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Milwaukee's Daily Magazine for Thursday, June 20, 2013

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The last bagel

I wasn’t sure why I felt so deflated last night as I thought about the Downer Avenue Einstein’s closing today.  It’s a chain bagel shop, and there are a handful in Metro Milwaukee -- including one closer to my Bay View home than the one on the East Side.

But as I ate my final toasted egg bagel with plain light cream cheese and sipped my Euro French Roast coffee this morning, it came back in a flash.

In a really weird way, that particular Einie’s served as a backdrop to my life these last 10 years.  And today, it goes away for good.

It opened in 1996, when I was a lowly assistant account executive at Cramer-Krasselt. My firm actually represented Einstein’s, but I was chained to the business-to-business side of PR, so all I could do was sit there and eat free bagels while my co-workers opened the store.  Having moved back from Washington, D.C. that summer, I craved a “real” bagel -- not the squishy Lenders types I could find in Milwaukee.  At the time, I recall declaring to anyone who would listen that Einstein’s bagels were the closest thing to East Coast style.  Until Blue Dawg came along -- then went away as a store-- that was the truth. (Now, Alterra serves their bagels. Expect to see me there a lot more.)

A week before officially forming OnMilwaukee.com, another local agency made me a job offer.  It was tempting, but I had dot com fever.  I was 23, and meeting with this VP at Einstein’s to decline the position was one of the more difficult career decisions I had to make at the time.  I remember what table we sat at and discussed.  The man doing the offering said something to me I’ve repeated many times. He said, “Andy, doors don’t have to close, they just can open and shut a little.” I liked his point.

On my first day of self-employment, April 7, 1998, I tailgated at Opening Day at County Stadium.  I tell that story all the time.  But on my second day, I didn’t set an alarm, woke up at a leisurely pace and walked from my apartment on Stowell and Bradford to Einie’s for a bagel shmear and coffee. This was back in the very early days of OnMilwaukee.com, when we held our meetings on my dining room table.  When our mailing address said “Suite 15,” but was really just “Apt. 15.”

At any rate, those were some of the happiest days of my 20s.  Yeah, we weren’t making any money, but the very early pre-launch days of OnMilwaukee.com were surprisingly mellow and unstructured.  Since we didn’t have any model on which to base our business, we flew by the seat of our pants.  I probably ate a bagel a day, and even interviewed a potential sales person at Einie’s one morning.  It was probably a good thing we didn’t hire him back then, since we didn’t have any inventory to sell -- or money to pay him.

Maybe a year later, I ran into news anchor and then neighbor Ted Perry at Einie’s … then proceeded to bump into him weekly for about six months straight.  Later, we would both joke that we were stalking each other.  But at Einstein’s, I introduced myself (of course he had no idea what OnMilwaukee.com was at the time), and he told me the most risque story I had ever heard within five minutes meeting someone.  We still cross paths occasionally, and he remains an OMC supporter (and vice versa).  His Milwaukee Talks interview from October 2000 is still one of the most-read stories on our site of all time (and the three OMC founders were featured as “Perry’s People” a few years later).

In 2000, as I was groggily sipping my coffee and stuffing my face, a woman approached me at Einstein’s and said, “Hey, you’re Andy Tarnoff!”  That was about the first and last time that happened -- but she had just read a fluffy profile story about me in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.  I remember thinking, “OK, it’s about 9 a.m., and this girl just read a story about me being a hard-working dot com guy, and here I am half-asleep at Einstein’s.”  I didn’t bother to explain that back then we worked crazy hours, and without any real employees yet, the normal work day started and ended later for us.

When I moved from the East Side to Bay View in 2002, I cut back on my nearly daily bagel obsession (which my waist line appreciated, though not as much as I would expect).  I began incorporating the Einstein’s on 27th and Oklahoma as part of my weekend routine, but it wasn’t the same.  Something about that Downer place felt very appropriate for the neighborhood.  In fact, someone who worked at the old Oriental Drugs told me that many of the same regulars who were displaced when it closed simply relocated to Downer.

And up until this morning, I made Einie’s a semi-regular stop on my way to work.  Every time, without fail, I ordered the exact same breakfast, and never once got sick of it.  As I said in my interview on WUWM’s “At Ten” last week, if I felt like reading the newspaper, I didn’t buy one -- I’d just grab the sports section and read the Brewers coverage (ironically, this is where I discovered that Drew Olson -- who we would eventually hire -- was one of the best sports journalists in town).

People who know me insist that I despise change.  I’m that guy who cried when they tore down County Stadium.  But I must clarify: I like progress, but I’m no fan of change for change’s sake.  You see, even back in the early ‘90s, Downer was a special place for me.  I spend almost every night at the Coffee Trader and was sincerely upset when it went out of business.  Seeing it empty for all these years irked me immensely, but when I tried out the new Original Pancake House that took its place, I felt vindicated.  No, it wasn’t the Trader, but it was really, really good.  And it was better than an empty shell.

But as for Einstein’s, there was nothing wrong with it.  I spoke to the new building owners last night, too, who insisted that they tried to keep the store, and that Einstein’s corporate just wasn’t making money at the location.

This may be true, but a slice of my life (pardon the pun) is ending today. And as I finish the last sip of my “darn good coffee,” I’m left feeling caffeinated -- and just a bit melancholy.

Talkbacks

OMCreader | July 11, 2006 at 11:32 p.m. (report)

Chris Stravinski Sharrow said: I had my first bagel with a shmeer (although it wasn't called that then) and nova lox on a bus trip to La Guardia airport when I visited my brother in NYC back in 1971. It was a mouth-treat revelation. They had toasted it and wrapped it in foil to eat while I rode the bus to my flight home.

I too was sad to hear the Einstein's was closing when I heard it.



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OMCreader | July 11, 2006 at 1:29 p.m. (report)

harvey said: bagels... i left washington d.c. in '71 for milwaukee when a friend assured me that good bagels were available here. they were then made by guys from brooklyn.
raised in manhattan i gotta have a bood bagel every other day at least and my daughter, who lives in manhattan, brings them (4 doz./trip) or i bring them back on my visits. for emergencies i go to brueggers on silver spring. they're ok.

einsteins did not make a decent bagel imho. where else can you get a good bagel in milwaukee?

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