Kossar’s Bialys

Update 3/18/09: Kossar’s is no longer open 24 hours. See hours below.

I never tasted a bialy before I lived in New York City. Even in New York these cousins to the more-mainstream bagel are hard to come by. Try to find a good one and most likely, you’ll end up standing at a certain spot on Grand Street, where trendy Lower East Side melds with Chinatown and overlooks the projects. Here stands Kossar’s Bialys, the remaining stronghold of downtown’s vanished bialy-baking industry.

Inside it seems like little has changed since they opened seventy years ago. Behind a simple counter stand a few wire racks piled with warm bialys, bagels and bulkas. Across a powdery floor, trays of dough placed in tall racks await their turn in the brick oven, whose depths are plumbed by a lone baker with a pole. Seating consists of a bench outside, with an old guy already sitting on it.

But atmosphere isn’t the point–this place is all about bialys. While bagels are boiled prior to baking, rendering their crusts hard and shiny and their innards dense, bialys are simply baked, leaving them lighter and airier, but still chewy and delicious. Instead of a center hole they have a dimple filled with sweet chopped onion. Kossar’s doesn’t toast, so if you do so at home you’ll find even more flavor unleashed, especially with a thin layer of cream cheese or butter spread over top. If you haven’t been for a while, steel yourself for sticker shock–the price of a bialy has skyrocketed from sixty to ninety cents since 2006.

Snack spots, even good ones, come and go quickly in this hood, and I don’t tend to get too attached (witness, if you will, the Chase Bank that was once the venerable Second Avenue Deli). I don’t think shrugging off the past is necessarily a bad thing (now scheduled for demolition–the funeral pyre-ish tower of bedraggled toys on Sixth Street and Avenue B–amid cries of protest I fail to understand). But, ye Manhattan gods! Leave us Kossar’s Bialys! Someone make this a designated landmark before it’s too late!

(shot of the doomed Tower of Toys on East Sixth Street)

Kossar’s Bialys 367 Grand Street at Essex Street. Sun-Thurs 6am-8pm. Fri 6am – 2pm. Closed Saturday. REPEAT: Closed Saturday!! If you forget and head down on a Saturday, don’t worry. Doughnut Plant is a couple doors down, and is worth a visit.