New York bagel lovers rejoice: Boichik Bagels is preparing to open a store in Concord at the end of April.
“I’ve had people asking for a Walnut Creek spot since I opened,” said founder Emily Winston. “There are a lot of people who want one closer to them and don’t want to have to brave the tunnel traffic.”
It’ll be the 11th Boichik Bagels outpost, but the first east of Berkeley.
A New Jersey native, Winston opened the original Berkeley store in 2019. Within months there were lines around the block.
When the New York Times caught wind of the bagels in 2021, the newspaper proclaimed, “The best bagels are in California (sorry, New York).”
Winston said she began experimenting with bagel-making after moving to the Bay Area in 2010 and being “disappointed” by the bagel scene. She hoped to recreate her favorite bagels from childhood, the bagels from the since-closed H&H Bagels in Manhattan.
“It was my obsessive new hobby,” she said. “I’d keep trying it every few weeks, taste them, bring them to my friends, we’d talk about it and I kept playing with it. Five years later, I had an awesome bagel.”
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Winston said she never thought her homemade bagels would turn into a bagel empire until she started selling some out of her house and saw lines down the street.
A former mechanical engineer, Winston said she made these bagels for all the East Coast transplants in the Bay Area.
The everything bagel is “by far the most popular,” she said.
“There are a lot of ex East Coasters like me who want a serious New York style bagel, not a fluffy, round bagel or a sourdough bagel,” Winston said. “It’s a taste of nostalgia. If you grew up with that flavor, that’s what you want.”
Details: Opening at the end of April at 2980 Treat Blvd. in Concord; boichikbagels.com.
A basket of bagels in the retail kitchen area of the new Boichik Bagels production facility on Thursday, March 23, 2023, in Berkley, Calif. The 18,000 square foot plant will produce dough, bagels and pastries. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
