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Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.

The mouth-watering aromas of baked cheese, rich sauce and warm bread filled the streets around San Francisco’s Washington Square Park for the first-ever Pizza, Bagel and Beer Festival. Dozens of local pizzerias, bagel shops and breweries set up their wares and welcomed hordes of hungry eaters and thirsty drinkers.

Eat and drink they did! A wristband bought all-you-can-eat pizza and bagels as well as four tickets that could be exchanged for beer, cider and seltzer.

The festival was a dream come true, a carbohydrate wonderland.

Saturday’s North Beach fest was hosted and organized by Tony Gemignani, owner of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana — which made one of my favorite pizzas of the day, more on that later — in collaboration with the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club Foundation.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed presented him with awards from her office and from the Board of Supervisors, celebrating him for bringing the neighborhood together for a day of carb pleasure.

Gemignani said he wanted to create a food festival after the Covid-19 pandemic died down and realized he could make it more interesting by not only inviting pizzarias but also bagel shops and breweries.

“For me, I think San Francisco is as good as New York and Chicago when it comes to pizza,” Gemignani told J.

He noted that pizza makers have been slowly adding bagels to their repertoire.

“There’s a movement in the industry for the last maybe five years or so of pizza makers that make bagels,” said Gemignani. “It’s not uncommon if you’re in the pizza industry. It may be uncommon from a consumer’s point of view. Putting them together in a festival isn’t too crazy.”

Gemignani himself has expanded into the bagel business. He named his shop Dago Bagel because he’d been called, “dago,” an ethnic slur, and opted to reclaim the word instead, according to his shop’s website. Gemingnani said Dago Bagel baked 1,200 bagels the morning of the festival.

“I don’t think it was a giant leap to make bagels,” he said. “It was something I wanted to do for a long time.”

Gemingnani said his bagel shop also produces sourdough bread and the pizza dough for his pizzeria, allowing one business to feed the other. His goal was to create a New York-style bagel, which he claimed couldn’t be easily found in the Bay Area.

“When you have that bite of an East Coast — primarily a New York — bagel, it should be a little tough, not fully yeast, not super sweet. It’s not Montreal,” said Gemingnani. “It’s hand formed. It’s specifically boiled in liquid malt. It’s twisted by hand. It’s cooked on burlap boards upside-down, and you flip them over. So there is a technique just like different styles of pizza.”

Gemingnani praised the various bagel shops and pizzerias that served hungry festivalgoers.

About that great slice I had from Tony’s place — it was the extremely unkosher Motorhead, a massive square of Detroit-style pie that featured four kinds of meat. (The bagels flowed freely at the event, but so did a lot of very unkosher pizza. I’ll spare you all the juicy details, but I had a great time.)

I also got to try the seeded bagel from Gemignani’s shop. It was an OK bagel, though it came with some really excellent honey butter.

Emily Winston, owner and founder of the Berkeley-based Boichik Bagels, saw the festival as an opportunity to increase awareness in San Francisco of her growing operation. She brought along about 2,000 bagels to do just that.

“It was a really fun time. I’m really glad that Tony invited us. I ate a lot of pizza and beer and bagels. I was really stuffed,” Winston said. “A lot of people who live in San Francisco … came and said they had never had our bagels before, so they were excited to taste them. So that was great.”

I’m one of those people. I had been meaning to try Boichik Bagels, but never found a chance until the festival. They didn’t disappoint. The bagel I had was soft with chive, poppy seeds, sesame seeds and onion. Plus, they were served by Boichik COO Rob Soviero, who shouted into the crowd a pretty convincing slogan: “If you eat more bagels, you can drink more beer!”

Boichik came about as an effort to re-create the bagel experience that Winston had growing up in New Jersey with H&H bagels. Like Gemignani, Winston attempted to mimic a New York-style bagel.

“Basically I studied whatever I could get my hands on about New York bagels,” said Winston. “I was just trying to re-create my most-beloved New York bagel. So there was a lot of research into: What is it they’ve been doing in New York for a hundred years? How are they making those bagels?”

Winston said she studied everything from methods to ingredients and sought advice from local bagel shops. After that, she said there was a lot of trial and error.

“The real fantasy I had was maybe one day The New York Times will say that my bagels are acceptable,” Winston said with a chuckle. “That would be just the greatest thing.”

Then, the Times actually wrote about Boichik and other shops in early 2021: “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York).”

“That was completely stupendous that they came back and said we’re even better,” she said.

Jeff Krupman’s PizzaHacker served a lemony arugula atop its pizza. I would have appreciated the sourdough crust if the greens weren’t in my face with every bite. Since 2018, Krupman has been turning PizzaHacker into a bagel shop called BagelMacher on weekend mornings. So aside from the pizza, they handed out hundreds of bagels throughout the festival.

Other bagel shops on hand included Daily Driver, BagelMacher, The Laundromat SF and Kaz Bagels.

Having tasted 13 pizzas, two bagels and one beer, I was more than just satisfied. I was bloated. As I left, Jewish rapper Kosha Dillz was introducing himself onstage as having been on Nick Cannon’s show “Wild’n Out” and launched into a bagel rap. My pace quickened. I was done with food for the day.