We love to hate the cinnamon raisin bagel. Why elite Bay Area shops have decided to make it
Cinnamon raisin is the most divisive bagel flavor. (Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle)
In 2011, when the owners of the Bay Area's Wise Sons Jewish Deli drafted their original business plan, there was one item they swore they'd never serve.
"Wise Sons will focus on the pillars of Jewish Deli food - pastrami, latkes, smoked salmon, and matzo ball soup with a limited selection of classic bagel flavors," the plan read.
"Not a cinnamon raisin bagel in sight."
Cinnamon raisin is, arguably, the most derided preference in all of bageldom. (The runner up would likely be vertical slicing, or "bread style," which began in St. Louis at the St. Louis Bread Company - known in the rest of the country as Panera - briefly sparking a national moral panic.) "There's this stigma that they are not true bagels or that they are for bagel amateurs," Wise Sons owner Evan Bloom said. "I don't know how to put it. They're dessert."
When running for governor of New York in 2018, Cynthia Nixon revealed during a campaign stop at Zabar's, the iconic Jewish grocer, that her go-to order was a cinnamon raisin bagel with lox, cream cheese, tomatoes, red onions and capers. One can't definitively say that it cost her the election, but it did not help.
Would you eat a cinnamon raisin bagel with lox? (Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle)
While odd food pairings can raise eyebrows - the Hawaiian ham and pineapple may be the cinnamon raisin bagel of pizza - the combination of cinnamon, sugar and raisins, supposedly invented in Boston by longtime bakery Eagerman's, seems to especially offend some basic sense of taste. Even in our modern bagel era - a timeline where Flamin' Hot Cheetos bagels, French toast bagels and bagels with Grillo's pickle butter exist - the disdain for the cinnamon raisin bagel remains unmatched. "Some people get a box of a dozen bagels and their everything bagel touches their cinnamon raisin bagel and suddenly they can't eat it," Bloom said.
For purists, sweet bagels should not even exist. "My mom wanted me to tell you that she thinks they're sacrilege," Will Dudley of North Bay popup Dudley's Bagels relayed from his mother, who lives in New Jersey. Blake Hunter, owner of Hella Bagels in Albany, believes that a cinnamon raisin bagel is, at best, a plain bagel with random bites of cinnamon or raisin; at worst, it's a dense, cloyingly sweet blob of dough.
Yet there is clearly a strong - if not exactly equally strong - allegiance to the cinnamon raisin bagel. One of Dudley's regulars comes every week and buys two cinnamon raisin bagels and nothing else. And at some shops, it's a top-seller. "They sell very well," said Emily Winston of the wildly popular Boichik Bagels in Berkeley, which has sold the flavor since day one. "There are people who are serious devotees."
Mark Lieuw, a pastry chef who runs San Francisco artisan chocolate popup Stay Sweet SF, exclusively eats cinnamon raisin bagels. It reminds Lieuw of his grandparents, who often ate Sun-Maid cinnamon swirl raisin bread. However, at the start of his pastry career in New York City, while working at fine-dining institutions Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernadin, he carefully hid his fealty. "I would never dare order a cinnamon raisin bagel while in New York," he said.
But in the Bay Area, he can let his cinnamon raisin flag fly freely. His go-to is toasted with cream cheese.
Customers often requested cinnamon raisin bagels at Wise Sons, which held the line for nearly a decade. In 2020, it acquired Beauty's Bagels in Oakland and with it, a menu that included the hotly contested bagel. Somewhat reluctantly, Bloom adopted it. There needs to be sufficient demand to justify the additional labor they require: Cinnamon raisin bagels use a separate dough, and the cinnamon interacts differently with yeast, which can inhibit proofing. At the time, a batch of Wise Sons dough yielded about 400 bagels - and there were enough cinnamon raisin disciples to justify it.
Baker Morgan Lear prepares the dough for the cinnamon raisin bagels at Poppy Bagels in Oakland, Calif. Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle)
Poppy Bagels, which added a cinnamon raisin bagel in 2023, uses golden raisins in its dough. (Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle)
People similarly kept asking for cinnamon raisin bagels at Loveski Deli, fine-dining chef Christopher Kostow's bagel shop with locations in Napa, Marin and, as of March, San Francisco. He added the divisive flavor about a year and a half ago. "I don't dislike them," he said after a long pause. But "we're not here to tell people what their bagel order should be."
In the Bay Area, unsurprisingly, many bakers, even those who harbor their own deeply held opposition to the cinnamon raisin bagel, have set out to make the best one possible. All of them are in pursuit of a bagel that's balanced - not overwhelmingly sweet, yet satisfies the contingent of customers who want a sweet bagel. Some shops add honey. Some like the cinnamon to be evenly distributed, while others prefer streaks. A cinnamon raisin bagel made its debut at Oakland's Poppy Bagels in 2023, with unconventional golden raisins. Owner Reesa Kashuk considered currants instead of raisins, but she realized, "I would just be doing that to not do a cinnamon raisin."
Kostow, too, endeavored to create a cinnamon raisin bagel he felt comfortable selling: slightly sour and not too sweet, ideally enjoyed, he said, with butter and Loveski's bagel miso, made from day-old bagels. "That salty umami with the cinnamon raisin bagel actually works for some reason," he said. (Every owner interviewed for this story agreed that the most acceptable way to eat a cinnamon raisin bagel, if forced, is toasted with salted butter.)
At Poppy, plenty of customers are going in a Cynthia Nixon-esque direction. They're ordering open-face, savory sandwiches - with tomatoes; lox, capers, dill and onion; or even whitefish - on a cinnamon raisin bagel. "We've seen it all," Kashuk said.
Cinnamon raisin bagels remain conspicuously absent at at least one Bay Area shop: Hella Bagels, where Hunter has no qualms about subversive bagel pairings, like peach and feta or "sushi bagels" with spicy mayo and fish roe. When he tried to make his own cinnamon raisin bagel, he wanted to push its flavor limits by amping up the cinnamon and soaking raisins in vanilla syrup. "But the more you're pushing the cinnamon, the more you're counteracting the yeast. When I got to a point where I was like this is enough cinnamon, I also looked at the quality of the bagel and I was like, ‘This isn't representative of everything else we're offering,'" he said. It never went on the menu.
Cinnamon raisin bagels are a top-seller at some Bay Area bagel shops, despite their polarization. (Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle)
Bloom, for his part, changed camps. He now eats a cinnamon raisin bagel, toasted with salted butter, once a week at Wise Sons.
At least it's not a jalapeño-cheese, chocolate chip or blueberry bagel. The latter, Bloom said, remains off limits for Wise Sons. "I think you should eat a muffin if that's what you want," he said. "But never say never because clearly I went back on my word."
