Irvings Bagels

New York-style bagels across from the Penn State gates

Irvings has been boiling and baking bagels in downtown State College since 1989, in a shop that sits opposite the Allen Street gates onto the Penn State campus. The style is New York: boiled first, then baked, which is what gives the dense, chewy interior and the thin glossy crust. Everything else on the menu is downstream of that. Cream cheeses come in an assortment, the bagel flavours rotate through the case, and the sandwiches are built on the same bagels rather than on a bread list. The flavours run wide enough that the case looks different from one visit to the next, but the method underneath never changes.

A counter, and a basement for the overflow

The shop runs on counter service, so a visit is a queue, an order and a paper bag, or a seat if there is one. There is more room than the frontage suggests: a lower level takes the overflow, which turns what could be a takeaway window into somewhere students actually sit for an hour. Coffee and espresso drinks sit alongside the bagels and are the reason a fair number of the morning regulars come in at all.

More than three decades in the same downtown block has made the shop part of the campus routine rather than a stop on it. It is independently owned, it has stayed on one product, and the crowd is a mix of students walking to class, faculty crossing town and visitors coming through the gates.

Order the bagel first, then build on it

Take a bagel with one of the cream cheeses before anything else. It is the only order that reads the shop honestly: crust, chew and spread, with nothing to hide behind. Gluten-free bagels are available if that is what the order needs, which is not a given at a shop this traditional.

From there the menu climbs in one straight line. A breakfast sandwich puts egg, meat and cheese on the same bagel and turns it into a full morning order. At lunch the deli-style sandwiches do the same job with cold cuts and salads. Staying inside that progression is the point: Irvings is a bagel shop that makes sandwiches, not a sandwich shop that happens to have bagels.