The line for bagels on Saturday mornings at the Downtown Growers’ Market winds its way through the grass, cutting through the open area between booths. The queue hums with questions: “Have you tried them before?” and “What’s your favorite kind?”
A little more than three years into their endeavor, Bobby Nolan and Nicholas Fitzgerald have built quite a following for Sunday Bagels — which can be found most weekends at either the Growers’ Market (810 Copper Ave. NW) or Gravity Bound Brewing Company (816 3rd St. NW)
Bagel varieties rotate each week and include favorites like fermented honey garlic, black sesame harissa (a spicy chili pepper paste), lemon blueberry and a green chile cheese bagel that is crusted over with delightfully crunchy baked cheddar. Customers can also choose from a bevy of spreads like spring veggie (made with locally-grown produce from other market vendors), hot smoked salmon with dill and lemon, and smoked trout salad. The menu also includes open-faced sandwiches — cold smoked salmon with arugula, chive cream cheese and spicy pickled red onion, say, or blueberry jam with ricotta and olive oil.
Nolan and Fitzgerald began making bagels at home in the fall of 2020. It was a hobby born of their prior restaurant experience, longtime friendship and pandemic malaise.
The first batches consisted of 18 bagels made for friends and family.
One recent week, they made more than 1,100 — and sold out to the grower’s market crowd by 11 a.m.
Both Fitzgerald and Nolan grew up on the East Coast — in Vermont and Florida respectively — where bagel shops were plentiful. Fitzgerald fondly recalls the shop in his small hometown that he would visit about once a week. (This author also grew up on the East Coast and is also nostalgic for a weekend bagel tradition).
“We didn’t realize at the time, I think, that it was almost like a trigger food — like it kind of excited people in a different way,” Nolan tells The Paper. “There was a New Yorker article a couple of weeks ago about the bagel renaissance. We weren’t aiming for a renaissance, but we definitely wanted to put our twist on a bagel.”
For Sunday Bagels, the twist involves straying from the traditional New York style bagel found in countless Jewish delis. They have adopted both the Montreal tradition of boiling the bagel with honey — except they use agave to accommodate vegans — and the California style which incorporates sourdough.
Now they’re making bialys too — similar to a bagel but instead of a hole there’s a slight depression in which they heap leek confit and caramelized onion or roasted spring onion and tarragon.
It takes about six “bakes,”one a week, to perfect a bagel flavor, Fitzgerald says. The exception was the lemon blueberry which he said was perfect from the outset.
Then there have been some flubs, including a grapefruit variation of their popular orange julius bagel that was so bitter they had to spit it out and a Caribbean-inspired habanero curry bagel that just didn’t quite work.
“Avocado bagel — it sounded great but…not good,” Fitzgerald says. “It was weird, kind of like Play-Doh. And then it just didn’t taste like avocado. It tasted really off.”
These days the dough for Saturday morning’s bagels gets started at a commissary kitchen in Wells Park on Tuesdays when they make a levain — a preferment — 16 hours before they mix it into the dough.
To bake more than a thousand bagels in time for the market at 8 a.m Fitzgerald says he gets to work around 1:30 a.m.
“Usually we’re done at 3 p.m.,” he says. “So it’s kind of a graveyard shift — a modified graveyard shift.”
Last summer, the two announced on Instagram that they have a brick and mortar location in the works.
The shop, a white brick building on Central, west of Downtown, is still very much unfinished. The plan is to install equipment, including a bagel shaping machine, and modify the existing ovens to increase production by four or five times. There will be a display counter and a dining room where customers can sit and eat.
As for when it will all be up and running, Nolan and Fitzgerald say it’s still up in the air.
“At the end of the day, this is a project we’ve put a lot of work into and we want to continue down the same path,” Fitzgerald says. “It might take us longer to open but there’s a lot of integrity and hard work that’s come with it and we just want to do what’s comfortable and feels right for us.”
To see the weekly menu and pop-up events, follow Sunday Bagels on Instagram @sunday_abq