Andrew Barton remembers the cheddar bagel at Humble Bagel with unusual specificity. The now-defunct shop sat on the corner of the Sundance building on 24th and Hilyard, where Happy Cow is today. South Eugene High School students would slam the shop for an affordable after-school snack.
But it was that cheddar bagel — a yellowish-orange, possibly flavored with turmeric, studded with dried herbs — that stuck with him. Barton always ordered it with sundried tomato cream cheese.
“It felt very hippie food adjacent,” Barton says over the phone from Portland, where he lives now. The bagels had “this perfect dance of the boiled exterior texture with a blush of golden brown from the bake.” Humble Bagel closed in 2019 after 42 years. Other recognizable names to the Eugene food scene, like Keystone Café and Pizza Research Institute, have closed their doors, too…