PopUp Bagels’ controversial 3-bagel minimum (unsliced!) hits the Upper West Side
PopUp Bagels. Courtesy of PopUp Bagels.
By Beth Harpaz May 7, 2024
Call him a bagel disrupter: PopUp Bagels founder Adam Goldberg has a lot of controversial rules about bagels. His stores have a minimum purchase of three bagels, along with a mandatory tub of cream cheese or butter, for $12. He only sells five flavors (poppy, sesame, everything, plain and salt). And customers have to do their own slicing.
But with $8 million in venture capital funding, a seventh PopUp Bagels store that just opened Sunday on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (Columbus Avenue and 76th Street), and bagels selling out daily, he must be doing something right.
In a phone interview, Goldberg talked about the old-school bagels of his childhood, why his model works, and what’s next. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What makes PopUp different from all the other bagel shops in New York City?
We use very high-quality ingredients and we bake our bagels in small batches so they’re always fresh from the oven when you pick them up. We only sell them hot and whole — we don’t make sandwiches. Our bagels are not as dense as a standard New York bagel; they’re a little smaller, with a nice, crispy exterior and a fluffy interior.
Selling bagels unsliced and encouraging people to rip and dip (instead of slicing and spreading) is controversial. Come on, why not just slice them?
The minute you start slicing and making sandwiches, it slows everything down and eliminates the beauty of a hot, fresh bagel. I’m 49 years old. When I was a child, I remember getting a hot bag of bagels from the bagel shop and sharing it around the table. Over the years, bagel stores have become more like delis. We wanted to bring back the old-school bag of hot bagels.
Where were your childhood bagels from?
Livingston, New Jersey. The store is still there but it’s mostly a deli now.
The three-bagel minimum and required cream cheese purchase is also controversial. What do you say to the haters?
They don’t have to come! Listen, we package our cream cheese in 8-ounce containers, and three bagels is the right amount of bagels for that. If we were to sell individual bagels, it would affect how we bake them. They wouldn’t come fresh out of the oven. We’d have to make smaller cream cheese packages and different accommodations, and when you run a food business, every accommodation you make affects the ability to thrive.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, my favorite bagel store is the one around the corner. Why should I get on the subway from Brooklyn and go get your bagels in Manhattan?
We provide a totally different experience. When we first opened in Connecticut, we had people come from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey. They’d take the early morning drive to Connecticut for bagels because once you try it, it’s a different experience.
You started baking bagels at home in 2020 during the pandemic. Now you’re running a veritable bagel empire. But are the stores actually pop-ups, like the name suggests?
We have seven stores open now (four in Connecticut, two in Manhattan and one in Wellesley, Massachusetts) and we’ll have 10 open soon — one on the Upper East Side, one in Roslyn, Long Island, and one in Fairfield, Connecticut. Brooklyn will be next, No. 11. But the fact that we have more stores doesn’t mean our product isn’t as good. And our stores are all fixtures, permanent stores. We thought about changing the name to Permanent Bagels but that didn’t sound as good.
OK, but $8 million in venture capital for bagels? Aren’t mom-and-pop entrepreneurs supposed to go into debt up to their eyeballs before making it big? Isn’t that the American dream?
This is the American dream: Come up with a great concept, open a store or two, raise a little money and have well-heeled investors support your growth. We’re criticized online because we’re backed up with venture capital. That’s someone criticizing me for being successful.
What’s your personal favorite bagel and topping?
I love our everything bagels with maple syrup butter.
What? Maple syrup butter? Tell me more.
Every week we change our butter and cream cheese. This week we’re doing pesto butter and chocolate chip cannoli cream cheese. We always have plain and scallion cream cheese, and we always have at least one cool, fun cream cheese that changes every week, and we always have a fun butter as well. Once a month, we collaborate with national and local brands. We’ve recently done Tropicana, Old Bay, Fruity Pebbles and Blue Moon beer.
Not sure how I feel about those flavors, but is there anything else you want Forward readers to know?
I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve been proceeding with kosher review for our bagels and we expect them to be certified kosher any day. We’ll also have certified kosher schmears in addition to our usual for anyone who needs it.
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