If 25 years of steady success weren’t already enough of an accomplishment, Isla Vista’s beloved Bagel Café was also just named by Spoon University as one of the best college town breakfast spots in the country. That popularity can be confirmed every weekend morning by the line that runs from inside the small Trigo Road restaurant out onto the sidewalk during the crucial brunch hours, full of students carrying on a breakfast tradition that’s older than most of them.
The café’s owner is Doron Friedman, who moved to California from the East Coast at the age of 21, seeking to open a bagel joint. He believed Isla Vista was appropriately suited for his venture because it felt like a “real” college town — as Friedman explained, “insulated from the rest of the world.” Furthermore, he found West Coast universities to be amusingly deprived of quality bagel cafés.
So from the beginning, Friedman pledged to make bagels that are the “closest thing to New York and to the old-fashioned way of making bagels.” Today, his bagels are of such reputed quality that they wholesale throughout Santa Barbara. “Before we even open our door, we sell a thousand bagels,” he explained.