This winter, a brand new bagel spot opened thrillingly near my house and appeared to focus on my specific tastes. Gertie, which moved into the previous R&D Meals house on Vanderbilt Avenue, promised a nostalgic riff on traditional Jewish appetizing outlets, leavened by the millennial zip of pickled peppers and preserved-lemon mayo. However after I stopped by, I used to be stumped. The one bagels provided are all the things, sesame, and plain. The place was a bagel with heft, darkness, and a bitter chew that curled into nutty sweetness? The place was the whiff of caraway seeds that jogged my memory of my oma and her Leidse Kaas gouda? The place was the pumpernickel?
“I’m a nutjob concerning the numbers,” says Nate Adler, a co-owner. “We need to be streamlined and environment friendly.” His three bagel varieties can all be made with the identical dough, giving him extra flexibility to scale up or down based mostly on demand than he can with pumpernickel, which might require its personal workflow to supply. Not that demand for pumpernickel has been a difficulty for Adler. “Not a single individual has requested about pumpernickel,” he says. “Or possibly one.”
Gertie’s is a part of a wave of new-look outlets that promise bagels made with lighter, fluffier, more energizing dough, all of which favor blond bagels. Apollo Bagels, the sourdough-bagel spot with TikTok strains, now has six areas and but solely three flavors. (How little do they care about pumpernickel? They wouldn’t even return my calls asking about it.) PopUp, a Connecticut-founded model backed by celebs, has those self same three — plain, all the things, and sesame — plus poppy and salt. Even old-guard bagel outlets are reconsidering pumpernickel. Gross sales have been so sluggish currently at Utopia Bagels that second-generation bagel man Jesse Spellman regarded into reducing them. And Bagel Pub not lists pumpernickel on its on-line menu, a selection I believed a technical fluke till I requested about it. “Lots of people complain about that,” an worker instructed me. But nothing has modified.
There are many theories about why demand is dying for pumpernickel bagels: The darkish shade doesn’t {photograph} effectively; the flavour is just too overpowering for many sandwiches; youthful prospects simply favor a blander bagel; individuals have merely forgotten about them. It most likely doesn’t assist issues that the identify, in German, interprets to “a goblin’s fart.”
“I don’t need to use the phrase dying, however I feel it’s a taste of yesteryear,” says Adam Goldberg, the founding father of PopUp Bagels, who associates the scent of a pumpernickel bagel with a specific salad bar in Millwood, New Jersey. “I’m 50 years previous. I do know what pumpernickel is. However I don’t assume lots of people do.”
Pumpernickel is probably going a relic of a second when two Jewish meals cultures crossed paths, says Mitchell Davis, a historian with the Jewish Meals Society. First comes the bagel, within the 18th century. Then a Nineteenth-century wave of German Jewish immigrants brings over their darkish rye breads. Pumpernickel was possible a mix of two sorts of bread, which Davis compares, surprisingly, to the muffin-inspired trajectory of the blueberry bagel. If that’s an “abomination,” Davis says, then possibly pumpernickel was, too.
Avery Robinson is a baker and meals historian who’s attempting to encourage farmers to tackle rye crops and promote the more healthy, extra climate-friendly breads we may very well be making from them. It’s a problem because the pumpernickel we all know is comprised of a mixture of rye and white flours. For American bakers who’re skilled to bake with white flour alone, working with this dough requires a special ability set. And the white flour used to leaven conventional rye additionally saps its shade, which suggests components like molasses or cocoa get thrown in to attain a darker shade. Lastly, sharpening the flavour typically means including caraway seeds. Goldberg says they tried a restricted batch of pumpernickel at PopUp and it was a headache. “We had been in a position to get it proper,” he says, “however the course of was outrageous.”
The operators that proceed to hold pumpernickel — they do nonetheless exist — perceive that doing so isn’t about optimizing their backside line. It’s about catering to a really particular form of buyer: As Nathan Turtledove, the Technique and Operations Lead of Ess-a-Bagel places it, “The individuals who need it are available particularly for it and can preserve coming in for it till the day they die.”
At Russ & Daughters, Tim Von Hollweg, the director of operations, says pumpernickel stays on the menu to remind individuals it’s at all times been on the menu. “We’re, in some ways, the keepers of custom and historical past,” he says. “There are particular issues, even when they’re not the most well-liked, we’re going to proceed to make.” Taking pumpernickel off the menu might imply lessening demand for it even additional. “It’s a chicken-and-egg kind query,” Von Hollweg tells me. “Do the altering tastes of New Yorkers dictate whether or not pumpernickel bagels are widespread? Or do the whims and monetary points and the true property of the bagel-makers dictate what’s accessible?”
This submit has been up to date to make clear PopUp’s origins.
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Should you favor to learn in print, it’s also possible to discover this text within the February 9, 2026, situation of
New York Journal.
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Should you favor to learn in print, it’s also possible to discover this text within the February 9, 2026, situation of
New York Journal.