Bummer, but there's still Zabar's.

Patrick J - I hear what you're saying. But a *good* just-baked bagel is a different thing entirely. Will change your mind, I suspect.

I guess Kramer's strike finally brought H&H to its knees.

Or too many people found gum in their bagels. Hey, no bagel, no bagel, no bagel.....

Sorry - try Oakland Bagel - Oakland, New Jersey. Best bagel on the planet.

We always eat here when in NYC, as we stay in a hotel (The Lucerne) on 79th and Broadway. This is sad. They were always busy...

Ironically, I went in there for the first time a few weeks ago. And because it was only a bagel shop, as in, store selling bagels, not a cafe where you could actually eat your bagel, or even do so much as cut it in half and schmear it on the premises, and because I did not travel with all the silverware necessary to feed my family on a park bench outside the Am. Mus. of Nat. Hist., I had to walk back out again and go to Zabar's (some sacrifice) and get stuff there that we could actually eat that morning.

New York remains a marvelous, maddening place where shops make absolutely magnificent things, and yet don't seem to have the customer-focused retail common sense that God gave a Mailbox Etc. in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and would encourage them to actually sell things in a way people can use them.

There's been a lot of this happening all over, and it brings up a salient point of restaurant/food-service economics that most in the public don't get: The most important factor in the success or failure of any restaurant is often not the chef, the menu, the promotion, the atmosphere, or the actual taste of the food. It is....the lease. When places that have existed for decades suddenly go away it usually isn't a matter of a business turndown, death of a patriarch and offspring disinterest, or any of the things you might imagine would close an institution that is, it seems, doing good business. Some of these places have negotiated 25-year leases and when the time runs out a short-sighted landlord thinks "At LAST! NOW I can cash in on that cheapskate s.o.b.'s success that has been at my expense all these years!" and also presumes they won't close or move because of the difficulties of leaving a traditional and well-known address and local customers and because comparable rents in the area are just as high.

Wrong.

I know of one famous L.A. restaurant which, faced with a huge rent increase in their 40-plus-years location, chose instead to build a completely new restaurant on some land they did own across the street at a cost of over 4 million bucks, even though all the "grandfathered in" rules wouldn't apply and at one point the city wanted them to install a "turntable" to spin tour busses around in the parking lot to ease traffic congestion at the cost of an additional 500k or so.

Landlords of the world, take heed--get greedy and you'll get vacancies (and this applies to cities and counties and other taxing authorities, too--people vote with their feet and businesses have more reason to put on the running shoes and vacate your town.)

It was true in the boom, but during hard times it is triply true. Not only that, this tactic of having buildings that sit empty but have high rental rates as a means of artificially inflating the owner's net worth stats and thus creating collateral for other purposes doesn't work anymore either in our tighter credit times.

It ain't the bagel or the lox, folks--it's the rent "hole" that closes the shop.

Fairmont Bagel, Montreal - & I'm from the other side of the country. (Back talk from a BRITISH Columbian.) Better because they're NOT New York (style) bagels!