You might be tempted to think that if you're in New York City, you can't go wrong with a bagel.
But New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, best known for her role as Miranda on "Sex and the City," proved that you can, in fact, go wrong with a bagel — if you order one the way she did.
In a Gothamist video, while visiting the gourmet grocery store Zabar's in Manhattan on Sunday morning, Nixon asked for a cinnamon-raisin bagel — wrong move off the bat. In this author's opinion, cinnamon raisin is the Red Delicious of bagels. Bagels shouldn't be sweet. Period. But what Nixon did with said bagel was even worse. (Warning: It's not for the faint of heart.)
She added cream cheese, lox, red onions, capers and tomato right onto her sweet bagel.
"Yeah, sweet and salty, that's right," she proudly proclaimed to a witness in the small crowd that gathered near the counter.
Now, I'm not saying sweet and salty don't belong together — they do, in many cases — but sweet and fishy, not so much. That's like putting raisins in a tuna salad. Absolutely not.
Of course, the Twitterverse went bonkers, with some people rescinding (maybe in jest?) their support for her candidacy.
There were also quite a few voices, however, that seemed shockingly supportive of Nixon's breakfast choice:
Nixon defended her blasphemous bagel order, offering reporter Jimmy Vielkind the cinnamon-raisin bagel of responses: "Don’t knock it ‘til you try it." (To which I say, no thank you. Bagels and lox in New York City are expensive.)
If this all feels like déjà vu, that's because this isn't the first time a politician has been caught in the middle of a food faux pas on the campaign trail.
In January 2014, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was caught eating pizza with a knife and fork, a scandal which is now known as #forkgate.
In 2016, while eating his annual sausage sandwich at the New York State Fair, Governor Cuomo told a female reporter, "I wanna see you eat the whole sausage." (Nope.)
Then, let's not forget, there was John Kasich going to town on Italian sandwiches at Mike's Deli on Arthur Avenue — an image that cannot be unseen. (He is, like de Blasio, a knife-and-forker.)
Many a politician has tried to appear more relatable by grabbing a super-casual bite-to-eat ... with cameras super casually recording their every move. But then, when their eating habits are revealed to be, well, not like ours at all, it can backfire in a big way.
So, dear politicians, just know that we're onto your sneaky food stunts. Yes, we all have peculiar palate preferences. But don't mess with bagels in New York. Or pizza, for that matter.