The bagel social media sensation, PopUp Bagels, opened a location in Lincoln Park last Friday, and I braved the extremely long line to tell you if the spot is worth a visit.
What is PopUp Bagels?
PopUp Bagels originated as a local hit in Westport, Connecticut and now has locations across the United States. What distinguishes the rapidly expanding chain from other bagel shops is how it encourages customers to consume its bagels.
Rather than slicing its bagels to make sandwiches of cream cheese and other toppings, PopUp Bagels serves only warm, unsliced bagels and encourages customers to rip off pieces of their bagel to dip into their array of creatively-flavored schmears.
The bagel options are notably (and purposefully according to their website) basic: plain, everything, poppy seed, salt, and sesame. This simplicity balances out their more distinctive schmear options.
The Chicago location’s schmears currently include Cake Batter Cream Cheese, Vanilla Berry Butter, Salted Butter, Scallion Cream Cheese, and Spicy Scallion Schmear. The menu often changes and includes weekly specials.
The Experience
I arrived at the Lincoln Park location at about 10:00 a.m. on the store’s opening morning. The line was extremely long, as I expected it to be, but surprisingly it was fairly fast moving and it ended up only taking me about 45 minutes to get my bagels.
One of the reasons why the line moved so quickly was that the employees had us choose the bagels we wanted to order while we waited in line, and then hand over a paper bag with our chosen options once we arrived at the counter. This saved the frustrating time spent waiting for people to make a decision about what bagels they wanted at the last minute.
The restaurant itself is pretty small but very convenient to access from the L. It took me around an hour to get to it from Noyes Station.
The Food
I ended up ordering three bagels, everything, poppy seed, and salt, and two schmears, cake batter cream cheese and scallion cream cheese.
The first bagel I tried was a salt bagel, which I paired with scallion cream cheese. The combination worked really well, the bagel’s simple, salty flavor balanced and complemented the strong taste of the scallion cream cheese.
I next tried the poppy seed bagel and the cake batter cream cheese. The poppy seed bagel was also really good, it had a semi-sweet flavor that reminded me of a sesame ball. The cake batter cream cheese didn’t exactly taste like cake batter it was more so just a sweet cream cheese, but I thought it made a good pairing with the poppy seed bagel because they were both sweet.
Overall, I would say PopUp Bagels is definitely the kind of thing that you need to eat when it is fresh, but I did really enjoy trying the spot for the first time. I would go back and try their seasonal flavors in the future. This definitely would not be my go-to bagel spot, even if it was in Evanston, but I recommend people try it out.
