Dining Out 054: Banook Bagels
Breakfast in Peckham.
Considering the proliferation of “new gen”*, jauntily branded bagel spots around London – Papos Bagels, It’s Bagels, The Bagel Guys, and so on – it was only a matter of time until one such establishment made a name for itself in Zone 2 south east London, home to many a hyped independent food business. Well: arise Banook Bagels, your time is, according to Instagram, now.
Banook is tucked away just behind the cycle path that you take from the centre of Peckham to Burgess Park, on a little complex where there are a number of units for small businesses. It’s on the bottom floor, and operates out of a kitchen which, on a sunny day, has its doors flung open and benches set up outside, so you can enjoy your purchase in whatever little patch of light and warmth you can find.
It’s a very cute situation, as I discovered recently on a Saturday morning jaunt, having promised my housemate Hannah that I would return home with a bagel for us each (as such, this is a rare-ish Dining Out where I actually ended up eating not in the restaurant itself, but at my flat – although considering I do have a flat now, I think this should be generously allowed). Upon arriving at Banook I was greeted by a pretty short, simple menu: there are four sandwich options here. There’s The Fish One, The Tomato One, The Veggie One, and finally, a simple ‘bagel and cream cheese’ option, where you can select any bagel (plain, poppy, sesame, everything, or a special), plus whichever of the housemade cream cheeses you wish, for a really decent £4*.
When I reached the front of the queue (very short FYI, for those who fear the bakery queue phenomenon), I was delighted to see my pal and Friend of the Substack Lucas manning the front of house ones and twos, and after a quick consultation, we finalised that I would choose ‘The Fish One’: cream cheese, topped with smoked trout, capers, pink pickled onion and a metric shitload of dill, on a poppy seed bagel – which was, admittedly, on the pricey side at £11. I know the bagel choice du jour is ‘everything’ – that is, bagels that come fully coated with sesame, poppy and onion seeds – but to be honest, I think that onion seeds overpower just about every flavour that gets paired with them, so I personally usually just go plain, poppy or sesame. I’m a simple girl, what can I say?
I also grabbed a couple of interesting-sounding rosemary and sea salt bagels for the next day, and some of the April special cream cheese – wild garlic – at Hannah’s request, and then waited for maybe ten minutes next to some runners, and a bunch of couples with dogs (especially good entertainment from an aggy sausage dog) for my order to be ready. Then, I gratefully accepted my promisingly heavy styrofoam containers of bagel and headed on the short walk back home.
I thankfully got the precious cargo through the door without any real incident, and Hannah and I took our bagels outside to our garden (!) to eat them in the sun. There’s no doubt that my bagel was a well put together concoction: Banook bagels are served open so that you get the most out of the toppings, and there was a layer of cream cheese about a centimetre thick across both sides, plus lashings of smoked fish and all the trimmings.
My favourite thing about the bagel was the edge that the smoked trout gave it: it’s a slightly more substantial fish than salmon, meatier and less chiffon-y in texture. This meant that it stood up to strong flavours like the pickled onions and salty capers – and all of the edges of these tastes were rounded out by that absolutely brilliant, almost-whipped cream cheese.
When it came to the bagel itself, it was slightly softer and breadier than you might expect from a “London bagel” – and while still delicious in its own way, it didn’t have the firm, boiled bite of, say, a Beigel Bake creation, that I do feel like I’m ultimately always chasing when I order a bagel. The same was true of the rosemary bagels I saved to eat with avocado and bacon the next day: the flavours were moreish, and the bagel chewiness was levelled out by relative fluffiness.
I’d say this is intentional – Banook, of course, are doing their own thing with the form just as the other bagel makers in London are, and I love that they make the bagels and the cream cheese all in house, because they’re all the more delicious for it – I’m looking forward to sauntering down on more sunny days, and attempting a Pokémon “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” approach to the bagel and cream cheese combinations. A basic rule of thumb, then, might be this: don’t expect salt beef, take Banook on its own terms, and you’ll come away a happy customer.
* Quite early for an asterisk this week but I’d like to clarify what I mean: obviously London has long been home to incredibly famous and incredibly great bagel bakeries like Rinkoff’s and Beigel Bake, but in recent years, since London’s gradual New York-ification started, more and more bagel places that market themselves like pizza shops (cool merch, sans serif logo) have cropped up.
** For the Martin Lewis Money Saving Experts among you, it’s a fiver for a bagel and a coffee between 8AM and 11AM Wednesday to Friday, which is a pretty good bargain.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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