Photo by MARC LESTER
Anchorage Daily News
Cinnamon raisin and "everything" are two varieties offered at Bagels Alaska on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway in the Valley.
Bagels Alaska
Big bagel options for a little dough
Published: November 10, 2005
Last Modified: June 29, 2006 at 03:58 AM
PALMER -- Bagels Alaska is caught between the best and the worst of the Valley. The cafe is framed by the awe-inspiring Chugach and Talkeetna mountains yet set in a strip mall along the motor madness of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.
But there's no contradiction in a Bagels Alaska dining experience: It's good on all fronts. Opened in 2001, Bagels Alaska is now a Mat-Su standard. It's a friendly respite from the Valley's growing pains and offers an extensive menu of delicious, satisfying and reasonably priced items.
The real beauty here is the Alaska-inspired menu: Most items are named after an Alaska locale. The choices cover all forms of bagel concoctions, soups, salads, sandwiches and wraps. Bagels Alaska pulls away from the cafe norm with its pizza, its wildly popular "Hot Spot" calzones and its prices. Almost everything runs less than $8.
I visited Bagels Alaska with a pair of hungry friends on a recent Monday afternoon, and we hopped around the menu with: a Chugiak wrap ($5.75, with cream cheese, Genoa salami, provolone, olive tapenade and pepperoncini peppers); a Ketchikan calzone ($7.50, with smoked salmon, buffalo sauce, blue cheese and cheddar/jack cheese); a Hatcher Pass calzone ($6.50, chicken chunks, jalapeno cream cheese, mushrooms, caramelized onions, fajita seasoning and cheddar/jack cheese); and a pizza bagel sandwich ($2.75 for one topping, though our server loaded ours with Canadian bacon, pepperoni and sausage for the same price).
The menu states that calzones take 10 to 15 minutes to prepare. We appreciated the warning and figured our wrap and pizza bagel would get us going. Wrong. The wait staff served us all of our food at once, and since the calzones took a bit longer than 15 minutes, our wrap arrived warm, our pizza bagel cool.
The calzones were hot, though. They were also big and bountiful bready delights. The Hatcher Pass was a tasty mix of mild fillings: a lightly peppery fajita sauce covered abundant chicken chunks, mushrooms and caramelized onions with creamy cheese, but it lacked the promised jalapeno flavor. The Ketchikan calzone was bolder, bringing smoked salmon and a sharp buffalo sauce together while using blue cheese dressing to temper.
While impressive, these calzones weren't perfect. Despite the wait, the crusts were almost doughy. A perfect calzone crust is firm and brown outside and soft inside. These were soft all-around, slightly brown and providing no outer crust crunch.
The pizza bagel was also soggy, having been cut in half, overloaded with tangy sauce, then set aside to wait for the calzones. But it was also a delicious treat, stacked high with sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon and cheese, and a fun escape from traditional pizza. If served hot, it's a steal at $2.75.
The Chugiak wrap was a forgotten entree. It was light on salami, cream cheese and olive tapenade but heavy on provolone and pepperoncinis. And it was wrapped with bad technique, the middle nothing but a dense, dry wad of tortilla. Most hints of subtle flavors were overwhelmed by cheese and pepperoncinis.
But minor setbacks are forgettable, and overall Bagels Alaska is a place with charm, a place that outperforms expectations and a place where big servings and small prices are norm.
• Contact Daily News reporter Josh Niva at jniva@adn.com.
