Pop Up Bagels in Roslyn: A Soon To Be Former Bagel Experience

I have to hand it to Pop Up Bagels. They created quite the buzz when they first opened with their limited supply of bagels causing them to be sold out for the first month or so. I decided to stop by now that the hype has died down.

For those of you who are unaware, Pop Up Bagels is not you typical bagel shop. Here, they cater to an experience. This experience includes fresh, hot bagels with a variety of unique schmears. You will not find tray after tray of bagels that were cooked through out the day and then a variety of spreads to add to the bagels

Freshness: Pop Up Bagels emphasizes serving bagels hot out of the oven. This focus on freshness is a key factor in their appeal. I mean who does not love a fresh hot bagel. I do not believe that I have ever had a bad fresh hot bagel!!

Schmears: They offer a few flavored cream cheeses and spreads. They had cinnamon sugar cream cheese and roasted shallot butter along with the scallion and plain cream cheese. Fortunately, they also had whitefish salad.

Bagel Options: Pop Up Bagels came in a limited selection of flavors including plain, salt, sesame and everything. We had to wait 3 or 4 minutes for the latest batch to be ready. They took our names like we were in Starbucks to package up our order

How To Eat the Bagels: Pop Up Bagels encourages you to rip off pieces of the bagels and then dip it in the schmear. Cutting it and spreading the schmear is looked down upon. 

Our Experience: We ordered a plain and everything bagel along with the Cinnamon Sugar Cream Cheese and Whitefish salad. Along with two drinks, the bill came out at $38. That is a surprising number of a three bagels and some spreads.

The bagels were hot and we ate them immediately. They tasted good and we were happy with that. We did notice some people taking their bagels to their car to eat them. Definitely recommended to eat it right away.

We had a left over bagel which we tried the next day. Our take on the bagel then was that it was bland and sub par. Eating the bagel hot and fresh definitely masks its inferiority to many local bagel shops.

As to the spreads, the whitefish salad was decent and I had no issues taking it home to eat at a later date. The Cinnamon Sugar Cream Cheese was a unique experience and I am glad that I tried it. It did offer a blend of flavors that popped in my mouth but I was happy when we threw out the leftover of this schmear.

For us, Pop Up Bagels is a trending type of food offering that grow tiresome for folks just looking for bagels. I can understand why people in NYC may like it since it is fun tasting the new flavors of schmears that they have. But for people looking for bagels to eat at home or a few hours after they have cooled, you will be disappointed in the taste of Pop Up Bagels. 

A note: about a third of the people at Pop Up Bagels were looking for coffee to go with their bagels. For some strange reason, Pop Up Bagels does not sell coffee. So the real winner from Pop Up Bagels may be Roslyn Delicacies down the street.

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