Hilliaro Lopez, head baker at Harrie's Bagelmania, cuts strips of dough in preparation for feeding them into a bagel-shaping machine. Photos by Gary Thompson and Clint Karlsen Bagel Cafe owner Savvas Andrews pulls a batch of bagels out of the oven. Lopez, above, mixes another batch of dough and Bagel Cafe baker Victor Carrasco, below, prepares bagels for baking moments after they were removed from boiling water.

In the world of Mort Horn and Savvas Andrews, there are bagels, and then there are Bagels.

The lower-case -- and lower-caste -- kind would be the ones found in mass-market national chain outlets and on the bread shelves and in the freezer cases of supermarkets. You know the type, especially if you're a bagel maven. They're mass-produced, maybe steamed (horrors!) maybe not (even bigger horrors!). Dough probably frozen. You get the picture. In any case, they're soft, kind of squishy. They're not really bad, maybe, if you don't think of them as bagels, but as a sort of cross between Wonder Bread, a crumpet and an English muffin.

Then there are Bagels, of the type produced by Horn at Harrie's Bagelmania, 855 E. Twain Ave., and Andrews at the Bagel Cafe, 301 N. Buffalo Drive. Those are boiled before they're baked. They end up with a fight-back texture, a tough, chewy outer shell and a soft interior. And yes, an observer wouldn't be remiss to find parallels between such bagels and Horn and Andrews themselves.

What the two men have in common is that they're among the few holdouts in Las Vegas who produce bagels the old-fashioned way. Their bagels are authentic.

Horn got involved in bagels 43 years ago, when the Chicago native took a job in his native Windy City at New York Bagel & Bialy, owned by six partners from Brooklyn, N.Y. He'd started working in delis when he was 15 years old.

"I set up the deli for them," he said of the New York partners. "They only knew bagels."

Pretty soon, Horn did, too.

"I learned their process, and they learned my process," he said.

He bought his own Chicago store 32 years ago. It was Harrie's, too. Horn bought it from a guy who'd owned it for 60 years, and kept the name.

In 1992, he opened Harrie's Bagelmania in Las Vegas. And he's still making bagels pretty much the way he learned way back when.

"They're almost handmade, basically," Horn said. When he opened the Las Vegas shop, all of the bagels were handmade. He sold about 20 dozen a day. Now he sells about 60 dozen a day, and most are shaped by a machine, with the dough formed around a rod. Harrie's twisted bagels are still made by hand. Horn said he sells about a dozen of those each day.

What makes Bagels different from bagels is that, after the made-from-scratch dough rises or is "proofed," the bagels are boiled before they're put into the oven. The process, Horn said, leaves them hard on the outside, but soft on the inside.

The "modern" method of making bagels means -- as seems to be the case with most such things -- that they lose a bit of character in the process. The mass-production places often get their dough from a central commissary instead of making it in-house. Horn said they put 30 trays of bagels in a rack, and steam is injected into the oven.

"Seven minutes later, the bagels are done," Horn said. While the steaming process finishes 20 to 30 dozen bagels in seven minutes, Horn said it takes 20 minutes to make a dozen the old-fashioned way.

And the main difference is that the bagels are soft throughout -- "like white bread."

He doesn't fault the chains for selling some pretty nontraditional flavored bagels. "A lot of people like them; otherwise, they wouldn't sell them." Plain is his most popular, but Harrie's also sells poppy seed, sesame, salt, onion, pumpernickel, corn rye, garlic, egg, jalapeño, cinnamon raisin, "everything," whole wheat and blueberry bagels, as well as bialys. Bagels are $4.50 a dozen on Tuesdays, $7.95 other days.

Horn said despite his location's proximity to the Strip, most of his customers are local.

"Most of the old-timers who built this town are my customers," Horn said. Many are retired; some come in for breakfast seven days a week at the same time every morning.

During the recent National Association of Broadcasters convention, one large table was filled by a party that has returned annually for 15 years.

"It started out as a mistake and then they came back every year," Horn said.

Some of the group were from Munich, Germany. Paul Tepper is from New York. He said the attraction, in addition to Horn's personality, is that "they're real bagels."

"This is definitely the place," he said.

Across town at the Bagel Cafe, most of the customers Andrews has served for 10 years are locals as well, although he has had a few coals-to-Newcastle experiences. Andrews has sold some bagels to people who took them back to New York. He also has had calls from New York asking if he'll ship bagels there.

Like Horn, Andrews' bagels are the products of long experience. A native of Cyprus, he came to the United States at age 20, with a one-way ticket and $100 in his pocket.

"My goal was to go to school," he said.

In the meantime -- and while he was going to business school -- he picked up experience in the Greek diners and bagel shops in New York. He learned to make bagels, and eventually decided he'd like to have his own shop in Las Vegas.

"When I came to this town, they told me I could never make a good bagel here," he said. Some people said the water would be a problem, but Andrews suspected otherwise.

"You can get a bad bagel in New York," he said. "It isn't just the water."

The initial results weren't promising. Andrews used the recipes he'd brought from New York, and the first batches had "skin like a 100-year-old person," he rememberedt with more than a touch of chagrin.

He called New York. "They had no answer for me."

So it was experiment, experiment, experiment -- trial-and-error tinkering with the room temperature, dough temperature and altitude. Eventually, success.

Andrews said he doesn't use automated equipment. "I don't have any room anyway." Besides, his shop also is known for its rugulach, black-and-whites, babka and scores of other pastries and breads.

"Everything is made here," he said. "I refuse to buy food outside."

His dough is refrigerated for eight hours to develop the flavor. And the bagels are boiled before baking.

Besides plain -- the most popular at Bagel Cafe as well -- he offers cinnamon-raisin swirl, jalapeño and cheddar, sun-dried tomato and basil, pumpernickel, eight-grain, honey-wheat, onion, salt, super egg and onion, "everything," garlic, egg, sesame, poppy seed, sourdough, spinach-feta, blueberry, chocolate chip, cranberry, Asiago cheese and rye bagels, and bialys. They're sold 14 to a dozen for $7.50, and the store and restaurant sell 3,000 to 4,000 on a Saturday.

While Andrews said he doesn't have the facilities to serve large-scale wholesale accounts, Horn sells to various local hotels. Until recently, they included the Palms. Horn said the chef there changed vendors because he wanted a soft bagel.

"There are a lot of bad bagels," Andrews said with a sigh.

But he's undaunted.

"The traditional way -- that makes us different," Andrews said. "We'll stick to the traditional way. I'm never going to change it.