Kossar's Bagels & Bialys (LES)
A bialy goes into a brick oven and never near the kettle, which is the whole difference between it and the bagels in the same case. Kossar's has baked them since 1936 and stood on Grand Street since 1960.
Why go
The word is a shortening of Bialystoker Kuchen,
Yiddish for little bread from Bialystok, and Polish Jewish bakers brought it to the Lower East Side with them.1 Isadore Mirsky and Morris Kossar opened as Mirsky and Kossar's on Ridge Street in 1936. Kossar bought his partner out in 1953. A strike and a union fight followed, and in 1958 an explosion took the Clinton Street store down in the middle of the night. They reopened on Grand Street in 1960 and have not moved since. The shop calls itself the oldest operating bialy bakery in the country and lists what goes in: wheat flour, eggs, brewer's yeast, kosher salt, malt syrup and New York tap water. Ess-a-Bagel and H&H bake the big, faintly sweet, quarter-plate bagel this city has sold since the 1960s. Apollo Bagels and Popup Bagels pull the other way, tangier and denser.4 Kossar's is in neither camp.
Order this / avoid
- Order: a plain bialy. They bake it in the brick oven and never boil it.1
- Avoid: coming for the bagel and skipping the bialy. Eater's March 2026 guide names 21 shops and The Infatuation's names 22, and Kossar's is on neither.3
What locals & experts say
- Mimi Sheraton, in her 2002 book The Bialy Eaters, quoted by the shop on its own history page:
I knew Kossar's to be the source of the very best bialys in the city, and as it turned out, the entire country.
1 She was a New York Times critic, and I have not read the line in the book itself. - I have not found a living New York critic writing about this counter.
Good to know
- The doors: five shops take orders, and this page is 367 Grand Street on the Lower East Side. The others are on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, at Hudson Yards and on West End Avenue.2
- Booking: none. It is a counter.
Verdict
should-visit — The evidence is nearly all the shop's own, and it is unusually specific for that: a founding year, three addresses, a union dispute, an explosion and a bake split between a brick oven and a kettle. What no outside writer supplies is a verdict, because the strongest one on the page is Mimi Sheraton's and the shop is the party reproducing it, from a book published in 2002. Kossar's appears on neither of the two current bagel rankings. That sends a reader to the bialy, which is what this counter is for.