The first iteration of It’s Bagels was founder Dan Martensen’s love letter to the humble New York bakery classic, and now the NYC bagel joint comes west to Notting Hill.
Former fashion and portrait photographer (and former teenage Westchester bagel shop worker) Martensen was inspired to create It’s Bagels after experiencing homesickness during the pandemic after moving from Brooklyn to London in 2019, and the result has been TikTok virality. While many Londoners are familiar with East End-style beigels, New York bagels were much more difficult to find before It’s Bagels debuted at Camden’s Caravan Roastery in 2022.
The new Notting Hill site promises to follow a similar formula to the first bricks-and-mortar It’s Bagels in Primrose Hill - unpretentious, and faithful to the building blocks of New York bagel tradition. All the classic bagel flavours find their way onto the menu - here is the ubiquitous lox and schmear, bacon, egg and cheese (BEC), and peanut butter and jelly, and you can make any of these bagels vegan for £1 extra.
The bagels themselves range from plain and sesame to cinnamon raisin, as well as a slightly less traditional rainbow bagel available only during the weekends. If you can’t get enough of old-school bagel fillings, you can also buy a range of flavoured schmears by the tub.
Excitingly, the Notting Hill branch will transform some limited edition bagels from Primrose Hill into permanent menu fixtures, and these sound a little more ambitious than your standard lox and schmear. These include the It’s Bagels take on a classic salt beef bagel, which includes shaved red onion and kewpie mayo, and the meat-heavy Grinder, involving mortadella, salami, turkey, provolone, and iceberg slaw.
For the New Yorker pining for home or the Notting Hill bagel newbie, It’s Bagels provides the Platonic ideal of the iconic ringed baked goods.