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Murray's Bagels
Murray's Bagels has operated in Greenwich Village since 1996, building a reputation around a firmly traditionalist approach that includes a notable, long-standing refusal to toast its bagels, a policy the shop maintains on the grounds that a properly fresh bagel should never need toasting in the first place. That specific stance became something of a local point of debate and even minor controversy among customers accustomed to ordering their bagels toasted elsewhere, and Murray's has held to the policy for decades as a matter of genuine culinary principle rather than simple stubbornness. The shop's dense, chewy, traditionally boiled bagels and its extensive selection of smoked fish and spreads have made it one of Greenwich Village's most consistently recommended bagel destinations, its no-toasting policy ultimately becoming as much a point of pride as a point of contention. For a New York bagels list, Murray's is the essential "we don't toast, and we mean it" entry — a Greenwich Village institution whose famously firm no-toasting policy reflects a genuine, decades-held conviction about what a properly made bagel should be.
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Russ & Daughters
Russ & Daughters has operated on Manhattan's Lower East Side since 1914, founded by Polish-Jewish immigrant Joel Russ, and it remains one of the oldest continuously running "appetizing" shops in the country, a specifically Jewish-American food category built around smoked fish, bagels, and cream cheese rather than hot deli meats. Its name, unusual for the era in explicitly crediting Russ's three daughters who worked in and eventually took over the business, reflected a genuinely progressive family structure for a early-20th-century immigrant-owned shop, and the business has remained family-run across four generations since. Its bagels, served with a rotating selection of the shop's celebrated house-smoked and cured fish, including its renowned Nova Scotia salmon and sable, have made the classic bagel-and-lox combination one of the most historically significant and consistently imitated Jewish-American food traditions in the country. For a New York bagels list, Russ & Daughters is the essential "the appetizing shop that defined it" entry — a four-generation, 1914-founded Lower East Side institution whose bagel-and-smoked-fish tradition remains the historical benchmark for the entire category.
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