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Mission Bagel turns a home hobby into daily bread
Pacific Beach mobile kitchen NY style offers lox, schmears, and everything
Mission bagel, parking daily at the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Ingraham Street
It's kind of amazing that, five years later, we're still seeing Covid baking hobbies turn into new food businesses. It's even more amazing when the concept meets a need. Sure, I love sourdough as much as the next guy, but this latest bready endeavor truly speaks to my heart: it's all about bagels.
I went to Pacific Beach to check out Mission Bagel—which sounds like it should fit right in alongside typical San Diego Mission naming conventions. However, I suspect that mission is applied here in more a Mission: Impossible sense.
A lox sandwich with scallion cream cheese and capers, on plain bagel
Either way, midwest transplant Gabe Rubin chose to accept this mission when he started making bagels at home during the shutdowns. He applied his Jewish heritage and a bit of chutzpah to aim for the bagel holey grail: a New York style bagel with taut skin and satisfying chew.
Having sold bagels on the side for awhile, he's enlisted the help of his sister and brother-in-law to take his bagels to the streets: specifically, to Grand Avenue, at the northeast corner of Ingraham Street. The trio have put together a little mobile kitchen—a trailer outfitted with a charming, cartoonish mural depicting the three of them.
The Mission Bagel founders
The bagels aren't made in the trailer, rather in a commercial kitchen that can handle the sort of volume and temperatures bagel-making needs. Instead, the daily supply of bagels are brought to the trailer, where they're sliced, schmeared, and/or assembled into sandwiches. Say a lox sandwich ($14) dressed with cream cheese, capers, sprouts, and sliced cucumber. I ordered mine with scallion flavored cream cheese.
Other schmears available ($6.50, with bagel) include plain, lox, and strawberry (for your sweet bagel needs), while egg, tuna, and whitefish salads offer another way to go (though, to my taste, the tuna salad had a too-sweet, Miracle Whip-style tuna salad recipe, not my preferred savory style.
Most importantly, Gabe and company make a variety classic bagel flavors each day, including sesame, poppy seed, onion, cinnamon raisin, plain, and everything. I might not start peddling them on 5th Avenue, Manhattan, but for San Diego-made bagels, they do hit the spot.
Mission Bagel makes hand-made bagels with irregular shapes, evidenced here in poppy seed
You can tell they were made by hand, because rather than round, uniform, fluffy bagels like you tend to find at chain shops, these have slightly irregular shapes. They've got bumps, ridges, mild scorch-marks, and incomplete seed coverage. but none of these things keep them from being pleasant to eat. They've got snappy skin, they're dense but not too dense, and I can attest that they pass my test: you can eat one straight, without toasting, schmearing, or dressing in any way, and it stays interesting to the last bite. Or am I the only one who still likes to eat bagels this way?
Here's something you might be interested in.
Mission Bagel turns a home hobby into daily bread
Pacific Beach mobile kitchen NY style offers lox, schmears, and everything
Mission Bagel turns a home hobby into daily bread
Pacific Beach mobile kitchen NY style offers lox, schmears, and everything
Mission bagel, parking daily at the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Ingraham Street
It's kind of amazing that, five years later, we're still seeing Covid baking hobbies turn into new food businesses. It's even more amazing when the concept meets a need. Sure, I love sourdough as much as the next guy, but this latest bready endeavor truly speaks to my heart: it's all about bagels.
I went to Pacific Beach to check out Mission Bagel—which sounds like it should fit right in alongside typical San Diego Mission naming conventions. However, I suspect that mission is applied here in more a Mission: Impossible sense.
A lox sandwich with scallion cream cheese and capers, on plain bagel
Either way, midwest transplant Gabe Rubin chose to accept this mission when he started making bagels at home during the shutdowns. He applied his Jewish heritage and a bit of chutzpah to aim for the bagel holey grail: a New York style bagel with taut skin and satisfying chew.
Having sold bagels on the side for awhile, he's enlisted the help of his sister and brother-in-law to take his bagels to the streets: specifically, to Grand Avenue, at the northeast corner of Ingraham Street. The trio have put together a little mobile kitchen—a trailer outfitted with a charming, cartoonish mural depicting the three of them.
The Mission Bagel founders
The bagels aren't made in the trailer, rather in a commercial kitchen that can handle the sort of volume and temperatures bagel-making needs. Instead, the daily supply of bagels are brought to the trailer, where they're sliced, schmeared, and/or assembled into sandwiches. Say a lox sandwich ($14) dressed with cream cheese, capers, sprouts, and sliced cucumber. I ordered mine with scallion flavored cream cheese.
Other schmears available ($6.50, with bagel) include plain, lox, and strawberry (for your sweet bagel needs), while egg, tuna, and whitefish salads offer another way to go (though, to my taste, the tuna salad had a too-sweet, Miracle Whip-style tuna salad recipe, not my preferred savory style.
Most importantly, Gabe and company make a variety classic bagel flavors each day, including sesame, poppy seed, onion, cinnamon raisin, plain, and everything. I might not start peddling them on 5th Avenue, Manhattan, but for San Diego-made bagels, they do hit the spot.
Mission Bagel makes hand-made bagels with irregular shapes, evidenced here in poppy seed
You can tell they were made by hand, because rather than round, uniform, fluffy bagels like you tend to find at chain shops, these have slightly irregular shapes. They've got bumps, ridges, mild scorch-marks, and incomplete seed coverage. but none of these things keep them from being pleasant to eat. They've got snappy skin, they're dense but not too dense, and I can attest that they pass my test: you can eat one straight, without toasting, schmearing, or dressing in any way, and it stays interesting to the last bite. Or am I the only one who still likes to eat bagels this way?