Starting fresh with Hey Bagel, Andrew Rubinstein feels 'lucky'
"It’s all about helping make people’s day better."
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If you want to find Andrew Rubinstein and his bagels, don’t go looking in Rubinstein Bagels.
That sounds a bit counterintuitive, I know.
After selling his stake in the local bagel chain earlier this year, the founder now finds himself competing against his namesake. He’s not going head-to-head just yet, selling his small-batch bagels out of the back of his SUV and at pop-ups in coffee shops and breweries, but the day is likely to come when his new venture, Hey Bagel, might be down the road from Rubinstein Bagel.
“It’s weirder for some of my family members than it is for me,” Rubinstein told me in a phone interview last week.
Bagels have long been a passion for the Milwaukee-born Rubinstein. He remembers going to Benji’s Deli where his appreciation for a good sesame bagel began.
“My go-to is a sesame bagel, chive cream cheese, cucumbers, tomato, red onions, a drizzle of olive oil, salt, and pepper,” says Rubinstein.
After moving to Seattle, Bagel Oasis became his “go-to” but the overall bagel scene was lacking. So, he decided to help jumpstart that scene, opening the first Rubinstein Bagel at the tail end of 2020.
Things moved quickly from there, with a Capitol Hill location opening in 2021 and a Redmond outpost announced in 2022. The future seemed bright for Rubinstein and his burgeoning bagel empire.
So why did he decide to walk away?
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