Queens’ beloved Utopia Bagels is finally opening in Manhattan
In our humble, bagel-obsessed opinion, there can never be enough excellent bagels in New York City. So it’s extra good news that Utopia Bagels is finally coming to Manhattan, after more than 40 years in Whitestone, New York. (Don’t worry, Queens bagel fans: the O.G. storefront isn’t going anywhere.)
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Utopia Bagels is known for its unwavering dedication to the old-world process of making bagels—that is, individually hand-rolling them before kettle boiling the rounds and baking them in a 1947 carousel oven, a process that the team believes gives the bagels “their distinctive taste generation after generation.” Now they’ll bring those time-honored traditions to Manhattan proper with a second bagel shop location opening on Sunday, June 2, at 120 East 34th Street on the corner of Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill.
And to celebrate the grand opening, Utopia Bagels will welcome the public to its new NYC location from 9am to 4pm on Sunday. The first 100 customers in line will get a free hot bagel while they wait, so don’t be late!
Along with being centrally located and not inundated with a lot of bagel competition in the area, “it was important to us to pick somewhere that still keeps the family feel, and here we’re also located near hospitals and schools,” co-owner Scott Spellman told Eater earlier this year. Though the Manhattan location will be smaller than the original Queens shop, patrons will still be able to see those boiled-then-baked beauties being prepared from behind a glass window, just like at its predecessor.
Menu details are still to come, but it’s safe to assume that the Manhattan offshoot will have similar breakfast and lunch offerings as the original location, which offers a wide selection of mini bagels and regular-sized rounds, specialty sandwiches and giant bagel wheels, which you can load up with regular cream cheese, sliced lox, deli meats or flavored spreads, from the savory (scallion, jalapeño) to the sweet (cinnamon apple, walnut raisin).