Faithfully furnishing bagels, bialys, and muffins to its northern Bronx neighborhood since 1992, Riverdale Bagels guarantees its bagels are boiled and not steamed. All the traditional toppings are available, but innovative spreads are being developed on a daily basis, including spicy bacon, garlic pepper, sun-dried tomato, and strawberry pepper cream cheeses.

This shop was started by Andrew Martinez and Ashley Dikos in 2017 to address a lack of great bagels in Harlem. The result is a shop with bagels that have a crisp exterior and chewy inside, made the traditional way with a 24-hour fermentation, brief boil, and bake. All the classic spreads are available, as well as aggressively creative bagel sandwiches like the Andrew — featuring egg, sausage, bacon, Vermont maple syrup, and scallion cream cheese.

Come lunchtime, this barn of a bagel bakery boasts lines that trail out the door, the customers eager for a taste of its bulbous and reasonably priced bagels, often delivered still warm, rendering toasting unnecessary. The bagels at Absolute are a bit larger than average and glossy from their boil. The bright orange egg bagel is a favorite, and so is the everything bagel, best spread with the salty and smoky whitefish salad for an explosion of flavor.

Queens bakery Utopia Bagels is famed for its soft, airy bagels with a crisp exterior. In a video for Eater, shop co-owner Scott Spellman attributes the following to two things: having skilled workers who make bagels by hand, and keeping everything — from the ingredients, to the kettle, to the oven, to the baking techniques — the same as they were when the shop first opened 40 years ago. Bagels go for around $2 each, with bialys, flagels, and Kaiser rolls also on offer.

Locals rave about the bagels at this Astoria institution, and New Yorkers make pilgrimages from other boroughs to snag them. The range of bagels is vast. On a recent visit Asiago and jalapeno sesame bagels were available, and the roster of cream cheeses and other miscellaneous toppings is just as robust, sometimes with Korean flourishes.

Despite its name, Brooklyn Bagel doesn’t have a Kings County location — instead there are five spread across Queens and Manhattan. The Astoria outpost is super popular, frequently boasting long lines for their gigantic, airy bagels. They also serve a mini bagel, probably about the size bagels were a century ago. Also note the varied collection of cream cheeses, and rotating stunt specials like gingerbread, seven grain, and sundried tomato bagels.

Lox, nova, and smoked salmon aren’t the same thing — and Tal Bagels is the place to find out why, with a comprehensive menu that boasts all three. With six locations across Manhattan and too many cream cheese options to count, Tal has earned itself a reputation as one of New York’s favorite bagel shops for its hot bagels and fast service.

This classic New York bagel shop, which first opened in 1976 near Stuyvesant Town, now has four locations — three in Manhattan and one in Dumbo — all of which still sling big, chewy, crusty bagels. In fact, some blame the original shop for originating the modern gigantic bagel. It can take awhile to pick up an order for sandwiches or a bagel with lox, but people looking to grab bagels and cream cheese can sneak to a separate counter.

This bakery is indeed modern, specializing in gluten-free bagels that aren’t half bad. Indeed, everything in the place is gluten free. The salads that can be put on bagels are innovative and often delicious, including a Tel Aviv-style egg salad, chopped fine and extensively herbed, and a tuna salad that replicates the recipe of France’s vaunted Tunisian sandwich. Another branch lurks on the Upper West Side.

Open since 1996, Murray’s was born out of a desire for a superior neighborhood bagel shop in Greenwich Village. The result is a space with large but light bagels with a crackly crust and modest interior chew. Beyond standard cream cheeses, cured fish, and egg fillings, Murray’s specialty is substantial meat and poultry sandwiches, made from salami, hot corned beef, chicken cutlets, and just about any deli meat or fish salad one can think of.

Bagel purists may not like this place in the East Village, with its rainbow of cream cheese options, but it has long lines at this and its other East Village location for a reason: a massive variety of menu items, some frankly weird, that’ll satisfy any appetite. It’s sometimes the only bagel place out-of-town friends have heard of, and you can expect to find the latest food fads executed in bagel form.

For the better part of the last 100 years, the only way to get a bagel at Russ & Daughters was to wait in line — out the door and around the corner. Today, this New York institution has two additional locations, each with a slightly different focus, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Orchard Street. Their bagels and bialys are soft and chewy, but sturdy enough to hold their own against toppings like cream cheese, smoked fish, or pastrami-cured salmon.

This modest Forest Hills bagel bakery does little to advertise itself, offering a broad range of cream cheeses and perhaps the city’s best garlic bagel. (What are its features? The garlic is neither rancid nor overcooked.) Apart from that, the shop offers a handful of stunt combinations, including a blueberry bagel with scallion cream cheese that isn’t half bad.

Williamsburg pizzeria Leo might be better known for its slices, but don’t sleep on its stellar bagels. Only available on weekends, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. (or sold-out), they’re worth planning a morning around. Follow Apollo Bagels on Instagram for information on pop-ups happening at restaurants across the city.

This East Williamsburg spot can’t decide if it wants to be a bodega or a bagel bakery. Luckily, the bagels are damn good in all the usual permutations, which are alternated, so that the selection on any given day may be limited to six. This will help you make a decision. The lox and scallion cream cheese are a particular delight, while the everything pumpernickel offers something lesser-seen, even if it’s a little sweet.

This small chain of Brooklyn bagel shops turns out plump bagels with lots of chew, perfect for an egg and cheese sandwich or good enough on their own. Breakfast sandwiches are available in myriad forms, including those with hash brown, turkey bacon, and chipotle cream cheese. Expect a line that snakes toward the door on weekends, with a selection of inventive bagels — egg everything, pumpernickel everything — visible in a row of stainless steel baskets that are regularly replenished.

This bagel shop sandwiched between Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery ensconced in a double storefront produces one of the city’s broadest range of bagel flavors and a correspondingly large array of cream cheeses. One of our favorites is the egg everything bagel, which enriches its multiple herbal flavors with egg; another is the cinnamon raisin bagel with a sweetened cinnamon crust on the outside, a combo that can reasonably be termed a dessert bagel.

This Bay Ridge bakery offers a bagel so big and bulbous the holes have nearly disappeared, and one is almost enough to be shared by two. The shop furnishes views of the nearby Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and there’s a park across the street where you can eat your purchases in fine weather. (It also sells subs on rolls baked on the premises.) Its most unusual product is the French toast bagel, which is sweet, sticky, and covered in powdered sugar.

Tasty Bagels in Bensonhurst, a rare Italian bagel shop, was founded in 1983. This hub of bagel innovation owns up to inventing the big wheel bagel in 1984, a giant disk of a bagel layered with meat and cheese and cut in wedges. Ten years later, the flagel was born here — a flattened bagel that fits in a single slot in a toaster without being cut. Apart from novelties, and a lengthy menu of hero sandwiches, all the regular bagels are available in exemplary renditions.