San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Self-taught baker unleashes her popular bagels with her first shop in Oakland
New York native turns popular pop-up into Poppy Bagels in buzzy Temescal neighborhood
Reesa Kashuk didn’t let anyone taste her homemade bagels for two long years.
The homesick New York City native had ironically high standards in her new home: the Bay Area, whose lack of quality bagels at the time had driven her to learn to bake her own.
Riffing off a 2016 Washington Post recipe, she spent those two years creating what would meet her exacting definition of the ideal bagel. She retrofitted her San Francisco apartment around this quest, including adding an extra shelf to the fridge for proofing (though there was nothing she could do about the stove’s weak range, which meant she could only boil a single bagel at a time).
Now, five years later, Kashuk has opened Poppy Bagels in Oakland’s buzzy Temescal neighborhood. It serves her golden, hand-rolled bagels that stand out for their blistered crusts, ideal chew and artful marriage of classic and inventive flavors.
At the new shop, customers can sit at a terrazzo counter in the sunny space, watching bakers boil bagels in a kettle and pull them steaming hot out of a huge revolving deck oven.
It’s an incredible journey for someone with zero professional baking experience. But it’s unsurprising that the Bay Area has responded in droves to the new wave of bagel-makers with stories like Kashuk’s, including Berkeley’s acclaimed Boichik Bagels (started by an engineer who taught herself how to make bagels) and Schlok’s in San Francisco (the brainchild of a local restaurant operator and a Michelin-starred chef who had never made bagels before). Thanks to them and others, the Bay Area now has its own flourishing bagel scene.
Kashuk didn’t plan to enter the food industry. She studied English literature with a neuroscience concentration in college, thinking she’d work as a psychologist.
But bagels were always a throughline. She grew up in New York City with great bagels everywhere, all the time: at corner bodegas and institutions like Russ & Daughters, on casual weekend mornings and at celebratory family events. She desperately missed them when she moved to the Bay Area eight years ago.
“I didn’t really realize the significance of bagels in my life because it was just so ubiquitous,” she said.
In California, bagels quickly consumed Kashuk’s life. Once she was satisfied with her homemade version, she shared samples with friends, who encouraged her to start a business. An early pop-up at Noe Cafe in San Francisco in 2019 brought in even more fans. She started taking orders on Instagram, getting up at 3:30 a.m. to deliver bagels all over San Francisco before going to work at her advertising job.
The pop-up grew to the point that she had planned to quit her job in April 2020, but the pandemic got in the way.
She eventually left that fall to focus on Poppy full time, delivering bagels throughout the pandemic and eventually launching a stand at the Grand Lake Farmers Market in Oakland. There was a perpetual line at the market for her glorious bagels, topped with scallion cream cheese, juicy heirloom tomato slices and salmon roe. Word was rapidly spreading that Poppy made some of the best bagels in the Bay Area.
Cash Caris, co-owner of the popular Delirama in Berkeley, got to know Kashuk when they worked out of the same commissary kitchen in Oakland. As a fellow entrepreneur with a growing pop-up at the time, he admired her “no-bulls—” attitude and methodical standards. And her bagels impressed him so much that he asked her to make them for Delirama before it opened last summer. She said no, wanting to preserve their friendship.
Kashuk makes her bagels in the likeness of a classic New York bagel, but with distinct Bay Area flair. She’s long used fresh-milled, high-gluten flour from Petaluma flour king Central Milling in her dough, which she said creates that “quintessential,” alluring bagel chew, and adds salt harvested in the San Francisco Bay. She tops them with standbys like lox and capers, but also tiedye-like watermelon radishes, a fuchsia-tinted cream cheese made with beets, or a chive schmear mixed with lemon zest. The bagels are modestly sized, with bubbly crusts and savory flavor from malt powder.
Kashuk is adamant about hand-rolling bagels. While the process is labor-intensive, she believes it adds texture that can get lost in a machine-made bagel. She proofs the dough for two days and uses yeast, not sourdough starter like some of the other popular, young bagel businesses in the Bay Area. (Kashuk remains a bagel purist in many ways.)
She believes fervently in covering both sides with seeds and spices, so you get bites with them no matter what, which is especially important given Poppy serves open-face bagel sandwiches. Sesame and other seeds come from what’s widely considered to be one of the Bay Area’s best spice purveyors, Oaktown Spice Shop. She mostly sticks to classic bagel flavors like everything and, of course, poppy. The standout salt-and-pepper bagel gets extra spice from two kinds of Oaktown black peppers ground into the dough.
After signing the Oakland lease, Kashuk went to Manhattan to work with “bagel rolling masters” at 87-year-old shop Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys for a brief stage. Now, she’s focused on getting Poppy open and stable. That means her farmers’ market stand and deliveries are on hiatus, though she hopes to return to the market and add delivery at the shop.
Poppy fans will be excited to see a few new items at the bagel shop. Kashuk will soon serve a new bodega-style egg and cheese bagel sandwich with slices of both American and cheddar cheese. (She’s pescatarian, so there’s no bacon at Poppy.) Also expect tuna salad and egg salad sandwiches down the line. She’s kicking around ideas for new cream cheese flavors, like a maple rendition to satisfy sweet bagel fans. Rugelach, scones and soup will later join the menu, but it will otherwise stay relatively simple.
Drinks include coffee from Brooklyn’s Superlost (which Kashuk gave to her wedding guests, along with bagel chips), a spicy oat milk chai courtesy of Flowerhead Tea and freshsqueezed orange juice.
The cheery, 1,250-square-foot space, decorated with prints of poppy flowers and yelloworange gradient tiles, has 16 seats at the counter and a few small tables with brightly colored stools. Many of the Bay Area’s bagel shops are set up as takeout-only operations, so this will be a relatively rare place to linger over a fresh bagel with a cup of coffee. If it’s packed, she hopes customers will take their bagels around the corner to Temescal Alley and grab an open bench.
Loose bagels cost $3 each while bagel sandwiches range from $8 to $17. Kashuk and other new-generation bagelmakers struggle against the perception that bagels should be a cheap, accessible food like they are in New York City. The rising price of high-quality ingredients and labor makes that challenging.
“You think about, what do you pass off to customers and what don’t you, and then you absorb that,” said Kashuk, who hasn’t increased prices despite the skyrocketing cost of her core ingredients.
While Poppy has been wildly successful, it hasn’t been an easy, linear path. Kashuk almost gave up on her dream many times, feeling imposter syndrome as a non-trained baker and the pressure of incessant media hype around new bagels (of which The Chronicle is guilty). She almost walked away from the Telegraph Avenue space when an obscure permitting issue presented significant delays.
“I already knew how hard it would be and how expensive it would be. It was really tempting to be like, ‘I don’t know if it’s worth it’ — and I still don’t know if it’s worth it right now, sitting here,” she said, sitting in the shop on a recent afternoon. “It’s a huge gamble.”
Poppy Bagels. 6:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 7:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. poppybagelsca.com