One Angeleno’s hunt for a scooped bagel in New York City has the internet up in arms, reigniting the city’s long-running culture clash with Los Angeles.
L.A. resident and clothing brand founder Taylor Offer posted a video to TikTok this week recounting his attempt to order a scooped gluten-free bagel while visiting New York.
Back home, he said, he could walk into any bagel shop and the request would draw no questions or appalled glances, but there’s “nothing more stressful” than trying to do the same in the Big Apple.
“Guy just looks at me and goes, ‘Dude, I’m not scooping your f—ing bagel, bro,’” Offer said in the video, which drew more than 8 million views in three days. “It’s like, dude, that’s how I want it.”
Many who stumbled across his post commented that this was the first they had heard of a scooped bagel — a bagel hollowed out from the inside to leave just the outer shell, oftentimes to limit caloric and carbohydrate intake — but that after looking up what it was, the shop worker was right to reject his request.
“I’m team bagel shop,” one user commented, racking up more than 125,000 likes. “Scooped bagel is a crime.”
“GF AND scooped??” another viewer wrote. “I feel like at that point you have to just admit you don’t really want a bagel at all.”
Some commenters compared the concept of a scooped bagel to the idea of ordering a muffin just to eat the wrapper, or of tossing out the muffin top and keeping only the stump.
Offer’s audacity to order such a bagel quickly spawned outrage across the internet. A viral X post sharing his video wrote that the city needs to start “turning californians away at the border.” Many joked the order was so atrocious it should constitute a crime.
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“Californians needs to gtfo out of NYC with this ‘scooped bagel’ nonsense,” one user posted. “Be a man. Get a bacon egg and cheese on an everything bagel, toasted. Maybe even throw a hashbrown in there.”
The video also circulated on Reddit, making its way to the r/TikTokCringe community and drawing overwhelming support for the bagel shop worker.
“Protect all bagels from this Los Demonese monster,” wrote one Redditor in the thread.
Offer appeared to lean into the anti-LA discourse, riling up his viewers even further by posting more videos comparing the two cities — claiming Los Angeles is more fashionable and offers better nightlife, for example, and lamenting the relative dearth of alternative milk choices at New York coffee shops.
Some began to suspect he was playing a part.
“This could be a character: guy that thinks LA is the greatest place on earth,” one commenter wrote, adding: “If it wasn’t before, it is now.”
Offer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But regardless of whether his later videos turned satirical, he did eventually succeed in getting his scooped bagel.
“You get less bagel, you get more cream cheese. Look at that cream cheese to bagel ratio,” he said, showing his bagel off to the camera before taking a bite. “Wow. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
