‘The next best thing to a sexual fantasy’ – hanging out at London’s all-night bagel bakery

Beigel Bake on Brick Lane in Shoreditch, east London, has been serving up its bagels 24 hours a day, every day, since 1974. In 1992, the UK filmmaker Debbie Shuter dived into this scene with her short Beigels Already. Although aficionados from New York and Montreal today might argue that the best bagels come from their cities and nowhere else, the sheer enthusiasm of the motley crowd in and around the bakery back then suggests that there was something good going on across the Atlantic too. Today, Shoreditch is home to a profusion of artisanal food outlets, and the cosmopolitan dining habits of those bagel fans have gone mainstream. Touching briefly on how bagels are made, as well as their Polish Jewish roots, this film is a cheerful and cheeky love letter to the bagel and the people who love it, as well as to the those distant 1990s.