Can I find a good Seattle bagel at... Little Market on Portage Bay
The best-kept secret in Seattle bagels
Welcome to It’s A Shanda, one Northeastern Jew’s quest to find a decent bagel in Seattle (and beyond). If you’re interested in taking this journey with me, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a review. If you want to make sure I review any specific bagels (or want to let me know why I’m wrong), you can email me at seanmatthewkeeley@gmail.com.
UPDATE: Little Market has closed. 😢
ORIGINAL: My plan for the next bagel review was to visit Muriel's in Seward Park, which I’d heard some good things about. Alas, the kosher eatery abruptly closed on November 13, so I never got the chance. It sounds like their closure came with little warning, which is a bummer as it’s not like there’s a plethora of kosher spots around Seattle. So it goes.
As for where I would search for my next bagel, I turned to another newsletter for inspiration. I get the Axios Seattle newsletter each weekday morning and find it to be a good baseline resource for local news. Melissa Santos, who runs the newsletter, has been on a bagel quest of her own and we started swapping recommendations. She mentioned Little Market on Portage Bay, which I was completely unaware of. She then wrote about their bagels, claiming they are “some of Seattle’s best.” You know how I like to check on a claim like that, so I decided to make a trek there myself.
In 2016, Carla Leonardi spun off Montlake's popular Cafe Lago with Little Lago, a neighborhood market and Italian deli in Portage Bay. Less a restaurant and more an upscale corner market, Little Lago mixed a collection of groceries and produce with a deli counter that served freshly made pizzas, sandwiches, and other baked goods. Per Eater Seattle, the ambiance was meant to resemble “the Italian corner grocery that Leonardi's parents ran in Ohio when she was growing up.”
Careful not to upset fearful locals who were wary of a full-scale restaurant moving into the neighborhood, Leonardi told Seattle Met “we are allowed a few stools for seating and hope the neighbors will find our market to be a delightful place to sit and enjoy life with others from near home.”
Sure enough, Little Lago became a staple of the neighborhood thanks to the many delicious and affordable offerings inside its tiny space. This past April, Leonardi announced that she had sold her share of the business, and soon after it was rebranded as Little Market on Portage Bay. Far as I am aware, much of the space and its offerings remained the same, but bagels appear to be a newer item (feel free to correct me if that’s not true).
So many of the bagel spots I’ve been to are trying to recapture the authentic Jewish deli experience, meld the Pacific Northwest aesthetic to bagels, or build themselves into the next big bagel chain. But has the best bagel in Seattle actually been tucked away in a tiny corner of Seattle this whole time? Let’s find out.
And if you want to know how I define a good bagel, you can find that here.
WHAT I ORDERED
Untoasted sesame bagel with garlic & herb cream cheese.
Untoasted plain bagel as-is.
THE EXPERIENCE
On an otherwise unassuming residential stretch of Fuhrman Avenue, you’ll find one retail block with four businesses, one of which is Little Market. It’s a neighborhood market in every sense. The lowkey nature of the market belies the quality of baked items to be found inside, including loaves of bread that I have to return to try.
The most important thing to note is that this is not a traditional deli and it’s not anything like the other bagel places I’ve been to. It’s a market that specializes in pizzas that also happens to serve bagels in the morning. Given that, the options were limited. I believe the available flavors consisted of plain, sesame, poppyseed, and asiago cheese. Without my go-to option, I went with the sesame bagel.
The same issue came up with the cream cheese options, which consisted solely of plain and garlic & herb, so I went with the latter. I was asked if I wanted toasted or untoasted but was glad to hear that they don’t automatically toast their bagels.
It’s also worth noting that they slice the bagels length-wise and give you the cream cheese in a container to spread yourself. Not the bagel experience you might expect in a deli or bagel shop, but that’s how they roll here.
UPON FIRST GLANCE
I noticed right away that the bagels here looked pretty brown, though the specific shade varied. The bubbly look of the bagels implied some crispiness ahead. I don’t know if it’s because they use such small-batch baking but they all seemed to be well-cooked. Usually, when I visit a bagel place, some bagels look better than others. But here, they all looked appealing.
TOP
The top of the plain bagel was golden brown and covered in bubbles, which always is a very good sign. Touching the top of the bagel I didn’t get much in the way of a crispness.
As for the sesame bagel, this one was a very dark brown color, which got me very excited. As the color suggests, this one offered a very crisp top. It was also very firm to the touch and I felt a little crispiness when pushing on it.
BOTTOM
The most concerning factor of the plain bagel was that it had a very pronounced cornmeal ring of doom. However, this was the rare occasion when that didn’t predict a bad bite. Just like the top of the bagel, the bottom was firm but not overly crisp.
The bottom of the sesame bagel, however, offered a very crispy feel. It created a firm shell that I just knew was going to make for a fun bite. No sesame seeds on the bottom of the bagel, however.
INSIDE/BITE
The bite on the plain bagel revealed an extremely soft interior. Pillowy in a way that I have not come across very often out here. The bagel offered a good tear when biting into it, balancing the chewy interior with a slight crunch from the outside. Because the top wasn’t super crispy, it led to a tough, chewy bite, but in a really good way.
As for the sesame, the promise of that dark brown color came true as it was a super crispy bite. The interior was very chewy again, and the contrast between the crunchy exterior and fluffy interior made for one of the best bagel bites I’ve had in Seattle. The sesame seeds came across in a surprisingly strong way as well.
Admittedly, I didn’t really like the garlic & herb cream cheese at first. It did grow on me a little bit as I worked my way through the bagel, but I think next time I’d just stick to the plain cream cheese. Just not my preferred flavor profile.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The two bagels at Little Market were a fascinating study in contrasts. Most of the time, I find that one of the bagels ends up being better than the other. Sometimes, decidedly so. In this instance, despite both bagels offering different experiences in terms of crispiness and bite, they both delivered. I finished both bagels, which I rarely do.
Little Market is not the place you think of when you think about where to get a bagel on a Saturday morning. But it should be. There’s no conceit here. No attempt to remind you of the delis you went to as a child. No desire to mask mediocre bagels in wacky slogans or unique flavors. No accolades from the local food blogs or celebrity chefs.
They just make some of the best bagels in Seattle and that’s that.
Is It Good Enough For The Goys?
May we all be so lucky as the local goys to have this kind of bagel in their neighborhood. The people of Portage Bay have no idea how good they have it. Or maybe they do and they’ve been trying to keep quiet so the rest of us don’t find out.
Is It Good Enough For Northeastern Jews?
I gotta say, I did not expect to walk out of a neighborhood market with shelves full of pantry items and an extensive pizza menu and say to myself “this is one of the best bagels in Seattle” and yet here we are. I will not only be going back but I would gladly bring people from back East here to try them out. I couldn’t put them at the top of my list, but they’re closer than I ever would have predicted.
MY SEATTLE BAGEL RANKINGS SO FAR
Little Market
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Thank you for this rec. wow!