Andrew Cuomo with a “bacon cheese and egg” sandwich. Graphic by Hannah Feuer via Azurita /iStock and Kent Nishimura / Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer
June 4, 2025
It’s no secret that if you’re running for office in New York City, winning over Jewish voters is crucial. Candidates often go out of their way to show their Chosen People bona fides, from quoting Rabbi Hillel to calling Donald Trump a “schmuck.”
So when a reporter asks a mayoral candidate about their go-to bagel order or breakfast sandwich, they better be ready with a culturally competent bagel flavor and accompanying schmear.
Some acceptable answers: An everything, sesame or poppy bagel with plain, scallion or veggie cream cheese. Toppings may include nova lox, tomatoes, onions and capers, or perhaps whitefish salad. A truly ambitious candidate might even venture into chopped liver territory.
In a Tuesday interview with The New York Times, Andrew Cuomo offered none of the above.
“Bacon, cheese and egg on an English muffin, and then I try to take off the bacon, but I don’t really take off the bacon,” Cuomo said.
“The bagel I try to stay away from, to keep my girlish figure.”
New Yorkers everywhere are asking: What kind of meshuggeneh order is that? For one, Cuomo bungled the order of ingredients in the breakfast classic, which rolls off the tongue as bacon, egg and cheese. And, to state the obvious, an English muffin is not a bagel at all.
Perhaps Cuomo was pandering to more religious Jews by at least considering taking off the bacon. Was he for the bacon before he was against it? His opposition quickly seized on the bagel blunder as tone-deaf and out of touch.
“At least we now know someone who wants to be mayor of NYC doesn’t even know what a bagel is,” Fabien Levy, the Jewish deputy mayor for communications to Mayor Eric Adams posted to X.
“It confirms so much of what we feared about Andrew Cuomo,” mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said at a Tuesday press conference. “Not just that he doesn’t know how to order a bacon, egg and cheese, but also the fact that this is a man who New York City has been something he’s understood more through his television screen than actually by walking the streets.”
City Councilwoman Joann Ariola, a Republican representing Queens, called it a “disqualifying offense.”
Surely, Cuomo could have anticipated the question, after he defeated Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 New York gubernatorial primary. A non-zero factor in that election: Nixon’s controversial order of a cinnamon-raisin bagel with lox, red onions, capers, tomato and cream cheese during a campaign stop at Zabar’s, which she proudly defended as “sweet and salty.”
And that’s far from the only bagel faux pas in New York politics. In 2020, then Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted his go-to order at Bagel Hole in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn: Whole wheat, toasted, and with extra cream cheese. Astute New Yorkers pointed out that Bagel Hole doesn’t have a toaster. De Blasio deleted the tweet and reposted — without the “toasted.”
The Forward, too, asks all new employees about their go-to bagel order, which I can only presume is a litmus test of sorts. Our newest intern passed with flying colors: A sesame bagel with plain cream cheese and a thin piece of juicy tomato. Political hopefuls ought to take notes.
