Finally
This is not the best pic I have of Barry Bagels. I have better, way funnier ones. Like the time I dumped a whole big cup of coffee on the floor and had to call out the troops to help me clean it up. Or the life-size bobble-head of Barry himself installed after he died. Or back in 2007 when I arrived with my first iPhone and MMCB1 was inspecting it and accidentally took its FIRST PHOTO! Of a bag of bagels she’d just bought. I used it as my screen saver for quite a while until a beach urchin inadvertently changed it, not understanding its [rather silly] significance.
I don’t know when Barry’s opened but I have been going there a looooonnnng time, ever since the beach urhins were in grade school. I learned how to order a double cappuccino with hazelnut flavoring by copying my extreme extrovert friend, a woman who painted her living room royal purple one weekend when her husband and sons were out with the boy scouts. I took my parents there, one time spending something like an HOUR doing the usual Birch Point Beach gossip.
I was invited to join a weekly coffee clatch down at Zola when my older urchin went to middle school at the alternative “open” school. That lasted for a couple years but by high school the group was splintering (people were getting jobs, etc.) so a few of us west-siders migrated over to Barry’s. And have been going there once a week EVER SINCE.
My friends have been kvetching the whole time about how shabby it is. In particular, they hate the furniture. It is somewhat unwieldy but I tend to sorta go with the flow on that kind of thing so I have never totally understood their crabbiness.
The last time I got coffee at Barry’s was sometime last February. MMCB1 then jetted off to Australia for a month and MMCB2 was doing her Bubbe duty so wasn’t a frequent participant. Okay. What the hell happened in March? I got sent home to telecommute on the 12th. MMCB1 had to cut her Australian stay short and scramble to get a flight home. She messaged me that she was coming home early and we should meet at Barry’s when she got here. I said “OK”, knowing that we would not be meeting but not wanting to add to her stress level. When she got home, she realized that and for obvious reasons we have not been back. We do FaceTime every week.
So, you are wondering how this long meandering story ends, right? Is Barry’s closing? No no no no no, it is not. It is RENOVATING! There have been rumors about a renovation for a couple years now and apparently it is HAPPENING! This is a shop that has always had a big take-out business and it is going great guns doing curbside with online ordering. Without customers underfoot INSIDE the store, this seems like a perfect time to renovate.
Alas, I’m not sure when I’ll go back inside but all of a sudden I have a hankering for a tuna bagel. Maybe I’ll do curbside soon?
January 30th, 2021 at 8:12 pm
I absolutely love bagels and can hardly wait to go out for a real one, instead of the ones from the grocery store.