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| - As one who has plowed deliriously through all manner of crisp and chewy bread wheels rendered to extreme carb-overload capacity through extravagant dough+kettle alchemy, and even served a hitch in the employ of a national bagel Titan, your reviewer believes he rightly knows these suckers inside and out--and yet he was unprepared for the majesty of the Cleveland Bagel's creations--fresh, stocky, and charmingly bulbous, these beauties split in the teeth with an earth-shaking crunch, and they're adorned with heavenly mounds of cream cheese: true, they may be roughshod in their appearance, but don't let this fool you--CLE bagels, served by amiable staff in a clean, glowing space to a score of jaunty indie jams, are the antithesis of the pre-fab, plasticity, chain-made type and so nary a one is alike in precise dimension--and yes, this ought to be welcomed, even praised. It's the sweet duality of bagel bliss, dear reader: wild asymmetrical crust bearing a remarkable inner richness and a sense of unparalleled craftsmanship lurking beneath each bite. There's little in the way of customization (i.e. a vexing lack of veggies/eggs), and a mere five flavors to choose from, but this allows for far more perfectionist tinkering with the hand-twisted dough, the seeds, the lucious shmear, and it would be unthinkable not to mention the good black coffee strong enough to make ol' Balzac blush. Thus, a plea: rally at once against the ruthless hegemony denouncing bread-as-devilish-Other and (locally) indulge. Now everybody: we don't need no sad square bagels, we don't need no silly muffins...
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