{"id":4488,"date":"2007-06-07T14:27:44","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T19:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=4488"},"modified":"2007-06-07T11:55:31","modified_gmt":"2007-06-07T16:55:31","slug":"no_masala_bagel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/07\/no_masala_bagel\/","title":{"rendered":"No masala bagels here"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, I always felt that Desi and Jewish culture were similar. Unlike WASPs, we’re big into food, we have warm but meddlesome families, and we love to argue. So I was tickled brown to see a recent report of a desi bagel and bialy store owner named Ravi Agarwal who opened his third store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He seems to make a pretty mean bagel, and his bialys are even better<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

And no, it’s not a shanda for brown (non-Jews) to make Jewish food. Earlier we wrote about how a desi is the source for the perfect egg cream.<\/a> And although it’s a different shade of brown, New York’s most famous bagel store, H&H Bagels, was founded by brothers-in-law Helmer Toro and Hector Hernandez<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

My favorite aspect of this story — as reported by the Grey Lady — is that Agarwal’s ethnicity is never alluded to at all. It’s simply about how he, as a businessman from outside the neighborhood, goofed up in naming his bagel shop “Arena Bagels and Bialys”:<\/p>\n\n

\n

Mr. Aggarwal’s two teenage children had suggested the name after reading online about the planned new home of the New Jersey Nets. He thought it was a smart idea; the shop is in Park Slope, a few blocks from the site of the proposed Barclays Center arena, part of the [controversial] Atlantic Yards development…Soon, however, workers in the space began noticing negative reactions from passers-by… A few people even entered the shop to complain. And then a few more. In all, Mr. Aggarwal said, 20 or 25 unhappy people trooped in.

Mr. Aggarwal… quickly figured out that a word that is innocuous in Queens — he lives in Forest Hills, near one of his other two bagel shops — may be anything but innocuous in Brooklyn. [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n

<<\/p>\n\n

p>The problem was that many locals oppose the Atlantic Yards project, including the Arena, and so they pressured the shop as their way of voicing dissatisfaction with the development plan.<\/p>\n\n

<<\/p>\n\n

p>In this case Aggarwal screwed up because he’s an ousider, but by outsider the journalist means a businessman from Queens rather than an immigrant, a brown-man, or even a non-Jew. It’s just good local reporting.<\/p>\n\n

[The original story in The Brooklyn Paper<\/a> does mention that he’s an imigrant from Punjab, but only in the context of saying that he was a hard working man who worked his way up from dishwasher only to have his business get caught in a local battle over the stadium.]<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, I always felt that Desi and Jewish culture were similar. Unlike WASPs, we’re big into food, we have warm but meddlesome families, and we love to argue. So I was tickled brown to see … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}