PEC Challenge: H&H Bagels

I know everyone's been talking about Coronavirus but that's not what we're here to do.  I'm no doctor, I eat pork roll.  But I've gotta say, I think I've been living life on the edge lately.  This weekend I went to NY via Penn Station (already gross) then turned right around and went to DC to attend Monday Night Raw (large gathering of people).  So if there's any doctors out there, should I be worried? I already work from home so I'm basically self-quarantined (until I go to Boston this weekend for St. Patrick's Day) but I think I'm going to continue to live my life and maybe you should, too (also wash your hands, you animals). OK,  enough about the end of the world.  After springing forward this weekend at Dylan Murphy's (closed at 5am) I ordered my very first NYC PEC (5 hours later).  You might have heard of H&H Bagels from the Seinfeld episode "The Strike."  If you haven't I'll recap.  Kramer returns to work at H&H Bagels following an apparent 12-year strike and then is fired for dropping a piece of chewed gum into the bagel dough. The original store and bakery had been the largest bagel manufacturer in New York City before their 2012 closure (unsure if it was due to gum in the dough).   With that in mind, I was excited to see how these bagels would play out.  Everyone's always hearing about how NYC bagels and pizza are the best in the world (I disagree, they are awesome but New Jersey has the best) So how did they do? 

Bread Rating: 7.8/10 (For some weird reason they put paper wrapping in addition to the foil wrap which left the entirety of the bagel greasy and a little wet.  Even with that obstacle, the bagel was still pretty good.  Just a little jarring.)

Pork Roll Rating: 7.4/10 (The pork roll didn't have to travel very far to get here and they didn't mess up heating it up.  Maybe it could have had more on it, but that's city life.  I've found most "famous" places end up cheaping out on meat to cut costs, which to me is pathetic, let's move on.)

Egg Rating: 7.3/10 (A pretty solid fried egg, typical execution)

Cheese Rating: 6.8/10 (American yellow cheese, average, melted.)

Composition Rating: 6.5/10  (No SPK and I couldn't imagine how much soggier this would have been with ketchup applied so maybe it was for the best.  It just seems like this place kind of goes through the motions with probably thousands of orders a day but good on them for providing the Jersey people living in Manhattan what they want.)

Overall Rating: 7.1/10 (It did the job curing my hangover and gave me the fuel needed to return to Dylan Murphy's that day for some more BL Smooths, so I appreciated this PEC)

Price: $8 cause now you're in NEW YORRRRRK

H&H Bagels is located at 1551 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10028