PopUp Bagels encourages clients to tug hunks of its bagels by means of its Schmears.
Picture: Jacob Moscovitch and Vivie Behrens
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Simply after midday on a sweltering June Thursday, warmth radiated off the sidewalk on Thompson Avenue, baking into the decrease legs of some dozen folks standing in line for, of all issues, scorching bagels, accompanied by hot-sauce cream cheese.
The road stretched down towards Houston Avenue, and the assembled firm — NYU college students, Canadian vacationers, a gaggle of women in bike shorts and slicked-back buns, this bagel-loving journalist — have been prepared to courageous the noon solar not only for the possibility to be among the many first to attempt a style of PopUp Bagels’ new limited-edition cream cheese, a collaboration with TRUFF scorching sauce, however to satisfy the DJ Chris Lake, who was there “bagel bouncing”: posing for selfies whereas handing out PopUp’s signature small, pillowy, volcanically scorching bagels.
The vitality inside was Barney-Greengrass-meets-backstage-at-Coachella. Home music blared as clients filed in, every scoring a little bit brown bag full of three bagels and a four-ounce container of the much-anticipated schmear. Lake greeted followers whereas the assorted social media groups — for TRUFF, for PopUp, for Lake — captured the vibe on their telephones.
Ardyn Solomon, the bagel model’s 24-year-old director of social and partnerships, stood outdoors in a PopUp-branded trucker hat, surveying the scene approvingly. Lake’s go to happened, she mentioned, on the energy of an occasion the bagel store had finished with totally different DJs, the duo Two Pals, a few years again. “We actually introduced the roof down — they threw a full-on bagel rave,” Solomon recalled. “The group simply remembered how a lot enjoyable Two Pals had with it. It was such nice content material, and Chris is right here selling his present this weekend. It simply made sense!”
If the logic of a DJ working the counter of a bagel store in collaboration with a luxurious hot-sauce model eludes you, you’re in all probability over the age of 30. This scene, nonetheless, is an encapsulation of the magic that has propelled PopUp Bagels — which started as a pandemic passion in founder Adam Goldberg’s Westport, Connecticut, kitchen six years in the past — right into a burgeoning nationwide phenomenon.
PopUp is an element of a bigger bagel increase going down throughout the nation. There’s Jeff’s Bagel Run, the Orlando-based, scratch-made chain that additionally has its origins in COVID-lockdown baking and now has greater than 30 areas throughout 9 states; Apollo Bagels, the East Village darling whose blistered, deeply chewy, naturally leavened bagels made the Occasions’ rating of the town’s new-school bagels; and Name Your Mom, the D.C.-based “Jew-ish deli” whose colourful, sandwich-forward outlets have spawned a loyal following and a fast-growing footprint throughout the capital area.
However none has blasted off with the rate of PopUp, which now contains greater than 40 outlets (and counting), from New York to South Florida to Nashville, with franchise agreements signed for 300 extra. This spring, the enterprise offered a stake to funding agency Tiger World Administration — following earlier cash from the growth-equity fund Stripes and a roster of superstar traders that features the previous NFL star J.J. Watt and the actor Paul Rudd — at a valuation of $300 million. “My number-one aim,” Goldberg instructed me not too long ago, “is to get the very best bagel doable in every single place on the earth, beginning with America.”
Checked out a technique, PopUp represents a long-awaited breakthrough for bagel lovers whose best choice outdoors New York Metropolis and a handful of bagel hotspots has lengthy been Bruegger’s, or a sleeve of Lender’s. PopUp’s model is certainly an improve; Danny Meyer has referred to as them “one in all mankind’s greatest bagels,” they usually have twice received prime honors on the New York BagelFest competitors.
And but with its viral collabs, strictly restricted menu of bagel varieties, and steadfast refusal to make sandwiches on web site, PopUp represents a major departure from established, and cherished, bagel-shop norms. Some traditionalists query whether or not the bagels themselves, with their diminutive dimension and cloudlike softness, are actually even bagels in any respect; the meals author (and Grub Avenue contributor) Charlotte Druckman has referred to them, witheringly, as “chubby pitas.” So is PopUp the very best factor to occur to bagels because the invention of every little thing seasoning, or the worst?
PopUp’s story begins one summer time morning in 2020, with Goldberg floating in his swimming pool, making an attempt to resolve what to do with the day. He was 45 on the time, adrift not simply in his deep finish, however in life. He ran a flood-mitigation enterprise, specializing in non permanent ramparts a constructing may throw up earlier than a hurricane, the rights to which he’d purchased, by means of a golf buddy, two months earlier than Hurricane Sandy. However now, in COVID lockdown, nobody was apprehensive about hurricanes. “All the cash for flood mitigation went into concern mitigation,” Goldberg mentioned, joking. He discovered himself, like half the nation, baking: “I used to be making an attempt to determine my subsequent transfer, making sourdough each morning, consuming Burgundy wine each afternoon.”
On that exact July morning, on account of some scorching climate, any individual floated the thought of constructing bagels as a substitute of the same old sourdough — they’d be extra “refreshing,” the considering went, which Goldberg now concedes doesn’t actually make sense. He discovered a recipe, began tinkering, and locked it in quick. The system PopUp makes use of immediately, Goldberg says, is off by a single gram of 1 ingredient from the model he arrived at inside his first few weeks of baking. The bagels have been a revelation. “I wasn’t an enormous bagel eater,” he instructed me, however biting right into a scorching one contemporary from his personal oven was “a thoughts warp again to childhood,” when Saturday mornings meant a brown bag of heat bagels dumped out on the kitchen desk of his Livingston, New Jersey, dwelling. Earlier than lengthy, he employed a pal’s son and different youngsters to indicate up and bake at 4 within the morning — high-schoolers in pajamas or nonetheless dressed from the night time earlier than, drawn by loud music and a celebration ambiance. The crew would knock out over a thousand bagels on a Saturday, offered from Goldberg’s kitchen window by the dozen with two cream cheeses. Clients would tear into one earlier than they’d even pulled out of the driveway, which Goldberg says impressed the model’s now-trademarked “Grip, Rip, and Dip” slogan — a phrase that proliferates throughout PopUp’s signage, merch, and social media.
PopUp quickly crossed the road from boredom-buster to start-up, and by the top of 2020, Goldberg was promoting from a storefront in downtown Westport. He raised cash from buddies and followers, which he used to construct PopUp’s first commissary kitchen. A 12 months later, an introduction to John Davis — a movie and tv producer who had backed Blaze Pizza and Dave’s Sizzling Rooster — introduced a celebrity-studded funding spherical that paid to open the primary New York shops. The second PopUp’s Thompson Avenue location opened, Goldberg says, “each private-equity agency in New York knocked on my door and mentioned, ‘Hey, we wish in.’” It wasn’t simply the bagels that drew them to PopUp. Thanks, maybe, to his standing as a bagel-world outsider, Goldberg had managed to reenvision the enterprise in ways in which maximized each the revenue on every bagel offered and the dimensions of the group lining as much as purchase them.
A typical bagel store is a posh operation. It’d combine six sorts of dough and inventory a deli case filled with lox, whitefish salad, and a dozen cream cheeses; the sandwiches that make up the majority of its enterprise are higher-ticket gadgets than plain bagels, however labor-intensive to assemble. Goldberg disbursed with all of it: no sandwiches, no slicing, no scooping, no prep cook dinner making egg salad at daybreak. PopUp doesn’t even put together two forms of dough; the shops promote one, plain or seeded 4 methods (salt, poppy, sesame, every little thing), served scorching and entire, in a minimal order of three plus a shmear for round $14. A dozen bagels plus two spreads sells for about $44.
The ensuing mannequin is a franchisee’s fantasy: small shops which might be low-cost to construct, run restricted hours, and make use of simply ten to fifteen folks towards the 50 or 60 a full-service bagel-and-deli operation would possibly carry. Goldberg instructed me that PopUp’s dough is made in commissary kitchens — no one on the firm will reveal what number of — and fashioned by a mix of individuals and machines; the PopUp group declined to supply specifics, noting the method is proprietary. They’re then trucked to shops “just about day by day,” able to proof, boil, seed, and bake on web site.
In 2024, PopUp introduced Tory Bartlett over from Moe’s Southwest Grill to function CEO, and Goldberg slid over to chief model officer. Bartlett sees PopUp’s mannequin as filled with ingenious options to sidestep every little thing that makes eating places more durable to run. “The price of constructing a standard restaurant has elevated so dramatically,” he instructed me, noting that discovering and affording labor can be an enormous problem within the business. “The eating places which might be successful immediately are doing one factor properly.” He factors to Elevating Cane’s, a multibillion-dollar empire constructed on rooster fingers.
Goldberg’s strategy to bagels can be a grasp class in interesting to Gen-Z tastes. There are the in-store occasions — DJ units, a Love Island star drafted to run the register — and the quiet genius of PopUp’s shmear program. Along with its 5 bagels, PopUp sells “shmears”: cream cheeses and butters, pre-batched on the commissaries and trucked out with the dough. A number of variations are evergreen, however restricted editions — often a collaboration with an outdoor model — hit the menu weekly.
PopUp’s first limited-edition cream-cheese shmear, constructed round Utz’s cheese-ball seasoning, landed in 2021 and went, Goldberg mentioned, “bananas.” The corporate now does 30 to 40 collaborations yearly: Mike’s Sizzling Honey, ALB Vodka, Oreo, and the influencer Kaitlyn Lavery have all contributed.
The eating places which might be successful immediately are doing one factor properly.
For PopUp’s shops, a brand new collab requires no additional labor, no new tools or coaching, only a totally different tub of flavored cream cheese or butter combined upstream. However each palms influencers one thing contemporary to movie, provides the regulars a motive to return again this week as a substitute of subsequent, and feeds digital algorithms a gentle drip of content material.
Goldberg could not have skilled baking credentials, however this aspect of the enterprise — the collabs, the music, the traces, the cry of “Sizzling bagels!” that goes up each time an worker dumps a contemporary tray into the wire bins — is the place, after bouncing by means of a sequence of careers, he appears to have discovered his calling. “My entire life, I’ve been the social planner, the push chairman, the journey agent, the occasion coordinator,” he mentioned. “The background that led me to create this enterprise is the truth that I’ve all the time identified the best way to entertain folks.”
PopUp doesn’t confer with its merchandise as “New York bagels.” This isn’t, Goldberg instructed me, out of deference to the style and PopUp’s origins outdoors the Empire State, however as a result of the designation has turn into tarnished. “Everybody within the nation claims to have a New York bagel, and a lot of the bagels aren’t superb,” he mentioned. “So we don’t need to go on that checklist.”
He’s, after all, proper. Bagels on the market outdoors the New York metro space have traditionally been so universally horrible — cottony, dry, flavorless — that it’s tempting to conclude there have to be a legislation of chemistry or physics responsible. That is the wishful considering behind the favored perception {that a} correct bagel can’t be made with out New York Metropolis’s mineral-blessed faucet water. However, as I found in my deep dive into bagel historical past, the true clarification is extra difficult.
For one factor, bagels are usually not endemic to New York. In accordance with Maria Balinska, whose e book The Bagel: The Stunning Historical past of a Modest Bread is the definitive textual content on the topic, their first written point out dates to 1610 in sumptuary legal guidelines issued by the Krakow Jewish Council. (The phrase comes from the Yiddish beigen, to bend). As a result of they have been made with wheat flour, then 4 or 5 instances the value of rye, bagels have been a Seventeenth-century luxurious, and the council’s rules laid out in fastidious element who may purchase one and when. Solely within the nineteenth century, after the value of wheat collapsed, did the bagel come down on the earth, to be offered from the hampers of peddlers on the streets of Krakow and Warsaw.
It reached New York — and Montreal and London — with Polish Jewish immigrants on the finish of that century. By 1900, there have been a minimum of 70 bakeries turning them out on the Decrease East Facet. The PopUp staff grooving to Chris Lake have come a great distance from these authentic makers, who labored 13 and 14 hours a day in smoky, infernal subterranean bakeries earlier than wholesaling their output to grocers and appetizing outlets.
What makes a bagel, in accordance with Balinska, isn’t merely that it’s boiled earlier than it’s baked. A real bagel needs to be created from high-protein flour labored right into a stiff, low-hydration dough — the supply of its stretchy inside — then cold-proofed in a single day to deepen the flavour, and baked at excessive temperature to attain the thick, burnished crust. Actual ones know {that a} bagel isn’t a bagel until it makes your jaw ache.
To know what really stands in the best way of bringing an genuine bagel to all the remainder of humanity, I went to see Jesse Spellman, one of many homeowners of Utopia Bagels, a Queens establishment since 1981. Utopia, with its half-dozen totally different bagel doughs and sprawling deli counter filled with scratch-made salads and spreads, represents every little thing PopUp has thrown overboard to chop weight. Over a sesame and cream cheese bagel on the firm’s latest store in Midtown Manhattan, Spellman walked me by means of Utopia’s 45-year-old course of.
Utopia hand-rolls all of its bagels, sliced from a 300-pound block of dough, then provides them a two-stage proof — first at room temperature, then a minimal of 24 hours underneath refrigeration — and boils and bakes them in rotating ovens constructed particularly for bagels by a long-defunct firm named Cutler. The oven in Utopia’s authentic Whitestone location dates to 1947; to outfit Utopia’s newer outlets, Spellman has acquired used ovens once they come up at public sale, typically rebuilding them half by half.
For Spellman, an actual bagel is the sum of all that fuss. “It comes all the way down to the rolling, the components, the proofing course of, the boiling, the kind of ovens we’re utilizing,” he mentioned. The machine-made competitors provides itself away within the mouth: Retailers that run dough by means of rollers are likely to swap malt for white or brown sugar as a result of a stiff, malt-based dough gums up the tools. The result’s softer, sweeter, and, to his palate, probably not a bagel in any respect.
If I needed to know the one biggest impediment to creating nice bagels in Topeka or Tucson, Spellman mentioned, it’s the rolling — a talented craft he estimates would take a newcomer eight months to study, and one lengthy managed by a small, insular labor pool. After New York’s authentic wave of Jewish immigrants got here a Taiwanese and Thai cohort within the ’80s and ’90s, then a Dominican one, households wherein fathers, uncles, cousins, and sons all rolled, instructing each other and passing down the commerce. That meant an incredible bagel was, for many years, a basically native product.
Sam Silverman, a New York bagel evangelist and President of BagelUp — a media-and-events firm that runs bagel courses, excursions, and the annual BagelFest — agrees with Spellman’s analysis. “There’s a expert labor pool that has existed in New York Metropolis and nowhere else because the late 1800s,” he instructed me. The previous bagel-bakers’ union, he famous, intentionally stored the craft within the household — to study the commerce you needed to be the son of a member — which constructed high quality in New York whereas ravenous it in every single place else.
Making a genuinely good bagel at scale additionally requires a degree of funding most nationwide gamers have by no means bothered with: the gradual ferment, the boiling, the right ovens, the skilled palms. The Dunkins and Einstein Bros. of the world calculated that you can make a good-enough model by wheeling a rack of thawed dough right into a steam-injection oven, and now for a lot of the nation, a “bagel” is little greater than an insipid, ring-shaped piece of bread.
Whether or not PopUp can keep its attraction at scale stays to be seen. Bruegger’s, I’m instructed, was as soon as fairly good, however high quality is usually the very first thing to die on the highway to a thousand franchised areas. Goldberg insists his mannequin is constructed exactly to stop this, that by centralizing the dough and releasing every retailer to give attention to the bagel and nothing however the bagel, PopUp can keep its customary the place others slipped. If he’s proper, and PopUp brings its A-game to 300 shops and past, it can introduce hundreds of thousands of People to the very best bagel they’ve ever tasted.
However a rising tide doesn’t raise all boats. In Atlanta, PopUp not too long ago opened three doorways down from Emerald Metropolis Bagels, which mother-daughter duo Deanna and Jackie Halcrow grew from a farmers’-market stand into two thriving storefronts. I referred to as the store not too long ago to ask what the influence had been. “Usually, it feels adverse,” Jackie instructed me, with a sigh. At first, there had been some spillover — folks peeling off from PopUp’s viral line and wandering over. However “now that the mud has settled, it feels extra adverse. There’s solely so many individuals seeking to purchase bagels on one block.”
Within the early days, when PopUp was a handful of high-schoolers dealing bagels from a kitchen window, it was straightforward to root for. Someplace between the celeb cash and the cascading franchise agreements and the $300 million valuation, the attraction has began to put on skinny for some bagel lovers. On TikTok, critics have branded PopUp “Massive Bagel,” a soulless company machine towards which the scrappy neighborhood store have to be defended; the caption on one video of a younger girl digging into an every little thing bagel reads, “Each few months I test if I style the personal fairness in PopUp bagels.” (The submit has acquired greater than 23,000 likes.) One Reddit remark derides PopUp as “the Crumbl of bagels,” likening it to the cookie chain whose hype, rotating menu, and camera-ready packaging outrun the precise product.
Silverman, who topped PopUp the winner at his personal BagelFest not as soon as however twice, not too long ago posted a video on Instagram denouncing the inflow of capital into the bagel enterprise. “I don’t assume Adam and I are nonetheless on talking phrases,” he instructed me.
The grievance, notably, isn’t that non-public fairness will degrade PopUp’s bagels. It’s {that a} enterprise purpose-built for fast enlargement will behave like an invasive species, outcompeting homegrown establishments. Milena Pagán, who owns the artisan bakery Rebelle Bagels in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took to Substack to vent. “Once we don’t save room for bagels with area of interest attraction, when every little thing needs to be streamlined to attraction to the lots, we unwittingly degrade meals tradition,” she wrote in her publication, Latent Warmth.
Bagels have all the time been freighted with symbolism; within the Seventeenth century, when Cracovians needed to be legally restrained from spending away their livelihoods on bagels, they have been understood to symbolize the circle of life. They’re additionally an artifact of a selected diaspora, carried out of Poland by Jewish immigrants, rolled by hand within the basements of the Decrease East Facet. What the critics are actually mourning, once they take pictures at PopUp, is the gradual disappearance of the quirky, the time-honored, the native — the sense {that a} metropolis ought to style like itself and nowhere else. “Individuals have an actual affection for bagels,” Balinska, the bagel scholar, mused once I reached her at her dwelling in London. “It’s one thing in regards to the form, the little imperfections.” Detractors concern a world the place each downtown is identical assemblage of Clean Streets and Sweetgreens, Nayas and Dutch Bros, the place the meals is engineered to journey and the variations between one place and the subsequent have been sanded easy. The query hiding inside each scorching, good, an identical bagel PopUp lobs throughout the counter, then, is whether or not in making an attempt to supply the very best model of every little thing, in every single place, we find yourself nowhere in any respect.