New York bagel shops spread to meet growing appetite

On a recent Sunday in Whitestone, Queens, a line of more than three dozen customers stretched out the door of Utopia Bagels, a neighborhood staple for more than 40 years. But many customers don't come from the neighborhood — and that's got some New York bagel shops thinking bigger.

At Utopia Bagels that Sunday were Sarah and Mark Schaeffer, visiting New York City from Birmingham, Alabama, for a family event. Utopia was their final stop before their flight out of LaGuardia Airport, and not for the first time: “I've always been a fan. … It’s top of the list,” Sarah said.

Some of New York's oldest and most beloved bagel shops, often mom-and-pop owned, are looking to tap into this nationwide appreciation by expanding, giving retail landlords a lift as fast-casual chains such as Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Cava face slowing sales.

But it's not just familiar Manhattan icons: Viral upstarts also have joined the wave of operators opening scores of locations in a city that already has more bagel shops than anywhere else in the country.

Case in point: The century-plus-old Russ & Daughters that originated on Manhattan’s Lower East Side opened its first Manhattan West Side location in 2023 at 50 Hudson Yards, a trophy office tower co-owned by Related Cos. Related at the time of the lease billed the 4,500-square-foot bagel shop and cafe as a desirable office amenity "whether our tenants are grabbing breakfast on their way to the office, or enjoying a celebratory toast with friends and family."

The most aggressive is a newcomer, PopUp Bagels, looking to spread across the globe.

The appetite for Utopia bagels has driven the iconic shop — opened in 1981 and featuring a rare 1947 oven, two bagel boilers and fully visible bagel-making process — to expand its footprint and grow wholesale sales across the East Coast, according to co-owner Jesse Spellman.

After decades in Whitestone, Utopia opened its first Manhattan location in June 2024, followed by one in Long Island City, Queens, in May. Its fourth store is slated to open in early 2026 at 875 Third Ave., a Class A office tower owned by billionaire investor Eyal Ofer’s Global Holdings.

“I grew up working in the store … making the bagels and learning the ins and outs of the business,” said Spellman, 25, who, along with his childhood friends, took over the business from his father. Spellman’s dad, who still works at the Whitestone location, had taken over the business from its founder in 2012. “Over the years, I always have the goal of opening multiple locations,” including out of state, Spellman said.

While some question whether bagel stores of all kinds can succeed in an era when non-carbohydrate diets are popular, long lines have been common at the two new shops. Each location serves on average over 1,000 customers a day with about 5,000 bagels sold, Spellman said.

Utopia’s next phase of “growth will be in other office buildings” in Manhattan “as an amenity,” veteran retail power broker Jeff Winick of RTL, who is helping Utopia with its expansion, said in an interview. He added that Global Holdings “couldn’t wait to make a deal” with Utopia after checking out its Long Island City store.

“People are already talking about it” and want to know when the Third Avenue location is opening, Winick said. “There’s a brand following and quality following. Once someone comes into the store, they become permanent customers.”

PopUp has become popular online, born as a pandemic side hustle when founder Adam Goldberg, bored with making sourdough, created a bagel recipe in his kitchen in Westport, Connecticut.

“It was when we realized thousands of people were trying to get their hands on” our bagels from a backyard pickup window that “I saw there’s clearly a demand for it,” Goldberg said. Recognizing the business potential, Goldberg worked with a “dough coach” for a month to refine the recipe to make it “scalable.”

PopUp, known for its “Grip, Rip, and Dip” style — tearing off pieces of a hot, unsliced bagel and dabbing them into a tub of cream cheese — now operates six locations in New York City, three in Connecticut and nine across California, Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina, according to its website.

In July, the company announced plans to open 300 franchised stores nationwide, including in South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Maine, with a goal of 100 locations by the end of 2027.

“We have a global expansion strategy,” Goldberg said. “There are certainly a lot of bagel deserts throughout this country right now.”

PopUp, backed by investors including Olympian Michael Phelps and other celebrities, could grow to 1,000 franchised stores worldwide over the next decade, Goldberg said.

In metropolitan New York, according to crowd-sourced review provider Yelp, there were 128 new bagel shop listings from October 2024 to September — a 20% increase from the prior year. Nationwide, new listings rose 11% to 711 during the same period, Yelp told CoStar News.

Greater New York has about 1,400 bagel shops, the highest count of any U.S. metropolitan area, according to Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm, in a separate look at the market for CoStar News.

Bagel shops represent about 3% of New York’s restaurant locations, also the highest “saturation” among U.S. markets, Technomic said.

New York bagels “do definitely live up to the hype,” Tiamri Ryan, who was visiting from Toronto, said as she dipped a PopUp everything bagel into a tub of scallion cream cheese in Midtown East. In Toronto, “we don't have designated bagel spots like this. [New York] is the place to go it if you're going to have a bagel. … Most of the bagel places I tried … they were all great.”

Ryan makes the most of every trip to New York by visiting bagel spots she discovers on social media. Just a day earlier, she tried Leon’s Bagels, another popular spot that opened its first location in Greenwich Village in 2021. It's since opened two more locations in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn.

Retail broker Winick said he doesn't think all the bagel shops that have opened in recent years will survive. "It’s a wave," he said, adding that some bagel shops don't even make their products in-house.

Still, for Lili De Greef, who was visiting from Belgium with a friend, a bagel stop was a must-do on their itinerary.

“You see every New Yorker eats bagels,” she said at a Broad Nosh Bagels in Midtown East, known for its counter piled high with bowls of flavored cream cheese. “We still needed to try the local New York things to eat. … We have bagels, but not [with] the cream cheese like this. … I don't really eat them in Belgium. It's not a tradition.”

The popularity of New York bagels has sparked online Reddit threads and other social media debates about the myth that the city’s water is the secret ingredient.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Is it the water that makes New York's bagels great?' It’s not,” said Sam Silverman, founder of BagelUp, a bagel industry trade group that’s also behind the annual New York BagelFest and NYC Bagel Tours.

“It’s the people. … If we rewind 100 years, there was a bagel bakers union … the only ones who made bagels in New York City. It was a group of 300 Polish Jewish immigrants who had arrived here from Eastern Europe and brought bagels with them and banded together to represent their interests. ... They have passed those skills down to their sons, and their sons have passed that down to other immigrant communities. … It's really a heritage and a culture that exists here that doesn't exist in other places.”

Among the key techniques that separate New York bagels: rolling the dough by hand versus by machine and boiling them instead of steaming them before baking, Silverman, who’s also known as “New York’s bagel ambassador,” told CoStar News.

“A classic New York bagel is a two-day process,” Silverman said. Day one involves shaping the dough and refrigerating it overnight to allow fermentation. “The next day, sometimes even two or three days later, is when you boil and bake it. The dough is a very sensitive thing. … It reacts to the temperature, the humidity, the temperature of the water that you use. … It requires a tremendous amount of skill and experience to know how to adapt your recipe to suit the environment. … It's a very intricate dance that happens over the course of several days.”

Bagels “have the built-in cachet and marketing of being associated with New York City,” Silverman said. “It's a food that's unique to New York. When you open a bagel shop [elsewhere], you automatically have this connection to New York.”

At Silverman’s sixth annual sold-out BagelFest, Nov. 16 at Citi Field, 2,000-plus attendees, including some 25% from outside of the city, gathered to sample a variety of bagels, lox and spread, or buy bagel art and other themed products from some 50 exhibitors, including 25 bagel makers.

“There is this big bagel craze that I really never knew until we became crazy about them ourselves,” said Sarah Conroy, who traveled from Orlando, Florida, with her daughters, niece, friends and others — a 10-person group — just for the festival.

The bagel makers at BagelFest weren’t just New York natives such as local legend Ess-A-Bagel or newly opened Bagizza. Many others traveled from cities including Honolulu, Montreal, Dallas and Seattle — and even overseas from countries such as Spain.

Victoria Todorov, who opened SiSi Bagels in Madrid with her boyfriend in October 2024, said their frequent travels to New York inspired them.

“We love the energy and the vibe of [New York] and the people, and we wanted to bring it to Madrid,” she told CoStar News. Their goal is to expand in Europe and eventually set up shop where else but New York.

Laurence Faber, who opened Potchke Bagel with his wife in Knoxville, Tennessee, in January, is already doubling the size of the store. The demand has been “insane,” he said, adding that the shop now sells out of 1,200 bagels a day.

“Being in the South, we're not bound to a lot of traditions.” Faber said. “We really got to experiment with the bagel recipe and … create something that was really special. … New York is where all these traditions are. But for us, we just love that we've created our own style of Jewish deli food.”