I am not a food critic. I am, however, a food eater. Most notably, I am a lunch eater, because lunch is the meal that takes place during work, and it is, therefore, the best hour of the day. I do not bring my lunch, nor do I call out for it. Is this because I find eating at a desk uncivilized? Or is it because those who eat at their desks are expected to be simultaneously working at their desks?
If I am going out to lunch alone, as I often do, because my co-workers are eating and working at their desks, I generally go out in pursuit of sliced turkey, preferably sliced turkey on a bagel. As it turns out, there is a Brooklyn Bagel Deli directly across the street from my office. But even if it were not directly across the street from my office, or if I wound up in some other office, far away, I would go to Brooklyn Bagel Deli—or at least think wistfully about going there while going somewhere else—because Brooklyn Bagel Deli is home of the empire club on a cheddar bagel, the sandwich that single-handedly ruined my conditioning last spring. If I start to enumerate the contents of the empire club—turkey, bacon, mayo, lettuce, tomato—you may say, and perhaps you already are saying, something along the lines of "Duh, idiot. It's a club sandwich." As I said, I am not a food critic. I can't quite tell you why I like the empire club on a cheddar bagel so much. I can only ask that you trust me, and look downward in mock sadness if you don't.
It could be that I have extraculinary reasons for liking the empire club. It could be the tall, purple booths at my neighborhood Brooklyn Bagel Deli. Think about it: The convenience of a quick bite to eat and the luxury of a tall, purple booth. It could also have to do with the all-CNN, all-the-time televisions, which sometimes have the sound off and the closed captioning on, so I can keep up with the news if I want, or simply look down at my book and pretend there is no news, no news at all, just me and my turkey and my bagel and my book and the 22 precious minutes left in my lunchtime.
The Brooklyn Bagel Deli also makes excellent wraps—the tristate club (turkey with roast beef and bacon) on a spinach tortilla is my favorite—and breakfast sandwiches. As for specialty sandwiches to rival the empire club, the Santa Fe turkey, which has a flavorful jalapeño cream-cheese spread and is best on a jalapeño cheddar bagel, is a worthy choice, as is the uptown turkey, with low-fat, scallion cream-cheese and alfalfa sprouts on whole-wheat bread. My wife, who is perhaps a less committed turkeyphile than I, is partial to the pastrami Ruben or the tuna salad sandwich on a sesame-seed bagel. For red-meat lovers, there's a tasty steak sandwich with peppers and melted provolone. Dieters will appreciate the low-carb bagels, as well as fresh fruit cups, granola and Yoplait yogurt.
The Brooklyn Bagel Deli also offers plenty of snacks, from cinnamon-sugar bagel crisps to obscenely good chocolate-chip muffins and that Seinfeldian favorite, the black-and-white cookie. For the kids, there are cartoon-themed cookies and color-a-cookie kits. And yes, there are bagels, baskets and baskets of bagels, from the venerable everything bagel to the even more venerable nothing-at-all bagel.
Now, all that being said, you may at some point find me somewhere else, eating someone else's version of turkey-on-a-bagel. I am an ecumenical turkey-on-a-bagel eater, a fan of diversity and fruitful dialogue and that sort of thing. I am, in short, an adventurer, and there's no telling where I'll wind up eating turkey-on-a-bagel. My sandwich punch cards are scattered across town. But only in Brooklyn am I due for a freebie.