When will Seattle hit peak bagel?

The shops keep opening, the lines keep stretching, the bagels keep coming

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Credit: Mt. Bagel

One last plug for my short play “Crucifixin’s,” which is getting a staged reading as part of the We Need New Plays Festival on Friday, August 2 in the Bullitt Cabaret at ACT Theatre. If you’re up for a night of supporting new works by local artists, I hope you’ll consider checking it out. Tickets are pay-what-you-can and if you do come, I’d love to say hi and give you a sticker.

I remember talking to Aaron Emas in the weeks leading up to Backyard Bagel’s launch in Fremont and mentioning that I thought he would have to contend with long lines when they opened. He sheepishly shrugged off the notion, perhaps presuming that his business hadn’t built up the kind of goodwill.

I’ll take the win on that one because as soon as Backyard opened its doors, the lines stretched down the block and haven’t waned since.

The same goes for Toasted, which opened its doors last weekend and welcomes massive lines of people waiting for the chance to try out those long-awaited bagel sandwiches.

The lines have been massive at Olympia’s 6th Borough Bagels, just as they were for Tacoma’s Howdy Bagel before it.

Even now, if you stop by Mt. Bagel before they sell out (usually between 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.), you’re guarenteed to wait in line for at least a few minutes.

In a few months, Hey Bagel is going to open in U Village and Salmonberry Goods will open in Sunset Hill, which comes on the heels of Toasted, Backyard, Georgetown’s Bloom Bistro, Rachel’s new outpost in Lake City, and Rubinstein’s new Eastlake location. To say nothing of trendy pop-ups and market stands like Sully Eats, Old Salt’s move into Ballard, and a potential expansion by Loxsmith. And I fully expect hungry people lined up outside all of them to get their fill.

I keep waiting for the moment “peak bagel” gets here but I’m becoming very aware that it might not happen for a long time, if at all.

Credit: Hey Bagel

When people ask why I like Seattle, I often say that I appreciate the way it’s a city of neighborhoods (which I imagine is what most people say about the city they live in, but I digress). I’ve really seen how true that is with the proliferation of the bagel scene.

A bagel place fills a void in a neighborhood. It succeeds. That success does not diminish from the success of other bagel places in other neighborhoods. Everyone coexists.

To me, it speaks to just how intense the demand for bagels is in Seattle as well as how we’re not even close to the saturation point.

Even when there is neighborhood overlap, there still doesn’t seem to be any issues with meeting demand. Someone living in Capitol Hill could reasonably walk to seven bagel shops, but that proximity hasn’t impacted anyone (except Ben & Esther’s, which had other issues).

My guess, if I had to posit one, is that we won’t really know when we’ve hit peak bagel until it’s already happened. Even then, it will be because of some larger trend and not because we got too many shops or chains.

I mean, look at New York City…if that many bagel places can coexist there, Seattle can easily support another 10 on top of what we’ve already got.

Besides, there are still plenty of bagel deserts that need to be filled. West Seattle. Columbia City. Queen Anne. Rainier Valley. Magnolia. First Hill. Greenwood. Northgate. Broadview. Leschi. I’ll even throw Downtown Seattle on that list.

To be fair, this could be a case of being careful of what you wish for. One thing Seattle’s bagel scene has benefitted from is not being infiltrated by VC-backed brands like PopUp Bagels or burgeoning chains like Boichik Bagels. It seems inevitable that some of them will start showing up sooner or later.

Bring them on, I say. I feel good about the state of Seattle’s local bagels and it’s ability to compete. Besides, all of this is very self-serving. More bagel places means more bagels to eat and more bagels to review.

May we never meet demand!

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