It's a rare occasion when New York bagel shops take their cues from — gasp — Los Angeles. But when a fad hits big on TikTok, all bets are off. That's the case with the stuffed bagel, a recent phenomenon that hails from the Koreatown neighborhood of L.
A. Bagels are apparently all the rage in South Korea these days, as well as a decadent riff on garlic bread called Korean cream cheese garlic buns . Fluffy Hawaiian buns are filled with cream cheese and dunked in a garlic butter “custard.
” This is the landscape that inspired a Los Angeles shop named Calic Bagel in 2021 to invent a bagel version of the cream cheese garlic bun, which takes the visually appealing cheese pull to fantastical new levels. And the phenomenon has gotten so big that it's reached Long Island. You can find this legendary “stuffed bagel” at The Everything Bagel of Commack, a veteran-owned business that's pretty savvy on social media.
The shop owned by Steve Ott debuted its own version of the stuffed bagel on Instagram May 23, and the influencers quickly converged to produce various viral videos. Manager Vicky Lima said she and the shop's social media manager came up with the idea, but held off for several weeks because the shop was already very busy. Now they've been selling dozens a day and are planning to expand the menu to more stuffed bagels with meats like chopped bacon.
“We get it, everybody likes a New York bagel,” she said. “But why not do something new with it, experiment with it?�.
