— PROPER BAGEL —
$3.75 for one; $13.50 for six; $23 for 13 / October 2023
Moving from one city to the next is usually a well thought-out decision. Inertia being what it is, few of us pick up and leave just for the hell of it. More likely, it’s the culmination of months of disenchantment, running away from a place (a job, an ex-), or the opposite, to follow a personal or professional muse and a fresh start. Either way, the last thing we’re worrying about is how to replace our favorite Sesame Chicken or Stuffed Cabbage. Which is good, cause I’m here to tell you that, at least in Nashville, you just can’t. You can, however, on occasion, move past your old favorites to new gems, and they don’t even have to be deep-fried and delivered with a red, mouth-numbing heat.
Proper Bagel, menu-wise, is a pretty metro-New York experience, take or leave that as you may. As for the food, I don’t eat cream cheese, so I can’t tell you much about the dizzying number of options in that regard, except that they sure are pretty in the display case. I can tell you, however, that for me, the bagels are the best in town; I am qualifying the quality comment slightly because disputation follows bagels wherever they go, and whether you agree with me or not will depend on the bagels you’ve had before. I grant there is room for interpretation and argument.
But enough about bagels. I want to talk about Proper Bagel’s bialy, which far surpasses any bialy I have ever had before (New York’s pale by comparison). Far as I know, Proper Bagel is the only place in Nashville that makes bialys on-site, or even sells them at all. Bialys (“bee-ollies”) are the original niche product, toiling in obscurity; to find the next-closest rendition, you’d probably have to go to Chicago, St. Louis or Atlanta.
As you can see in the picture, a bialy is a browned disc of dough. It has a circular depression in the middle, where a bagel hole would be, if it was, of course, a bagel, which it decidedly is not. Just because it occupies the metal basket next to the bagels does not mean there is cross-pollination. All bialys, anywhere, will have minced onion (and probably poppy seeds) in the middle; no bagels have minced onion, only toasted onion, and a bagel with both poppy seeds and those toasted onion bits, let’s just call that unlikely.
The bialy, like the bagel, claims Eastern Europe as its point of origin (the bialy is allegedly from Bialystok, the 10th-largest city in Poland). But unlike a bagel, the bialy is baked, not boiled-and-baked. It’s flatter. The dough is a ton lighter and when hot and fresh, pillow soft. You could close your eyes and be forgiven for thinking it’s your favorite foccaccia. Proper Bagel’s has the faintest hint of salt in there.
How do you eat it? I mean, you are in Nashville’s foremost bagel and cream cheese emporium, right? If that’s your craving, stick to the bagel. The bialy-eating experience bears almost no resemblance to that of the bagel. No cream cheese on a bialy. No smoked salmon. No tomato. Under no circumstances would King Solomon ever cut a bialy in half (in any direction). Leave it whole.
Now, this is huge: you want that bialy warm. Not burning hot, but warm. Proper Bagel will toast it for you — I asked — but I only buy them to-go. They freeze magnificently (first thing you should do when you walk in the house). Just take one out of the freezer and put it in a 300-degree oven for about 10-15 minutes to heat through. Take the first bite, then butter the bread inside (not the crust) before every subsequent bite. Just keep buttering and biting, buttering and biting. No shortcuts; if you butter the crust, it will melt all over the place, defeating the purpose.
And welcome home.