Terra Bakery and Cafe: Falling In Love…With a Bagel

I couldn't even take the goddamn photo before chomping the hell out of Peter.

I learned something very important about myself today.  I learned that jaded, misanthropic, pessimistic me is more than capable of falling deeply, madly and obsessively in love in a mere instant.  I now know this because it happened today at Terra Bakery and Cafe.

If you’re the kind of person that goes to the movies and leans over every three or so minutes to whisper your enlightened opinions on each move every character makes to your poor date and you think you know where this story is going — me, hunched over at a table, hungover as shit, donning Ray-Ban Clubmasters (I just like saying that name), spots hot beard-y, plaid shirt-y guy feeding a bottle of milk to a baby monkey at the next table over and swoons — you, sir, are DEAD WRONG.  Because this afternoon I fell in love with a BAGEL.

Terra Bakery and Cafe was originally the reincarnation of Lower Haight’s Roland’s Bakery, but they’re having some internal, uh, disputes, so now I don’t really know what the hell is going on.  Lucky for me the only thing I care about is whether their food tastes good, and it does.  So this bagel I had — cheddar cheese and black olive — was so good it deserves a name.  I think Peter will suffice.  I’m a sucker for anything cheesy and/or olive-ridden, but aside from that, Peter just tasted GOOD.  He had the perfect mixture of doughiness and firmness and was so bursting with flavor that his middle was more like a puckered mouth (what did you think I was going to say?) than a hole, which for some reason is like my favorite thing in life.  And Peter only cost 2 bucks, which is pretty damn good for something so full of carbs you won’t need to eat again for three days.

As a side note, I also ordered something called a Cinnamon Melt-Away, which was pretty much a flakier-than-normal cinnamon roll that tasted like a cross between my eleventh birthday when we had a scavenger hunt at the mall and the time I found 5o bucks on the ground at Disneyland, if that makes sense.  If not, here’s the Cliff Notes version of that sentiment:  ORDER THE CINNAMON MELT-AWAY FOR DESSERT.