Croatia’s culture of baked goods is well-established – walking around any city in the country, you’ll find multiple chains of bakeries serving up all sorts of delicious and traditional treats. The ever-popular American bagel, however, has proven elusive, offered in only select places as an expensive delicacy.
However, the newly opened Brooklyn Bagel Co in the centre of Zagreb is determined to fill that gap. After success in Split, the chain has opened a hole-in-the-wall spot in the prominent square of Europski trg.
On the menu are six typs of bagel (plain, poppy-seed, sesame-seed, onion-flake, garlic-flake and the Everything variety) with five different spreads, all cream cheese-based, as is custom for this classic sandwich.
The Brooklyn Bagel Co was set up by New York expats John Kent Pepper and his wife Catherine, who moved from the Big Apple to the Dalmatian coast some years ago. They noticed that everyone in Croatia had a great sense of American culture, and that all of the films and TV shows they loved set in NYC would show their characters eating a delicious bagel at some point – but that didn’t translate into much knowledge of the bagels themselves.
Zagreb’s Brooklyn Bagel Co can be found at Vlaška 12/Europski trg, open Mon-Sat 8am-8pm, Sun 8.30am-1.30pm