NJ bagel shop sparks backlash over its lazy schmear technique
A New Jersey bagel shop is being schmeared online for its cream cheese placement on a woman’s bagels.
A New York City-based influencer posted a video on TikTok earlier this month showing her 55.7K followers their abysmal breakfast from Bella’s Bagels in Seaside Park, New Jersey — racking up 25 million views and countless infuriated cream cheese critics.
“What is this?” the TikTokker, Valentina, asked as she held up the two halves of her bagel with thick slabs of cream cheese in the center of the bagel, ostensibly unschmeared.
“Did you just cut Philadelphia cream cheese and put the freaking block?”
“And I know it’s not a mistake, because what is this?” she said, showing a second bagel in her order that looked even worse than the first, with a block of cream cheese on just one side of the bagel and a deep space on the other half.
“This is not OK, guys, you have to spread your cream cheese,” she declared.
Valentina received nearly 15,000 comments in response.
“I thought that was a baked potato,” one person admitted.
“WHY IS IT A BLOCK?” another exclaimed.
“I thought that was an Ice cream sandwich,” someone else said.
“Nahh, the second one was hateful,” one wrote.
“That’s an appropriate amount of cream cheese for a bagel schmear, but a downright diabolical distribution of it,” another pointed out.
Bella’s Bagels indirectly responded with a video posted to their TikTok account, but reportedly deleted the video after backlash. But nosy internet sleuths saved the video and reposted it.
“This is how we actually make bagels with cream cheese,” an employee said in the now-deleted video.
“We put a little glob in the middle and then we spread, cover all the edges, and then we cut it,” she said. “This is how it should look — nice and soft, nice and spread, a nice Jersey schmear. If your bagel does not look like this, please come back or give us a call and we will fix it.”
The video didn’t go the way the bagel shop had seemingly wanted it to, with many commenting that their response was “rude” and “passive-aggressive.”
“Right. We know what it should like. That’s the problem,” someone wrote.
“You ACTUALLY gave her a block of cheese. She SHOULDN’T have to come back so you can redo it. You SHOULD do it right the first time so she doesn’t have to be back in the Jersey Shore,” another said.
Some perturbed viewers even went back to Valentina’s original post to discuss the response.
“They replied, acting like it was your fault you didn’t come back for them to fix it,” one pointed out.
“They could have addressed how it should’ve been done without being passive-aggressive,” another said.
“Their response is even worse,” someone wrote.
Since then, the Bella’s Bagels TikTok account has been flooded with negative comments, with its Yelp page frozen as platform moderators investigate alleged review bombing — presumably by Valentina’s followers.
Valentina posted an update asking people to stop tagging the bagel shop and noted that some individual employees reached out to her through their personal social media accounts, offering to somehow fix the situation.
She said she appreciated the effort but “left it alone” — until she saw the since-deleted video from Bella’s Bagels.
“But now I see that the company is actually posting a video, and they’re throwing shade at the end, which is so unnecessary,” she said in the follow-up video. “If you are trying to fix bad PR, you should probably respond to me and not like make a snide comment. That’s just my two cents.”
The Post has reached out to Bella’s Bagels for comment.
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples
