How long does it take to open a gluten-free bagel shop at Church and Duane? For Modern Bread & Bagel, it took about seventeen months. Tribeca Citizen first reported the shop coming to the corner in April 2025. By January 2026 the owners were still "waiting on some city inspections" and had "no definite date." The shop finally opened in early September, inside a hotel lobby whose name had changed twice while the bagels were waiting.
Modern's long wait tells the larger story. The Tribeca "Bagel Wars," as the local paper has called them, usually get covered as a land grab with too many shops chasing the same breakfast. The 2026 record shows something different. The shops that actually opened this year each sell a different product in a different format. If you live here, the morning decision has changed. The closest shop matters less now than the kind of bagel and the kind of stop you want.
The January List, Read in October
On January 13, Tribeca Citizen ran a roundup of "incoming carb joints." It counted three new bagel places "slated to open soonish," and it also covered Apollo's lease and a second Nala's. Here is where that list stands nine months later:
- PopUp Bagels, 315 Greenwich at Reade, opened February 6.
- Apollo Bagels, in the former Kings space on Bogardus Plaza at 121 Reade, was up and running by July 2.
- Modern Bread & Bagel, 130 Duane at Church, opened in early September.
- Nala's Bagels, which opened on Reade in 2024, closed that shop and reopened on Church and Chambers.
- Tompkins Square Bagels, announced in August 2025 for the Independence Plaza retail space at Greenwich and Franklin, has no confirmed opening yet.
Four of the five have opened. The fifth still carries the same "hoping for spring" line in the September roundup that it carried in January, and spring has come and gone. Treat it as announced, not open.
Four Arrivals, Four Different Bagels
Laid side by side, the four openings look less like competitors and more like a menu.
Apollo is the sourdough room with booths. The bagels come in three flavors only: plain, sesame and everything. Apollo's everything skips the salt. Tribeca Citizen described them as very crispy outside and spongy inside, with sourdough air pockets, and said they were lighter and fairly large. It recommended slicing over tearing. The prepared menu has six options, and the shop bottles its own ginger lemonade. Co-founder Joey Scalabrino grew up in SoHo. He started the bagels as a pop-up at the soup kiosk at Fanelli's, opened the first standalone shop in the East Village in early 2024, and now runs nine locations. He told the paper he "wanted a lighter, more refreshed version" of the bagel he grew up eating. The old Kings space is now a roomy cafe, and the booths sit on the Bogardus side. Of this year's arrivals, it is the one built for sitting down.
PopUp is the opposite format. The shop at Greenwich and Reade has no seating and runs as grab-and-go. It sells bagels in bundles with 8-ounce tubs of schmear. When it opened in February 2026, three bagels and one schmear cost $13. That price buys a household's breakfast to take home, so it doesn't compare directly with one bagel at a counter.
Modern is the gluten-free bakery that is also a lunch counter. Its bagels have a following at the 14th Street shop, and Tribeca Citizen called the gluten-free bagels "excellent." The Duane Street menu goes well past bagels, with sandwiches, open-faced melts, a separate list of egg sandwiches, salads, spreads, smoked fish and signature lattes. The shop also sells packaged gluten-free cake mixes. The space flows into the lobby of what is now the Duane Hotel, and there are a few seats at the southern end.
Nala's pairs bagels with ice cream and has moved to 146 Church, on the southwest corner of Chambers. When the paper reviewed the original Reade shop in August 2025, the menu leaned toward sandwiches, with quinoa bowls, avocado toast and kale salad alongside the bagels. No source has said whether the Church Street menu is the same, so check before you go.
The newcomers barely overlap. A sourdough loyalist, a household picking up a dozen, a gluten-free diner and a family that wants ice cream with brunch each have their own shop now.
Church Street Becomes Bagel Alley
Where the shops are matters as much as what they bake. When Ess-a-Bagel announced a shop on Murray Street between Broadway and Church on September 17, a Tribeca Citizen reader mapped the result.
"After Ess opens, I think that every block on Church Street from Park Place to Duane Street will have a bagel outlet."
His block-by-block list runs Dunkin, Ess, Dunkin, Nala's, Dunkin again and Modern. He also pointed out the economics: "You'd think that all this competition would drive down the high cost of a bagel with a schmear a bit. Guess not." That fits the pattern above. Shops that sell different products don't have much reason to compete on price.
Ess-a-Bagel brings history to the corridor. The paper calls it the 50-year-old family institution. Florence and Gene Wilpon founded the first bakery with Florence's brother Aaron Wenzelberg, all from an Austrian baking family. The citywide expansion reached downtown with a shop just south of Zuccotti Park, which opened in spring 2025. That shop serves a large lineup of specialty sandwiches and has no real seating, only spots to lean in the windows. No opening date has been reported for Murray Street, and nothing has been said about seating there.
The Incumbents Already Covered the Classics
The newcomers spread out by format partly because the classic bagel was already taken. Tribeca Citizen's roundup names the established shops, and each has its own role.
- Zucker's, 143 Chambers Street. It moved into a larger space in 2023 that added customer seating, and it sells hand-rolled, kettle-boiled bagels, cream cheeses and smoked-fish sandwiches.
- Pick-A-Bagel, in the Goldman Breezeway. The Breezeway is North End Way, the passage between Murray and Vesey that runs from Shake Shack to Pick-A-Bagel.
- Brooklyn Bread, 111 Murray Street, open daily from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is the early-hours option among the shops listed here. The menu includes signature egg sandwiches, French-toast bagels and pizza bagels.
- Tribeca Bagels, on Canal.
- Black Seed, on Level 2 of Hudson Eats at Brookfield Place. Its bagels are hand-rolled, boiled and baked in a wood oven, served with smoked fish, housemade spreads and coffee.
With the kettle-boiled deli bagel, the smoked-fish sandwich and the wood-oven bagel already covered, a 2026 arrival needed a different pitch. Apollo offers sourdough. PopUp offers bundles. Modern skips the gluten. Ess-a-Bagel is betting on its name and its sandwich list.
What Is Still on Paper
Two Tribeca bagel projects have no opening date as of October 4, 2026.
Tompkins Square Bagels first opened on Avenue A in 2011 and has four other locations in the city. The company's own locations page doesn't list a Tribeca branch. The Independence Plaza space at Greenwich and Franklin is still a promise, more than a year after the announcement.
Ess-a-Bagel on Murray is the newest promise, announced on September 17 with no schedule.
Modern's wait is the closest local benchmark for how long these projects take. It needed about seventeen months from the first report to opening day, and inspections were the last hurdle. Neither pending shop has gone through that stretch yet.
For the rest of the neighborhood's openings this year, see our look at Tribeca's four restaurant stories from this summer, or browse the Tribeca neighborhood guide.
At New York Collaborative, we track Tribeca the way this post tracks its bagel shops: block by block, separating what has opened from what has only been announced. If you'd like that level of detail about the streets around a particular address, request a bespoke Manhattan market consultation.
