This bare-bones bagel shop is a favorite of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center employees and others that pass through what amounts to Washington Heights’ downtown. Poppy and whole wheat bagels are favorites, and nothing makes a better breakfast that the dark and slightly sweet pumpernickel bagel thickly spread with egg salad.

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.

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.

This Astoria bakery also promises lots of cream cheese flavors. In fact, so profuse are the number of choices that some of them are fruit flavored and decidedly sweet, allowing the unrestrained seekers of bagel-as-dessert to construct such admitted monstrosities as the rainbow bagel with strawberry cream cheese. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself, but it was actually a fun antidote to the bagel’s savory excesses.

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. Today, this location still slings 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, exclusively making 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 heavily herbed, and a tuna salad that replicates the recipe of France’s vaunted Tunisian sandwich.

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.

Tucked away on a residential side street of Greenpoint is Bakeri, a small-batch bakery that turns out Norweigan skølebrod, German chocolate cake, and loaves of sourdough rye each morning. Those items and the many others made here are worth a trip on their own, but the bagels are a total sleeper hit. Dense, squat, and baked to the point of almost looking burnt, Bakeri’s bagels are deeply flavorful and come speckled with bits of cornmeal underneath. The cinnamon raisin is best, made with a generous portion of gold and purple fruit that keeps this bagel moist and acidic.

This Greenpoint corner bagel shop has a history dating back to 1977, but you’d never know it for the postmodern fixtures, which make you feel like you’re ordering bagels on the Starship Enterprise. So step up to the plasma ordering kiosk and opt for a plain bagel with green-olive cream cheese, which is absolutely delicious.

Head for Forest Hills Bagel for a more comfortable bagel experience. The interior is laid out like a diner, and an opulent counter display offers a large range of flavored cream cheeses and their surrogates, including low-fat dairy spreads and those made from whipped tofu. The bagels remain the focus, however, with a very nice cinnamon raisin for sweet bagel lovers, and poppy and sesame bagels that don’t stint on the seeds.

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.

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.

The wall of bagels against the barn wood wall is reason enough to enter Bed Stuy’s best bagel store and take a gander. But the bagels are pretty damn good, too, including a very salty salt bagel, a garlic bagel that will leave you breathing fire, and a chocolate chip bagels in which there are enough chips to make it taste slightly sweet but not a bit like dessert.

Modernist bagel shop Shelsky’s has all the classics in small, dense form, but it sports a few spicy outliers, like its numbing Sichuan peppercorn bagel and chili crisp cream cheese. Indicative of the appetizing shop’s contemporaneity, the preparation of the bagels here shows extra care: A sourdough starter is employed in the kitchen, actual egg goes into the the egg bagels, and chopped cheese and Taylor ham sandwiches come served on a bagel or bialy.

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.