Food & Drink

The great bagel crisis

Zafaryab Ali (left) and Peerzada Shah, Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, last month saved Coney Island Bialys & Bagels, NYC’s oldest bagel shop. (Paul Martinka)

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Tony Grob, 50, and Kirsten Atik, 37, were prepared to go a little out of their way for a great bagel.

Last Sunday, the married duo, in town from Seattle, came to the legendary center of world bageldom — the Upper West Side — to get a cinnamon raisin and an onion with cream cheese at one of Manhattan’s flagship bagel spots, H&H.

It turns out they fell through the great bagel hole.

H&H has been shuttered since June. And if that isn’t enough, its plant on the West Side Highway is in danger of closing, too, after a judge found last month that the company owed $600,000 in back rent. (The owners did not return The Post’s calls.)

But Grob and Atik remained calm. “We followed the line” of people drifting toward Zabar’s a block away, says Grob. (Zabar’s, which once got its bagels from H&H, now has a different purveyor, but store manager Scott Goldshine won’t divulge the name.)

All of which raises a serious question: Is New York experiencing a bagel crisis?

“I think it’s more like a slow death,” says Upper West Sider Reynold Weidenaar, 66, who also shops at Zabar’s. He notes that bagels are bigger, puffier and more bread-like than when he moved to the city in 1979.

“It’s almost impossible to find [a good bagel] in Manhattan,” declares Matthew Goodman, author of “Jewish Food: The World at Table,” as well as the essay “The Rise and Fall of the Bagel.”

Jewish-food authority Joan Nathan (an H&H fan) thinks bagels are better in her current hometown of Bethesda, Md., than in New York. “We have very good bagels — we don’t have a crisis,” she says.

Goodman contends the bagel crisis has been ongoing for almost 50 years. “[It] began in 1963, when the automatic bagel machine was invented,” he says. “That meant that there was no longer a need for artisans.”

In other words, bagel makers who could compete in turn-of-the-century Bialystok, Poland, are no longer around to instruct the younger generation. (The oldest bagel spot in the city, Coney Island Bialys and Bagels, was about to close last month when it found an unlikely pair of saviors: two Muslim gentlemen from Pakistan, one of whom worked in the store years earlier.)

Aside from the bad effect the machine had on the artisanal nature of bagel making, it had a bad effect on the bagels themselves.

“Bagel dough is very dense,” says Goodman. “[It] kept burning out the machines. So they had to add water to the dough. This produced a softer bagel.” Additives and conditioners also affected taste.

Though Manhattan has been particularly hard hit, there are a few stalwarts who keep hand-rolled bagels alive in the outer boroughs — but the list gets smaller every year.

The only original bagel recipe traceable to Poland that Goodman can point to is not made by a Jewish bagel maker, but an Italian one at Bagel Hole in Park Slope.

“I learned how to make bagels from an old Jewish man, about 30 years ago, maybe a little longer,” says owner Philip Romanzi, whose bagels are smaller and sweeter than the standard Upper West Side bagel.

Meanwhile, some newbies are making the effort to get back to the bagel’s handmade roots. “We do hand-rolled bagels, and we [boil] them with a kettle and [bake them] with a gas oven — we don’t compromise on that,” says Vic Glazer of Vic’s Bagel Bar, which opened in March 2010 in Murray Hill.

This year, Montreal-style B&B Empire popped up in Brooklyn Heights. “There’s been a bit of a renaissance of the old-style bagel,” says Goodman, “Like [with] craft beers or handmade pickles or whatever it might be . . . Whether it will hold out against the cultural mass remains to be seen.”

In the meantime, get them while they last.

Where do you get a good bagel around here?

For those mourning H&H, an excellent alternative is Absolute Bagels (2788 Broadway) near Columbia University, where the rings are soft and chewy. While Midtown is saturated with lousy second-tier bagels, Ess-a-Bagel (831 Third Ave.) is several cuts above the rest. And though the LES hasn’t produced many good bagels lately, if you’re feeling nostalgic for a good old-fashioned “water donut,” you might try Kossar’s Bialys (367 Grand St.). For a sweeter Montreal-style bagel, check out the new B&B Empire (200 Clinton St., Brooklyn). For an old-meets-new bagel experience, get the Tokyo Tel Aviv Express at Vic’s Bagel Bar (544 Third Ave.), a sandwich with lox, scallions, edamame and wasabi. But to have them the old-fashioned way, head to Bagel Hole (400 Seventh Ave., Brooklyn) in Park Slope, and taste Poland by way of Italy.

mgross@nypost.com