PopUp Bagels opens on Long Island with a new kosher schmear

Before anything else, the kosher breakdown, because that is the only reason most of you clicked: every bagel at the new Garden City PopUp Bagels on Long Island is certified by National Kosher Supervision. Two cream cheeses, plain and scallion, are covered too. The OU-certified packaged lox is there if you want it but everything else in the refrigerator case is off the table, and that includes the chocolate chip cannoli schmear PopUp made for opening weekend, which we are choosing to regard as a test of character.

The shop opened this past Friday at 900 Old Country Road, in the same shopping center as the Trader Joe’s, and it keeps a flat 7am to 4pm schedule seven days a week.

Garden City is the chain’s third Long Island store in a little over two years, which shows something about both the growing scale of the bagel operation and its customer base. Roslyn came first, on Old Northern Boulevard, in 2024, and drew the kind of crowd usually reserved for a new iPhone or a free sample at Costco. Westhampton Beach followed this June on Main Street. Huntington Station has been announced. Somewhere in between, Tiger Global put money into the company at a $300 million valuation and started talking about 300 stores, which means the backyard bread project Adam Goldberg started in Westport during the pandemic is now a spreadsheet with a Nassau County tab.

We have been following PopUp’s kosher status for a while. When the Upper West Side store got certified, we noted at the time that only the bagels qualified, which left kosher customers tearing into a hot bagel and dunking it in a foil packet of Philadelphia. The house plain cream cheese earned its certification last year. Scallion is the new arrival, and as far as we can tell, the first flavored schmear to make the cut.

The format itself hasn’t budged: you still get the bagels whole and hot, unsliced, with a cup of cream cheese to dip into, an arrangement that half of Long Island considers heresy and the other half has already posted to Instagram.

At this pace, PopUp adds a certified schmear roughly once a year. We have our hopes pinned on lox spread by 2027, and we have already cleared the calendar.