Get this vegan fried mushroom sandwich while you can this November

The most interesting thing on Modern Bread & Bagel’s November menu may be its monthly special: a $17 sandwich built around fried maitake mushrooms that is available at all of the shop’s New York locations. Called the Vegan Bomb, it comes with truffle sauce, vegan Parmesan, red onion and watercress. At a shop where plenty of people know their order before they walk in, it’s a good reason to read the menu.

A bagel with a swipe of vegan cream cheese can solve breakfast but a $17 lunch has more to prove. Maitakes pull apart into frilly clusters, giving the fryer plenty of edges to work with. Watercress has the peppery bite you’d want against a creamy truffle sauce. What makes the sandwich interesting is how little explanation it needs once you get past its name: fried mushrooms and sharp greens make sense together regardless of what else you eat. Bon appetit, as they say on the other side of the Atlantic.

Modern Bread & Bagel, a kosher, gluten-free bakery, changes its specials monthly and offers a separate selection of limited-run bagels and pastries for shipping. In addition to the vegan concoction, the November menu includes a pumpkin spice bagel topped with toasted pumpkin seeds and apple cider crullers glazed with reduced cider. The vanilla-cinnamon halva babka is the one I’d be most curious to try. Halva gives the bakery a way into the cinnamon-heavy November pastry case through sesame, a flavor that can hold its own against all that sugar.

In the Instagram post announcing the sandwich, Modern Bread & Bagel goes out of its way to credit its photographer and graphic designer and say the image was made without AI. It’s a small disclosure that gets at one of the harder jobs in a bakery built on regulars. The person who comes in for the same bagel every week can order it without looking up but a monthly special has to make that person stop and consider, for a second, whether what they came in for is still what they want.