest to sample the best bagels New York City had to offer.
Participants at BagelFest 2023 take part in a bagel rolling instruction as part of the day's festivities. (Photo: BagelFest)
“The beautiful thing about the bagel tent, it's very big and very inclusive,” said Silverman. “And no matter how much we disagree on what you should put in or on a big bagel, at the end of the day, there's something for everybody.”
For the first BagelFest in 2019, Silverman said he’d hoped that maybe a hundred friends and family would show up to the small venue he’d rented in Bushwick, but over 350 people ended up attending. The next year, there were over 1600.
As the event grew, Silverman left his 9-5 job at a hedge fund and “dove fully into the bagel promotional space.”
New York BagelFest creator Sam Silverman, (second from right) pictured with last year's winners of Best of the Fest and Best Bagel, has devoted his career to promoting bagel makers and sampling the best bagels the world has to offer. (Photo: BagelFest)
“There's a bagel boom that's happening right now and we're trying to highlight that and promote it and help give people the tools to take part in it,” he said.
BagelFest led to BagelUp, an organisation devoted to promoting and advancing “bagel culture.” BagelUp has partnered with brands, bagel makers, bagel shop owners and bakers – including award-winning baker Reva Castillenti – to put on New York City bagel tours and bagel making classes, offering bagel obsessives “personal, behind the scenes access that you wouldn't be able to get as just an average consumer visiting these bagel shops.”
The drive for Silverman, beyond satisfying his constant hankering for bagels, is to honour the hard-working bagel makers who “don't have the time, the energy, the resources, or the know-how to promote themselves in the way that they should.”
New York BagelFest, created by Sam Silverman, is a festival exhibiting dozens of bagel makers from around the globe. (Photo: BagelFest)
“We want to create a platform that shines the spotlight on them. BagelFest is the weekend where we're able to do that.”
Oren Salomon, whose Dallas-based bakery Starship Bagel won Best Bagel at last year’s festival, called BagelFest a “celebration of all things bagel” but also a celebration of American Jewishness, too.
“With origins in Poland and brought to America via NYC, the bagel follows a very similar path to Americanness as my own family,” said Salomon, who opened Starship Bagel in 2021. “My grandfathers are both Polish and, having fled the Holocaust after the war, they left the shtetl life behind and had to start over. Having been born myself in New York as a first generation American with Polish Jewish roots, I feel a deep connection to the geography of the bagel.”
Starship Bagel's Oren Salomon, winner of Best Bagel at BagelFest 2023, pictured accepting his award at last year's festival. (Photo: BagelFest)
Salomon said that he practices bagel making “to nourish others, but also to nourish my own soul,” and added that the Jewish people “should be proud to have contributed something as ubiquitous as the bagel to the American diet.”
“My focus is on safeguarding the Jewish baking techniques that created the bagel in the first place and giving them a modern context to always be moving towards the future while keeping in mind where this all came from and honouring our culinary ancestors.”
Silverman couldn’t agree more.
“I meet tons of different people from all walks of life, Jewish or not, and the one thing that we can always relate to is bagels,” he said. “My main connection to my Jewishness is through food, and there is no food to me that encapsulates the Jewish story more than bagels do.”
Bagelfest
