Wonkette
It’s our Friday where-to-get-brunch column, Brunch DC, and this week our reviewer has found the best fresh bagels in DC, at a Neapolitan pizza place. What?!
I’ve searched the District far and wide for a decent bagel. Eventually I came upon an unlikely source for my circular carbohydrate fixation: 2 Amys Neapolitan Pizzeria. 2 Amys is rightly known for (1) being way the hell out in NW, far from a metro, and (2) having the best pizza in the city. Few know or recognize that this pizzeria also has the best bagels in the city.
Available only on Sundays, 2 Amys prepares homemade bagels and bialys that they bake in their wood-fired pizza oven. The tangyness of the sourdough used to make them comes from using leftover whey from their homemade cream cheese that they use instead of water. The result is indeed the best bagels (and bialys) in the city.
These are not traditional New York-style bagels, which upset the traditionalist in me until I took a bite. Instead they are larger, crispier, sourdough rolls with a slightly tangy taste. The bialys in particular look nothing like the traditional bialys you’d find in New York — they’re much bigger and crispier. Further, without the onion filling the partial hole of the bialy, it is hard to initially tell the difference between the bagel and the bialy. Not that this is a problem.
The bagel experience is augmented by homemade cream cheese and house-smoked salmon. The cream cheese is very soft, almost whipped, which makes it very spreadable. The salmon is nicely smoked and mild, though it did have a few dark spots and imperfections. Worth the schlep.
2 Amys Neapolitan Pizzeria, 3715 Macomb St. NW, Washington DC 20016, (202) 885-5700.
2 Amys is maybe 5 minutes from the Tenleytown Metro.
Haircut: and exactly a 1 mi. walk down Macomb to Cleveland Park Metro. But of course I’d say that b/c I live 2 blocks from 2 Amy’s and I’m still in denial about how un-cool my new ‘hood is compared to Logan Circle.
And speaking of bagels waaaaayyyyy up in NW, the best bagels in DC are at Bethesda Bagels, which IS near a metro. Yes that’s a long way to go for a bagel, but I schlepp up there at least monthly (even when I lived way down in Logan Cir.). DC Natives will remember they once had a sister joint at what is now Fuddruckers in Dupont, and there other sister venture (WhatsaBagel) in Cleveland Park closed up about a year ago (it was a sad operation to say the least). But it’s all moot because none of these sister operations compared to the original and the original is worth the trip.
I once waited for like two hours to get a seat at Two Amys for dinner, and with each passing moment the degree to which the pizza would have needed to be awesome to make up for the wait increased, and then we finally got our pizzas and they were in fact even more awesome than I could have possibly imagined or hoped for. So, their bagels are probably pretty good too.
I thought restaurants in DC were smoke free? Are they breaking code by all that house smoking?
omg.. that salmon on the bagel looks so good
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