The Scoop on Gotham Bagels

I know that we just had them for class on Wednesday, but I am such a massive fan of bagels that I had to go see the real place. I had a few friends come with me to let us try different things, and with that intent, we took the 02 bus over on to Gotham Bagels.

Once we get into the shop, we’re greeted by a line that extends well out of the door. As a foodie, this is always incredibly exciting to me, since it means we’re in the right place. As we wait and the line slowly but surely moves closer, we start to see the menu and we’re able to talk about what we’re going to order. One bagel, in particular, catches our eye as a bagel of interest, called the O.M.F.G.

This bagel has bacon, fried eggs, cheddar, fried chicken, and spicy aioli. It makes my mouth water, just even thinking of fried chicken on a bagel, a concept not found very often. My brother is maybe the biggest fried chicken person I know, if it’s on the menu anywhere that’s what he’s ordering. As we move closer to the order station, we all decide on our orders. We all decided on our own combination of a bagel and cream cheese, with my friend Max and I splitting the O.M.F.G.

The lady that took all of our orders was really pleasant was very helpful. I appreciated their attire too, because it’s called Gotham Bagels they all had on some sort of shirt from Batman, with most of them wearing GCPD shirts (Gotham City Police Department). Another friend, Amanda, got the iced coffee which is locally sourced from Colectivo (one of my personal favorite coffee shops that I’ve found here in Madison so far) and really enjoyed that too.

We did have to wait a decent amount of time to get our bagels, but with good reason. The O.M.F.G. definitely took the longest to wait for, understandably. I wouldn’t recommend going to Gotham Bagels if you’re in a rush, but if you have a good morning on a weekend (like we did) to just wait for some great food, I’d highly recommend it.

I love a good amount of cream cheese on my bagels and boy do they not disappoint. It comes split in half, with both sides having the same amount of cream cheese to them. We all ate ours as separate halves, but a quick word to the wise- we ate ours in the restaurant, if you get the bagels to go they fold it in and I assume you get less cream cheese because of that. Because I didn’t have any local bagel shops near where I lived in Stillwater, MN I only really have to go off of Bruegger’s and Einstein’s.

To no surprise, I really liked it there and thought it was quite a bit better than both of those places. Their cream cheese was quite flavorful, I almost always get an everything bagel with veggie cream cheese, it’s the same one that I’ve been getting since I was a little kid. You can tell they took plain cream cheese and mixed in tons of vegetables, the color said all of that. 

The O.M.F.G. was good but not as great as we had hoped. We both agreed that it could have used some more of the aioli, it was almost a little bland but you could still easily taste the eggs and chicken separately. Otherwise, it was a great bagel, the egg yolk had all of its golden goodness be soaked up by the bagel, which we chose for it to be an onion bagel.

Overall I’d highly recommend this bagel shop, I really enjoyed my time there and I thought my experience was really pleasing. It can be a hike, it’s northeast of the capital by a little bit, but if you’re willing to make the walk, bike, or bus, it’s completely worth it.

-Lars