Sitting Absolute Shiva in my Neighbourhood
It’s not about the bagels
On Thursday, the news began to break that Absolute Bagels, our beloved bagel shop, had closed down. Probably forever, said the West Side Rag. The news was gutting and the extended neighborhood of residents, visitors, Manhattanites and tourists, myself included, went into a paroxysm of denial. Spattered among the social media comments and messages, though, were suggestions of alternative bagelries to attend. And, later, once Columbia Spectator linked to the health violations and they became more publicly known, commenters expressed disgust about the reported state of the bakery.
Although well-meaning, I found these comments offensive. Not in a snowflake, “please use my proper title,” manufactured offense kind of way, but actual “don’t piss on my shoes” offensive. If you thought that these posts were about the loss of a convenient bakery on health grounds, you were entirely missing the point. My neighbourhood was grieving a death in the family and people were talking smack at the shiva.
“I’m so sorry your Aunt passed away, she was pretty gross when she got sick at the end, why don’t you try my Auntie? She’s nicer than yours anyway.”
Video: Gabriel Falcon, Absolute Bagels line extending north before Garden of Eden closed.
My friend Gabriel Falcon, who took the videos that are interspersed with this post, called the shop “connective tissue.” And that’s a good start to describe it. It was, as my next door neighbour David, said, “a vibe.” It was a focus of local pride and a place to see people in the, often-extensive, line. It was a counter-cultural landmark that was lively and just alive and feeding the communal consciousness. It was, in our imagination, like the beatnik bars of the West Village, or the existentialist cafes in Paris, the beating heart of practical, warm, neighbourhood New York.
Unlike a cafe, though, you couldn’t really hang out there, you just had to line up, buy your bagels – with cash – and go. People went daily, or weekly or on special occasions. Parents arrived early to pick up their kids so they could grab a bagel on the way, older kids moseyed over to buy a bagel after school, and an assortment of others built a trip to Absolute into their Sunday morning routine. Different people from my Sunday soccer would arrive at the game with a steaming brown paper bag they had bought before 7am to beat the lines.
“Cash only” meant you had to be in the know. And, though they were friendly they were also cautious — there were rules, they had to balance every day’s books. They were, for example, gracious but firm with the unhoused folk who rocked up to the shop. They never extended credit. I never felt like I belonged so much as when I ordered 10 dozen bagels for part of my daughter’s bat mitzvah celebration and went to the front of the line the next day to pick them up. It was OK, they were expecting me, they had told me to do exactly that. But Absolute was not a place to skip the line: excuse, reason or none.
In the fall I found myself unexpectedly on the block, but had no cash. Nick was at the cash register. I said had no cash but would bring in the money for the three plain bagels the next day. Nick, who I’d known for 18 years, since our kids were born, paused to consider it. “Ok. Tomorrow morning.” I was there before 9 the next day.
In an era of Insta and TikTok, the shop had no online presence. In an era of immigrant-hatred, Sam Thongkrieng from Thailand had learned how to make bagels and made them better than any Jews on the Upper West Side. And in an era of division and polarization, Absolute gave a universal welcome no matter age, creed, colour, belief, gender, sexuality. I mean it’s trite to say it, what shop wouldn’t just take your cash, but over 30 years they practiced friendly warmth to everyone.
It wasn’t a chain, despite many suggestions that he expand, it wasn’t even a mini-chain. Sam, silently, made bagels in the back and his bustling crew of workers arrayed them in bins and purveyed them with brusque warmth to the crowds. And it hired staff properly – tall Nick was there just about every time I went in between moving in a block away in 2002 and the last time I went in a couple of weeks ago. The tiny, and slightly frightening (unless you had kids with you, in which case she was a no-nonsense sweetheart!) lady on the cash register was almost always there over those decades too. She was there crying on Thursday as they closed.
In the 1990s, the area southeast of Columbia was called Little Vietnam – and it took decades, and shops like Absolute, to transform that moniker from a byword for gun violence into a reflection of the excellent ethnic cuisine and eventually to a no-place. The neighbourhood might not actually appear on taxi maps, wedged in between Columbia and Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side, but every section of our cosmopolitan nabe, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, agnostic or a myriad of lapsed religionists bought the bagels. The Thais sold to all flavour of locals, North Americans and Native Americans, the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who built the late twentieth century barrio, Brits, German, and French folk, plus of course any South American nationality you can think of.
Some influencer, maybe on TikTok, said how good it was and, as the pandemic waned, Absolute was inundated with tourist traffic. We knew that people would find out how good the bagels were, so we were happy – as the whole of Manhattan is – for tourists to subsidize our excellent culture. The line became so famous that it was news when it changed direction after its neighbour, The Garden of Eden, closed.
Writers, laborers, social workers, architects, students, shopowners, doctors, union workers, producers, lawyers, librarians, teachers, therapists went to Absolute. Sufferers from insomnia, from celiac disease, from Raynaud's disease, from terminal hypochondria would go to Absolute for the bagels or the vibe. It was warm, it was steamy, it was busy. When my fussy toddler wouldn’t eat anything else, I would bring her an absolute bagel. Generations all agreed that it was a treasure. But Sam didn’t seem to care.
The Health Department slapped an injunction on the eatery on Wednesday and by Thursday lunchtime they were closed for good. On Friday morning Nick and others were carrying out the guts of the store to a skip on the street under Sam’s taciturn supervision. He barely spoke to the workers, he has refused to speak to the press or to neighbors. He told Nick that he was too old. He told the real estate agent that he was done. Apart from that we know almost nothing. And that abruptness has been jarring for the neighbours.
Video: Gabriel Falcon, Absolute Bagels employees trashing the contents.
Why didn’t he sell the business as a business? Why didn’t he say goodbye? Why didn’t he just hand Absolute over to the pizza place on the next block so that, instead of having to claim unemployment, his faithful workers could continue to hand their rolled dough shaped lumps of human warmth to the people who thronged to the store every single day of the week?
Maybe when the shop was closed for almost a week in 2017, he had decided that he had had enough. Maybe 34 years of getting up at 5am and working in an unforgiving steam bath was enough. Maybe he never took the pride that we did in having the best bagels in New York in 10025. Maybe he never really understood how much his shop nourished the blocks around it. Unless he radically changes direction and makes a public statement – neither of which he has ever done in the last 34 years – we may never know.
Video: Gabriel Falcon, the mourning begins.
CODA: It was a bagel shop after all and everyone had their favourites. I edited out pretty much everything I had written about the actual bagels but readers asked, so here are some bagel notes for shiva stories. I used to be a hardcore fresh hot poppyseed bagel man: not toasted, just butter. More recently I have been known to buy myself egg bagels as a kind of dessert snack, to eat with low cholesterol non-butter and fancy salt.
To everyone their taste — some people even like mutant bagel offspring like cinnamon and raisin bagels or bizarre remnants from the 90s like sun-dried tomato bagels. Absolute bagels were huge, fluffy, and chewy. At a day old, they were not as good as Columbia Bagels z”l, but I had worked out the best way of reviving them with water and a microwave and could make them almost perfect up to 50 hours old.
Of course when we had guests we put together the fixins: a shmear of cream cheese (or butter for me), capers sprinkled over liberally, a slice or two of ripe red tomatoes, some thinly sliced red onion and then foldings of unctuous smoked salmon and a squeeze of lemon juice. OMG, heaven.