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Nine LA Bagel Shops Worth Crossing Town For
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) — a tray of fresh bagels, shown for context; not any specific shop on this list.
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Quick take
Courage Bagels is widely credited with starting LA's current bagel moment — by refusing to make a New York bagel at all, going Montreal-style instead.
Brooklyn Bagel Bakery has been running since 1953, making it the elder statesman of this entire list by decades.
This isn't a ranking — a Montreal-style bagel and a New York deli bagel aren't playing the same sport. It's a map of what each shop does differently.
No prices are listed anywhere — menus and hours change too often to promise accuracy, and this list is entirely unpaid.
For most of Los Angeles's modern food history, the bagel was the one category the city conceded to New York. That changed fast. Over roughly the last decade, a wave of home bakers, farmers-market pop-ups, and one very patient Highland Park deli turned into a genuine scene — dense New York-style rings sitting on menus next to thinner, sweeter Montreal-style ones, gluten-free versions that don't taste like an apology, and at least one stuffed, garlic-butter creation that has nothing to do with either tradition. LAist has gone as far as arguing the city is now "eating New York's breakfast." That's a strong claim. It's also not an unreasonable one.
We're not ranking these nine by a single "best" — a Montreal-style bagel and a New York deli bagel aren't playing the same sport. Instead, this is a map: what each shop is actually doing differently, where it sits in the city, and the one order to lead with if you only get one bagel today.
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) — a bagel, lox, and schmear, shown for context.
The ones that started the conversation
Virgil Village
Courage Bagels
Courage is the shop most credited with kicking off LA's current bagel moment, and it did it by refusing to make a New York bagel at all. Its rings are Montreal-style — thinner, sweeter, hand-rolled and boiled in honeyed water — then topped open-faced rather than sliced and stuffed. The lines that wrap around the block on weekend mornings are real, and they're the reason half the shops on this list exist.
Lead with: the smoked salmon, open-faced with cream cheese, cucumber, and a finish of olive oil.
Highland Park
Belle's Delicatessen
Belle's has the best origin story on this list: high school friends Nick Schreiber and J.D. Rocchio started making bagels in a backyard as a pop-up back in 2012, years before "LA bagel scene" was a phrase anyone used. The dough is still the point — a double-fermented recipe sweetened with barley malt syrup that gives the crust a deeper, almost caramelized aroma than a standard NY bagel.
Lead with: the Shelskey — pastrami-smoked lox with a sharp deli mustard.
Silver Lake
Maury's Bagels
Maury's makes the opposite bet from Courage: small, dense, chewy bagels with a thin, almost cracker-like crust, baked in frequent small batches through the morning rather than one big bake. That means a bagel bought at 11am can taste noticeably fresher than one from a shop that baked its whole day's supply at 6am.
Lead with: the sablefish sandwich.
Not trying to be New York at all
Koreatown
Calic Bagel
Calic doesn't split the difference between LA and New York — it skips the argument entirely and goes fusion. The bagels themselves are fluffy with a thin, blistered crust, but the menu is built around Korean and pan-Asian fillings: bulgogi, gochujang aioli, puffy garlic-butter stuffed varieties that read closer to a milk bread than a classic bagel.
Lead with: the "Ktown Not Philly," bulgogi and gochujang aioli.
Palms
Daniel's Bagels
Daniel Messinger started this one during pandemic lockdown while still a student at UC Santa Barbara, baking with his brother Ben and selling through farmers markets before landing a brick-and-mortar in Palms in 2022. The bagels run smaller than most on this list — closer to a "rip-and-dip" size meant for tearing apart and dunking.
Lead with: "the works" cream cheese with lox.
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) — an everything bagel, shown for context.
At a glance: the rest of the map
These four round out the list — a Valley trio with its own cured lox, and the shop that was doing this before any of the others were born.
Burbank · Sherman Oaks · Calabasas
Hank's Bagels
Trevor Faris and his partner Kelly opened Hank's in 2019 as a focaccia-forward sandwich shop; bagel demand took over within the first week. A three-day fermentation and in-house cured lox are the through-line across all three locations. Order the Number 3, with house-cured lox and pickled onion.
Historic Filipinotown
Brooklyn Bagel Bakery
Opened in 1953, making it the elder statesman of this entire list by decades. It operated as a wholesale bakery for most of its life before reopening a proper retail storefront in 2018. Dense, doughy, thin-skinned — the closest thing LA has to a bagel time capsule.
Woodland Hills + 4 LA locations
Modern Bread & Bagel
The gluten-free specialist. It's the rare gluten-free bagel with a real yeasty tang instead of tasting like a stand-in. The pastrami-cured lox on an everything bagel is the one to order if you're bringing a celiac friend.
Santa Monica
Layla Bagels
Crusty outside, cushiony inside, and a menu that leans produce-forward — seasonal fruit with cream cheese and honey rather than a full deli spread. The Westside's answer to the Eastside's bagel boom.
What makes LA's bagel scene interesting isn't that it's trying to out-New-York New York — it's that almost nobody on this list is trying to.
Geography check: this list deliberately spans the Eastside corridor that's driving most of the current boom — Virgil Village, Highland Park, Silver Lake, Koreatown, Historic Filipinotown — plus the Westside (Santa Monica), Palms, and the Valley (Burbank, Woodland Hills). If a bagel-worthy detour isn't on your normal route, it's on this map somewhere.
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) — an East Coast-style bagel, shown for context.
The takeaway
What makes LA's bagel scene interesting isn't that it's trying to out-New-York New York — it's that almost nobody on this list is trying to. Courage went Montreal. Calic went fusion. Modern Bread & Bagel went gluten-free without compromise. Brooklyn Bagel Bakery just never stopped. The city finally has a bagel identity that's actually its own, and it's spread out enough that "worth crossing town for" isn't hyperbole — for at least a few of these, it's the whole point.
Common questions
Which shop started LA's current bagel scene?
Courage Bagels — widely credited with kicking off the moment by making Montreal-style bagels rather than New York-style.
Which is the oldest bagel shop in LA?
Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, opened in 1953 in Historic Filipinotown — decades before any other shop on this list.
Is there a good gluten-free option?
Yes — Modern Bread & Bagel, which has a real yeasty tang rather than tasting like a compromise.
Are these ranked best to worst?
No. A Montreal-style bagel and a New York deli bagel aren't playing the same sport — this is a map of different approaches, not a ranking.
Did any shop pay to be included?
No. Nobody on this list paid for inclusion, comped a visit, or sent product — this is independent reporting cross-checked against LAist and The Infatuation.
Where this leaves it
Nine shops, four distinct approaches, and not one of them trying to be a New York imitation. Start with Courage if you want to understand what kicked this off, Brooklyn Bagel Bakery if you want the historical original, and Modern Bread & Bagel if gluten is off the table. Everything else here rewards an actual drive across town — which, per the headline, was the whole point.
Disclosure. Nobody on this list paid for inclusion, comped a visit, or sent product. This is independent reporting built from our own eating and cross-checked against public coverage from LAist and The Infatuation. No prices are listed here — menus and hours change too often for us to promise accuracy, so call ahead or check each shop's own page. Photography is real, Wikimedia Commons, credited per image, shown for representative context; no photo depicts a specific shop named in this list unless captioned as such, and no AI-generated imagery appears in this article.
