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[title]It’s 9pm on a Wednesday evening. Bleary-eyed punters are taking wolfish bites out of brown paper bags, huddling under a bright white sign that declares ‘open 24 hours 7 days’. Mustard dribbles down chins, pint-fuelled slurs are exchanged, and fingers point at the colossal pink hump of salt beef being sliced into thick, flaky slabs in the window. Brick Lane’s Beigel Bake is popping.
Inside, two women are hard at work behind the counter: sleeves rolled up, branded aprons smeared with cream cheese and nutella, blasting demands at the kitchen in full-throttle Cockney accents. ‘It could be a night out just coming here and watching people,’ says Kiri, who’s been a regular for 20 years. ‘It’s fully comedic. Just a great vibe.’
The word ‘institution’ gets bandied around a lot. But Beigel Bake – one of the two 24-hour bakeries on Brick Lane – is a London institution. It has perennial queues out the door and counts Madonna and certain members of the royal family as clientele. You’ll either have been there, have been there and not remembered it, or will have plans to visit. But just how did this place become so legendary – and what goes into making its sweet, circular deliciousness?
The beginning
On the wall behind Beigel Bake’s counter is a framed photograph of a gentle-looking elderly man: Asher Cohen. A carpenter by trade, he came over from Israel in the 1960s to help his brother, Jonny Cohen, who was working in the London baking sector.
Back then, the east end wasn’t the Ganni-wearing and oat-flat-white-drinking side of London that a lot of it is now. A maze of warehouses, factories, and housing estates, it was home to a large Jewish community, many who arrived in Spitalfields in the late 19th century. By the 1950s, a vast Bangladeshi community started moving in, and the area became known as ‘Banglatown’.
Jonny had already opened three bakeries in the city: one on Ridley Road, one in Dalston, and one on Brick Lane. But Jonny’s Brick Lane beigel shop wasn’t the Beigel Bake that we know these days. It was a few doors down. It was in the yellow-fronted building that’s now known as ‘Brick Lane Beigel Shop’. AKA, Beigel Bake’s most notorious rival.
‘My dad rented the bakery from my uncle during the week, and started his own wholesale business,’ says Daniel Cohen, Asher’s son. ‘My dad started to do quite well, so my uncle got envious and wanted the shop back.’
So how did another beigel shop – the one at 159 Brick Lane – come into being? ‘It used to be a butcher’s shop,’ Daniel says. ‘The guy who owned it retired, and the timing was perfect.’ His dad purchased that shop and established Beigel Bake in 1974 with his other two brothers, Amnon Cohen and Sammy Minzley, all of whom had been trained by Jonny.
Since then, the shop has stayed with the Cohens. ‘I remember coming in as a young child and climbing up stacks of flour,’ says Daniel, now aged 39. ‘The guys used to give me lumps of dough and I pretended I was making bread with them. Now I realise I wasn’t helping anyone, I was just being kept quiet.’
After Asher passed away in 2018, Daniel became the owner with his brother Nathan and uncles Amnon and Sammy. ‘I saw my dad work hard all my life,’ says Daniel. ‘I guess I wanted to be like him. He really put a lot into it, and our name has got more and more popular. Thank God we’re reaping the benefits.’
These days, Beigel Bake is what you might call a bumper, three-storey beigel operation (apparently, one of the older staff members was born upstairs). If you’ve ever been in, you’ll know you can see all the way back to the kitchen, and get a first-hand peek at the beigels being pumped out by the dozen. They come straight from the oven and are thrown into the shop. ‘You can literally just put your hand over and grab a fresh hot beigel,’ Daniel says.
Drunk and disorderly
These days the shop is an around-the-clock beigel funhouse. Everyone has their own after-hours story. Maybe you met your partner there. Maybe you were sick on the floor when your drunk belly realised it couldn’t quite handle the gherkin’s unforgiving tang. Maybe you had a life-changing epiphany. Maybe, like Lisa, you came here with your flatmates at 2am, then sat in the park munching peanut butter bagels for two hours while having a ‘good political discussion’.
‘As a Bethnal Green resident for nearly a decade, making the quick right down Brick Lane at the end of the night to try and mitigate the excesses was a bit of a ritual,’ says Laszlo Zsoldos. ‘The best thing in the world though, and a dirty little secret: their salt beef with the cream cheese. That’s an off menu special but really is the duck's nuts.’
‘I used to come up here a lot in the old days when I was a chauffeur,’ says Kevin. ‘I got bagels and a cup of tea in the evening. Been coming up here now for 35 years – it’s still good, still the same place that’s open 24 hours.’
‘That was always a drunk person asleep on the floor that you had to step over,’ says EJ Trivett, reminiscing on her years in London as a young professional. She’d go a couple of times a month, ordering a salt beef, gherkin and mustard sandwich, with a coconut slice for drunken pudding.
‘I remember bowling in at 3am, the surly faces of the women on the salt beef section, sick of the stench of drunken youth,’ she says. ‘The trick was to get there just as the boiled bread was coming out of the oven and stash a load of fresh bakes for the inevitable hungover breakfast too.’
The late night clientele has meant that the staff aren’t just bakers or shopkeepers. They’re also bouncers. ‘It’s a unique place, things happen on a daily basis,’ admits Daniel, who’s had to chuck people out for inappropriate behaviour or sweet-talk wired clubbers to go home.
Back in the day, Beigel Bake never sold sandwiches. It started off as a wholesaler that would begin baking at night, ready to deliver fresh breads at five or six o’clock in the morning. It was by accident that it became a shop. ‘One day, this drunk delivery driver came in and punched the table, demanding a salmon beigel,’ Daniel says. ‘We didn’t really do that. So my dad said: ‘Okay, we’ll start selling sandwiches then.’’
That was the beginning of Beigel Bake’s 24-hour hangover. Since then, it’s become a reliable, tasty haven, expertly placed next to the buzzing clubs and pubs of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green.
The secret recipe
Beigel Bake gets through around 20,000 of their brown bags in a single week and churns out about 3000 of their round chewy things each day. They use around 150 kilos of salmon and 100 kilos of cream cheese per week, as well as a huge amount of herring, avocado, houmous, and all sorts of other good stuff.
The humble beigel has noble roots. Allegedly the food owes its being to King Jan Sobieski of Poland, who saved his country from a Turkish invasion in the 17th century. To say cheers, his bakers made him bread that looked like his stirrups. Et voilà.
But when it comes to Beigel Bake, the secret to their shiny, sweet perfection is one well kept. ‘We don’t mix the dough with our feet or anything,’ Daniel laughs. Their recipe goes back decades, and is owed originally to uncle Jonny, who passed away many years ago. ‘He learned to make beigels from a guy in Stamford Hill, a really small place,’ Daniel says.
Flour, salt, sugar, malt, yeast and water are chucked into a giant mixer, then left to rest. The dough is cut into seven-pound pieces, shaped into balls, then fed into a rolling machine to give it that distinct beigel shape. After that, they’re boiled for a good ’ol chewiness before being baked in the oven. ‘My dad's hands were like shovels,’ Daniel says. Before the machine, they had to shape dough by hand – three or four thousand times a day.
Then there’s the pronunciation. Bye-gul? Bay-gul? Bee-gul? ‘It’s bay-gel,’ argues Lisa, outside the shop. ‘It looks like ‘Bea-gle’, like the dog,’ says her friend Fynn. ‘I don’t know!’
‘The clue is in the name of the shop,’ says Alan Fitter, who regularly visits from south of the river to buy beigels and rye bread. ‘I often stand in the queue muttering under my breath, ‘It’s beigels, not bagels!’’
Here’s what’s up. The Jewish ‘beigel’ is more twisted and chewy. The American ‘bagel’ is more round, crumbly, and soft, with an extra prominent hole. It became Americanised after the O.G. bread arrived in New York from Poland in the nineteenth century. By the mid twentieth century, it had become so popular that it was being made in factories, steam-baked rather than boiled (that’s mass production for you). ‘We call it beigel,’ Daniel confirms. ‘Bye-gul’ it is.
Finding fame
How did a traditional beigel shop put Brick Lane on the map? How has Beigel Bake excited the imaginations of Londoners and tourists, become a Chinese social media sensation, and even inspired a copycat ‘Brick Lane Bagel Co’ chain, that’s about to open a branch in… Harlow?
There’s something about the character of Beigel Bake that makes people keep coming back. ‘We know generations of customers,’ says Daniel. ‘I see the same people on a weekly basis. They know they know me, they’ve met my kids.’
It’s thanks to the boisterously loud but surprisingly kind ladies at the till, the willingness of the bakers to let customers nosy into the kitchen, the no-nonsense interiors and the cheap-but-tasty food. ‘I don’t go out much any more, myself,’ Maria says behind the counter, handing over a sausage roll as she talks to the tipsy customers. ‘I just Netflix and chill. But not that kind of Netflix and chill. Netflix and chill.’
It’s also the fact that, literally, anything goes. ‘A couple exchanged their vows in the bakery,’ Daniel says. ‘They met each other here. I think they were both clubbing and they got chatting, eating their beigels. I gave them something to eat after the wedding to say congratulations.’
It’s also become a prime celeb-spotting destination – from the cast of EastEnders, to famous footballers, the Spice Girls, Madonna, Sophie Ellis Bexter, and Action Bronson. ‘Mariah Carey came in with her bodyguards,’ Daniel says. ‘She had a salmon and cream cheese beigel and tried our baked cheese cake. Her bouncers had salt beef.’
Royals Will and Kate visited Beigel Bake in 2020 to see how the east end of London was coping during the pandemic. ‘They’re lovely, they got stuck in and helped to make the dough,’ Daniel says. Even the Kray Twins used to hang around, back in the east end’s gangster heyday. ‘From what I heard, they were actually very well mannered,’ Daniel says. ‘If someone was giving us trouble – like if someone swore at the girls – they'd turn around and say, ‘Oi, watch your mouth mate!’’
The guys next door
If you’re talking about Brick Lane and beigels, it’s either the ‘yellow one’ or the ‘white one’. You have your allegiance. You have your loyalties. And you’ll say no more.
But we know that everyone’s thinking the same thing. What one tastes better? What one is the original? What one is friendlier? And why are there only four doors between them? ‘Everyone told me the white one is the original one,’ says Jidout, waiting in line for a salt beef. ‘Some like the yellow, some like the white.’
Here’s a newsflash for you: the yellow one on 155 Brick Lane was the first one on the street. It was established by Jonny Cohen in the early 1960s (although their website says something quite different), and was taken over by Israeli brothers David and Aron in 1987. Back then, it was called the Evering Bakery. The name changed to The Beigel Shop, as we know it now, in 2002.
Over the years, the shops have been forced to differentiate themselves. The yellow one started selling rainbow beigels (the ones that originated in New York and went viral in, like, 2016), and offers different fillings like bacon, while the white one has stuck to a more traditional, kosher-style menu. ‘Introducing the rainbow beigels was definitely a highlight,’ says Melanie White, part of the Beigel Shop family. ‘We had people coming from all over.’
The odd proximity of the shops has inevitably tugged at people’s imaginations, and rumours are rife. Conrad, who had stopped off for his routine beigel after a Wednesday evening skating sesh, assured me that he’d seen some funny business going on. ‘You know that other [yellow] bagel shop down the road?’ he says. ‘I saw a guy from there bring a mouse into this one [Beigel Bake]. It’s a war zone.’ The Beigel Shop denies the allegation.
Both shops assure us there’s ‘no real rivalry.’ ‘If we run out of yeast, we'll borrow some from next door,’ says Daniel. ‘If they run out of flour, we’ll lend some to them. We're friendly, we’re neighbourly. It's not aggressive and not malicious.’ The Beigel Shop agrees. ‘Obviously, there's competition,’ says Melanie. ‘We're not the same business now, we used to be. But we’re family friends.’
Future-proofing
For the Brick Lane beigel shops, the last few years have been a rollercoaster. ‘We’ve always been known for being cheap, nothing’s cheap anymore,’ says Daniel. ‘Our costs have gone up 40 percent, salmon has gone up about four pounds a pound, and flour is going up to three pounds a bag.’ Inevitably, prices have had to rise to keep up. And during the pandemic, Beigel Bake was forced to embrace the digital world and launch a delivery app.
Brick Lane has also changed – it looks very different than how it did when the Kray Twins ran the town. Students have moved in, edgy bars and designer vintage stores have opened up, and locals and activists have taken to the streets with the Save Brick Lane campaign, protesting against gentrification. But the beigel shops have remained: always open, always baking, always a source of endless banter and bread.
‘I think Beigel Bake is probably one of the only places that has stayed consistent the whole time, because that part of London has changed so rapidly,’ says EJ. ‘Authenticity is part of the appeal,’ says Melanie, speaking about The Beigel Shop. ‘As Brick Lane has gentrified, this is just old school and really cheap.’
Looking at the tourists, the characters behind the till, the old geezers and tipsy art students – people young, old, and of all ethnicities – clutching their brown paper bags, it’s easy to see why the Brick Lane beigel shops have an almost religious significance to Londoners. Sure, part of it is owed to the sharp kick of the gherkin. The smooth moreishness of the cream cheese might play a role. And the pre-bought beigels that satisfy your hangover certainly will help. But, crucially, there’s something else that hits you before the smell of baking bread wafting from the shop. It’s the sound of shouting, conversation and laughter. The sound of Londoners.
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