Los Angeles is a pickle city. Where to find pickle bagels, fried pickles and pickle nachos

Did social media videos of ranch pickles, chamoy pickles and glickles (pickles with edible glitter) make pickle lovers out of all of us during the pandemic? Or did TikTok just give the existing pickle heads a new outlet for our pickle flags to fly high and wide? Today’s collective pickle obsession was probably brought on by a little bit of both.

If the Big Dill World’s Largest Pickle Party were a thing when I was younger, it would have been better than Disneyland. For the uninitiated, it’s an annual pickle appreciation festival that started in Baltimore in 2019. This year, there are events planned for Dallas and Baltimore. Imagine pickles on and in offerings that include pizza and egg rolls, a world pickle eating championship, brine chug challenge and unlimited pickle sampling.

Topped and Kaylin + Kaylin owner Scott Kaylin poses with a pickle at his shop inside the Original Farmers Market.

(Courtesy of Kaylin + Kaylin)

“I think social media just exposed all the pickle lovers,” says Scott Kaylin, owner of Kaylin + Kaylin pickle shop and Topped pickle restaurant at the Original Farmers Market. “Obviously it’s creating some new ones but I think overall, there have always been pickle lovers, and social media is just exposing pickle lovers to different things.”

Kaylin + Kaylin has nearly 2 million likes on TikTok and thousands of followers. It’s also one of the most frequented vendors in the Original Farmers Market, with customers who line up for the $3 pickle flight at the tasting bar. You choose five flavors, then spear your sample spears with a tiny wooden pick. I tend to resample the spicy garlic dill, horseradish and spicy honey mustard with each visit.

The flight was actually a pandemic-specific business model that turned into a genius marketing ploy for Kaylin, who opened his pickle business about a month before the COVID-19 shutdowns of 2020.

A stack of pickle sandwiches from Topped at the Original Farmers Market.

(Kaylin + Kaylin )

“I went to the health department and told them I was an essential business,” he says. “They told me I could stay open, but I couldn’t sample.”

Offering shoppers free pickle samples is how Kaylin attracted most of his new customers.

“I thought, how do I function?” he says. “If I create a plate, it’s not a sample. I took the opposite of the Costco model and was probably the first person to ever charge people for samples.”

Last year, he sold 43,000 pickle flights. I was personally responsible for 30 of them.

In August, he opened Topped out of a 200-square-foot space near the north end of the market. The business was directly inspired by the pickle creations he sees on social media, offering pickle sandwiches, pickle chips dressed like nachos and flights of stuffed pickle mini boats.

Unsurprisingly, the flight of mini pickle boats is Kaylin’s bestselling item. And the pickle topping people gravitate to the most is Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

On a recent visit, I order a flight with a cream cheese, lox and everything bagel seasoning pickle boat; a tuna salad pickle boat and a peanut butter and Nutella boat with crushed pretzels. The latter is exactly as advertised, with smooth peanut butter and chocolate hazelnut spread becoming one in the center of a scooped out pickle with salty pretzels crumbled over the top. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Full disclosure: When I was 5 years old I told my parents I wanted to live in pickle land, a place I dreamed up where inhabitants ate all sorts of pickles for breakfast, lunch, dinner and all snacks.

A selection of pickle boats and loaded pickle chips from Topped at the Original Farmers Market.

(Eddie Sanchez)

My never-ending quest to fall deeper into the pickle rabbit hole that is Los Angeles led me to the bar at Belle’s Delicatessen, Nick Schreiber and J.D. Rocchio’s bagel pop-up turned full Jewish deli in Highland Park. Here, you can order a pickle martini (a full sour in martini form) and sip it alongside a plate of fried pickles.

“Fried pickles in and of themselves are a kind of drinking snack,” Schreiber says. “In a Jewish deli you eat pickles, but fried pickles are something we had seldom seen in the deli sphere.”

Belle’s fried pickles do not shrink into dry, shriveled raisins in the fryer. There isn’t too much batter and it doesn’t separate from the pickle. Schreiber uses a mixture of cornmeal and tapioca flour to create a light, crisp golden shell that fuses to each pickle chip. And he’s using a pickle with high nostalgia marks for any Angeleno.

After sampling dozens of pickles for the dish, he and Rocchio settled on a pickle from Chicago Pickle Co., which is actually a division of Vienna Beef.

The fried pickles from Belle’s Delicatessen in Highland Park.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

“Theirs was the best we tried by a long shot,” says Schreiber. “One of my reps told me that the garlic dill pickles at Jerry’s Famous Deli were these pickles and I was like, ‘say less.’ ”

The fried pickles are finished with a sprinkling of ground caraway seeds, giving each briny, acidic chip some deep sweet and spicy notes that will bring to mind your favorite toasted rye bread. On the side, there’s ranch packed with as many derivative onion flavors as Schreiber could manage, including green onion and onion powder.

And the slice of lemon on the plate isn’t just a pretty garnish.

“We actually do encourage people to squeeze the lemon over the pickles for what we call the kosher calamari effect,” says Schreiber. “Between the cornmeal, the lemon and the briny acidity, it’s giving calamari.”

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At the Fat & Flour location in Culver City, there is evidence of owner Nicole Rucker’s love of pickles all over the bakery and market. Pickle ornaments dangle from a display during the holidays, there are jars of pickles in the fridge to purchase and pickle hats. A bumper sticker reads: “I’d rather be leaning over the sink eating a jar of pickles.”

“Last year, pickles started to crest in popularity on the internet,” says Rucker. “Everything became like pickle girl content. I’m not really sure who started that but it just became like pickles were in the zeitgeist again in a different way.”

In January, she created the pickle bagel.

The pickle bagel from Fat & Flour in Culver City.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

“We started offering this bagel menu and top of mind, was my love of pickles,” she says. “I just really like pickles and thought what would be better than regular cream cheese? If we put pickles in the cream cheese. And it was very good.”

The pickle bagel is built on a Jyan Isaac Bread bagel of your choice, toasted until both the bottom and top are crusty. It’s smeared with a whipped cream cheese that’s been mixed with dill, a little bit of fresh garlic, chopped pickles and a splash of pickle juice. A ribbon of sliced cucumber is splayed over each half with more dill, some flaky sea salt and red pepper flakes.

You get the briny bite of a good pickle with the freshness of raw cucumber over one of the city’s best, airy, crunchy bagels.

The first iteration of the pickle bagel was made using a brand called Hot Girl Pickles.

“We switched over to using Grillo’s pickles in the cream cheese because the Hot Girl Pickles are not available to use right now,” says Rucker. “If I wasn’t using Grillo’s, I’d use the Bubbies ones, which are also very good. I’m entertaining new pickles.”

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My pickle-centric interview with Rucker ended with us both browsing pickle merch on a website she turned me onto called Faire. I’ve got my eye on a pickle bookmark and stickers that read: “just a girl who loves pickles.”

“Life is hell,” she says. “But there is still fun stuff going on. “

I couldn’t agree more. And for those who might appreciate such statistics, the words “pickle” and “pickles” appear a total of 75 times in this column.