Miami was not a bagel city. Then Miami was a bagel city. And the axis between these two points in time is a king guava on an everything from El Bagel. When this food truck first popped up in 2017 behind a Wynwood brewery, it served brutally delicious reminders of what we’d been missing, and sweaty locals forgave the hour-long wait after a bite or three. Today, El Bagel operates in two locations in Miami: the original MiMo shop and the somehow more minuscule Coconut Grove location (as well as one in Las Vegas, for some reason). The El Bagel empire is built on a bagel that’s fluffy and firm in the right places. The exterior has a blistered crust full of tiny bubbles, but rip one open and the puffy center springs back if you poke it. And, crucially, El Bagel covers their seeded bagels generously with seasoning—never only on one side, which is the gravest bagel sin in our eyes. You could take home a bag of them with a tub of schmear, but these bagels shine brightest in sandwich form, stuffed generously and wrapped tightly in parchment paper. There was a time you had to set an alarm on a Saturday morning to place an order before they sold out. That’s not the case anymore. Order online before noon, and a half hour later you can waltz right past the line of tourists who don’t know better. Plan on taking your food to go, unless you’re comfortable sitting on a partially shaded bench in what was once their lone parking space. (Legion Park is also across the street, which is ideal for picnics and also hosts a stellar farmers market on Saturdays.) More than five years in, El Bagel has become like Courage in LA or Apollo in NYC, the kind of shop that acts as a new-school bagel ambassador to a world all too eager to declare the line not worth it. You can probably find people who’ll say that about El Bagel, but it’s far easier to locate someone who rightly signed a lease because it was within walking distance. That’s the power of a foundational bagel shop—it becomes part of the city's routine, evolving Miami's breakfast culture and officially declaring our stance as a bagel city.