I had been so excited by the concept of Black Seed for a long time. I had followed their progress since before they opened and couldn’t wait to try it. The concept sounded fantastic. I love bagels like crazy and NYC is the only place that does them properly, but I had also long been wanting to try a Montreal-style bagel.
In a lot of ways, Montreal-style bagels were at an automatic disadvantage when compared to the NYC bagel: they are smaller, have a larger hole in the middle, are thinner, and sweeter. Like NYC bagels, they are hand-rolled and baked in boiling water, but unlike NYC bagels, they are boiled specifically in honey-sweetened water and not plain water. They contain malt and egg, and are made without salt. But one thing appealed to me greatly: after being boiled, they are finished off in a wood-fired oven! Given my immense love of Neapolitan pizza, you can convince me that almost anything is good if you tell me it’s wood-oven baked. But sadly, these bagels were not so good.
Throughout the years, I’ve heard all kinds of complaints about the NYC bagel, though most of them are ridiculous. Things like “they are too big” (umm since when is a portion being too big a bad thing?), “they are too soft” (umm soft, fluffy, dense bread is a problem??), etc. But my god this thing was a hard, crispy, baby-sized, flavorless, stale-tasting bagel.
We got the “black–seed” bagel, the establishment’s namesake, a.k.a. the poppy seed bagel (and by the way the “white-seed” is a sesame seed bagel) with half horseradish cream cheese, half scallion cream cheese, tomato, and onion. It was just so bland and hard I figured something had gone wrong. And I thought, ok, even if the bagel is bland, horseradish cream cheese cannot be bland – perhaps they left it off. I discussed it with them and very graciously, they offered to immediately make a new one. This time I asked for all horseradish cream cheese, which, I figured, had to pack a punch of flavor even if the bagel did not.
The second bagel was just as disappointing and the worst part is, the horseradish cream cheese tasted 0% like horseradish and 100% like plain cream cheese. And we both agreed on that, despite my counterpart’s extreme sensitivity to and distaste for horseradish.
I would definitely not go back. It was very disappointing and is just not worth another visit. If Black Seed is your only option, just don’t eat a bagel. Go with one of the other million foods there are in NYC.
There are three locations of this place: Nolita, East Village, and Hudson Eats in Battery Park.
