I'm a Food/Travel Influencer and You Can Order My Bagel for National Bagel Day!

For National Bagel Day, New York City finally has a bagel you are not allowed to toast, and it has my name on it. The Jeremy Bagel at Tompkins Square Bagels is meant to be eaten exactly as I designed it: warm, chewy, and unapologetically untoasted!

Why This Bagel Matters to Me

Only six people before me have had a namesake bagel at Tompkins Square Bagels, one of the truly elite bagel shops in New York City, and now “The Jeremy” is on that very short list. As a Jewish New Yorker, bagels are not just breakfast to me; they’re history, community, and comfort all rolled into one perfect ring of dough.​

Bagels came to this city with Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 1800s and grew into what I honestly think is the most New York food there is. Today, with roughly 1,400 bagel shops baking close to a million bagels a day, the bagel is even officially recognized as New York State’s bread, which feels exactly right to me.​

Tompkins Square Bagels

I’ve loved Tompkins Square Bagels for years, starting from their original spot off Avenue A by Tompkins Square Park to now watching them grow to four locations, including this beautiful Upper East Side shop where my bagel is debuting. Their big, hand‑rolled, kettle‑boiled bagels, baked in small batches, are everything I want from a New York bagel: dense, chewy, and always fresh.​

They crank out more than a thousand bagels a day and back them up with about 25 different cream cheeses and a menu full of over‑the‑top sandwiches. I’ve always loved that their most famous sandwich, the Weezer, helped make cream cheese and egg sandwiches a thing in the city, and now my order is going right up on the board next to it.​

So What’s in “The Jeremy”?

Here’s exactly what my bagel order is:

• Egg everything bagel

• Scallion cream cheese

• Lox

• Avocado

• Not toasted. Ever.

Now when you walk into Tompkins Square Bagels, you can just order “The Jeremy” and get the exact combo I swear by. I honestly believe this is the most elite bagel order: the balance of fat, salt, texture, and flavor hits every note I want from a proper New York bagel.​

For me, scallion cream cheese is the elite cream cheese, it has that herby, sharp, rich flavor that stands up to everything else in the sandwich. The lox brings that clean, salty punch, and the avocado quietly ties it all together with an extra layer of fat that softens and rounds out every bite.​

Why You Can’t Toast It

I have one hard rule with this bagel: you are not allowed to toast it. When a fresh egg everything bagel comes out of Tompkins’ ovens, it already has that perfect little crunch on the edges and a deeply chewy interior that I absolutely do not want to ruin in a toaster.​

In my opinion, toasting destroys the integrity of a great bagel by drying it out and masking the work that went into boiling and baking the dough properly. I built The Jeremy specifically to show off that texture, the give of the crumb, the slight snap of the crust, and how the scallion cream cheese, lox, and avocado melt into the warm center instead of just sitting on top of a brittle surface.​

Launch, Rating, and Your Turn

The Jeremy Bagel officially goes on the menu on National Bagel Day, January 15, and for now it’s scheduled to run for at least a month. If you all go order it, post about it, and talk about it, there’s a real shot it sticks around on the menu even longer.​