By Marco Shalma

New York has survived blackouts, blizzards, bankruptcies, mayors with questionable hobbies, and at least six separate cupcake waves. But nothing shook this city’s culinary self-respect quite like the rainbow bagel. One day we were happily chewing sesame and everything like functioning adults. The next day, Brooklyn woke up looking like a Lisa Frank fever dream had leaked into the food supply. And instantly, every New Yorker let out that deep, diaphragm-level noise we reserve for stalled trains and tourists blocking the subway stairs: ugh.

To figure out who ruined the bagel, you have to start with the guy who unintentionally opened Pandora’s Bread Box. Scott Rosillo, owner of The Bagel Store in Williamsburg, had been dyeing dough long before BuzzFeed discovered intravenous caffeine and industrial lighting. He called himself “the world’s premier bagel artist,” which is extremely Brooklyn, but also—credit where due—kind of accurate. He wasn’t a villain. He was a tinkerer making edible tie-dye in a quiet corner of the borough where grown adults willingly pay $5,000 a month for a room with a window facing a brick wall.

Then BuzzFeed found him.

That was the moment the city lost control of the narrative.

Their video hit the internet like a UPS truck with no brakes. Nearly a hundred million views later, Williamsburg turned into a pilgrimage site for people who think New York is a color palette. Lines wrapped the block. Cameras everywhere. Out-of-towners asking if this was “the real New York experience” while locals walked by clutching a normal everything bagel like a moral compass.

This wasn’t about taste. It never was. The rainbow bagel didn’t offend the tongue—it offended the city’s sense of itself. We’re a bagel town with standards. We boil dough. We don’t bedazzle it. The rainbow era triggered a chain reaction nobody asked for: rainbow grilled cheese, galaxy donuts, unicorn drinks, desserts that looked like they were cooked inside Times Square billboards. Suddenly the whole city felt like an edible art project curated by an overstimulated algorithm.

Meanwhile, The Bagel Store couldn’t handle the fame. The demand was too big, the hype too loud, the energy too messy. It shut down, reopened, shut down again, then finally tapped out in 2019. The bagel didn’t die. The circus around it did.

But the real crime wasn’t the bagel—it was the cultural fallout. It taught restaurants that spectacle beats flavor, that trends beat tradition, and that you’ll get more engagement from food that looks like a screensaver than food that tastes like New York. It rewired an entire generation’s appetite. It made “aesthetically pleasing” a requirement. It turned carbs into props.

So who ruined it? The truth sits in the overlap of good intentions and bad timing. Rosillo created the thing, long before anyone knew what a ring light was. He was a Brooklyn tinkerer making psychedelic dough because it amused him, not because he wanted to turn the city into a fluorescent circus. BuzzFeed detonated it, blasting a harmless neighborhood curiosity across the planet like it had geopolitical stakes. Instagram worshipped it, turning a novelty into a prophecy and convincing millions that New York had collectively agreed to this edible cartoon. And the rest of us? We were just trying to get to work without stepping over people kneeling on the sidewalk to photograph bread.

And if I ever run into Rosillo in a dark alley, I’m not mad. I’m handing him a plain sesame and saying, “Look what we all lived through because of you, kid.”