Review: Daily Bagel tastefully funky

A turkey and bacon club from The Daily Bagel features an outstanding jalapeño cheddar bagel. (Credit: Andy Barron / RGJ)

Give us this day our daily — bagel?

Well, why not? A bagel is bread, I tell myself, as I consider this twist on the Lord's Prayer, one brought to mind by my discovery of The Daily Bagel.

The restaurant is scooped from the ground floor of 11 @ The Firehouse, an old fire station renovated into condos lying just east of the Wells Avenue overpass at East Fifth Street.

Several spots in Reno have tried to offer sandwiches and good coffee in a setting that mixed cozy with funky — think East Village authentic. What resulted, too often, was a dusty mishmash featuring bad art school projects from the owner's friends.

But The Daily Bagel gets the mix right.

Yes, the requisite local art hangs on the walls, but some of it is quite solid, and one image resembling a mandala overlaying a landscape tempts me to look for a price.

Tables are set with triangular peg games. A counter display offers Good 'N Plenty candy and other treats. The shelves of a what-not are filled with ceramic pieces.

And the newspaperman in me can't help but love the newspaper sections nicely refolded by previous readers for folks to read later on.

The Daily Bagel encourages lingering with a cup of local Wood-Fire Roasted Coffee and a ham, cheese and tomato melt built with a sesame bagel . . .

Steam baking

Except said bagel is past its prime — freshness, of course, being a chief challenge of bagelry — and there's insufficient cheddar either to contribute flavor or bind the filling. It takes swipes of mayonnaise to perk up this oddly tentative sandwich.

A similar hesitance characterizes a parmesan bagel with a schmear of sun-dried tomato cream cheese made to order. The schmear is fine, but I almost can't taste the parmesan.

Because of space constraints, one owner tells me, The Daily Bagel makes its namesake by steam baking instead of traditional boiling and baking, a process that produces the bagel's classic dense chewiness.

To be fair, traditionally made bagels aren't the norm in Northern Nevada, and the folks at Daily Bagel clearly understand bagels should not be too cake-y, a fact seemingly lost upon some other local purveyors.

Plus, the staff cheerfully indulges my dithering over what bagels to choose for what sandwich.

Best in show

Redemption for The Daily Bagel begins with an onion specimen, which I forget to request extra toasted to create those tasty burnt bits.

The bagel is deployed in a turkey and bacon club sandwich; it's chewy enough to structure textural experience and onion-y enough to enliven the turkey and the too-mild bacon (where's the salt?).

The restaurant also serves salads, as well as waffles bedazzled with the usual array of fruit and whipped cream and drizzled syrups, but for the bagel obsessed (as I confess myself to be) these items are simply ancillary.

And so, one morning, to a sandwich of scrambled eggs, cheese and (bland again) bacon.

But this breakfast is made with an outstanding jalapeño cheddar bagel, rich and truly spicy, the ingredients integrated with the bagel and not merely applied. It's the best of its type in town.

Hallelujah!

And lox

After that, it's jalapeño cheddar or not at all — with tuna salad (nicely seasoned, by the way), with a turkey and bacon club, and yet another club, and once simply toasted, then chewed off hunk by hunk in the car.

The Daily Bagel needs some fine tuning, but the jalapeño cheddar offers reason enough to visit. Now, when does the bagels and lox make its debut?