From schmattes to schmears in the Garment District.
NYC and bagels go hand in hand. And while doughy shops are churning out shiny crust and chewy bites on practically every corner, there is one short, heavily trafficked Midtown stretch that has become one of the Big Apple’s most unexpected bagel battlegrounds.
On West 35th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, three major contenders, Best Bagel & Coffee, Liberty Bagels and Apollo Bagels, are all jockeying for doughy supremacy within steps of one another.
This little pocket, which is the only area in Manhattan with this many competing bagel shops, according to data from mapping and analytics firm Live XYZ, sits in the heart of what The Post previously dubbed 42BELOW.
It’s a stretch between West 30th and 42nd streets and Sixth and Eighth Avenues, that’s recently boomed with shopping, lodging, constant foot traffic — and now lines of people, locals and tourists alike, stretch down the block, making this bagel competition even more intense than shop owners could ever have predicted.
Best Bagel & Coffee has held down 225 W. 35th St. since 2015. Liberty Bagels opened at 260 W. 35th in 2018 with a recently opened second location just around the corner at 462 7th Avenue. And newcomer Apollo planted its seventh location right between the two kingpins at 224 W. 35th earlier this year.
“Being there in [the] morning, you can tell that more people are on 35th Street because they are looking for their favorite bagel,” Ryan Daly of the Garment District Alliance told The Post.
It’s no surprise that this neighborhood is a feeding frenzy — the Garment District pulls in more than 3.5 million hotel guests a year, with Penn Station and Port Authority Bus Terminal spitting a combined 870,000 hungry tourists and commuters into the area daily.
Best and Liberty had long been “busy and bustling,” Daly said, but once Best landed on notable “best-bagels across NYC” lists, “the energy has definitely picked up in there.”
Sam Nektalov, owner of Rush Passport NYC, a 15-year fixture on the block, has had a front-row seat to the transformation and bagel competition.
Best was once the only kid on the block, before Liberty’s West 35th Street outpost changed the rhythm fast, Nektalov said, with lines curling out the door almost immediately, forcing the shop to keep a staffer outside managing walk-in traffic and delivery drivers.
As more bagel players arrived, so did the clientele. “The crowd has been a mixture of everyone,” Nektalov told The Post. “As the other two stores opened up … the block has turned into a tourist trap. I do not know where they are advertising, but it seems like this is one of the places people need to visit when they come to NY, just like Katz’s Deli.”
Victor Mejia, one of Liberty’s co-owners, sees this chaos as confirmation that the neighborhood has become a true destination.
“Midtown has always been the center of Manhattan, especially 35th St.,” he told The Post, pointing to the surrounding transit hubs, the Empire State Building and Hudson Yards. About a year after Liberty moved in, he said, the business really started taking off as reviews and social media videos rolled in. The bagel madness in Midtown is all over TikTok, as #libertybagels alone has thousands of videos showing content creators drooling over their bagel orders.
“We’ve been visited by locals who live in the area, office workers, and eventually tourists,” Mejia said. Once Liberty landed in the top 10% of breakfast spots in the world on TripAdvisor, that attention only snowballed.
Mejia insists the bagel store cluster is not a problem, but a challenge. “It motivates us to be the best,” he said. “The competition sends their people over to check out what’s happening, checking out your recipes, trying to get your employees to spill secrets.”
Liberty’s own case for standing out rests on speed, customization and color. Mejia points to the shop’s quick-moving line, its long list of house-made meats and salads, and its 32 cream cheeses prepared fresh daily.
Then there is the visual star of the operation: the rainbow bagel, which he called “one of the most beautiful foods you can eat” — and post online.
“New school bagel shop,” Apollo founder Joey Scalabrino told The Post that he chose the Midtown block because he wanted to be “right in the middle of it.”
The focus, he said, is on “making the best product we can every day and creating a place people want to return to, whether they live nearby or visiting from somewhere far away.”
Alanna Glass, 34, is one of those nearby fans who loves her classic cream cheese and tomato order, but refuses to join the Midtown frenzy and stand in line for one. She prefers Apollo’s Williamsburg location.
“I always see the lines from my office,” the Cobble Hill resident told The Post. “I’m kind of a firm believer that there are too many good things to eat in New York to spend half your day standing on a line. If I see a crazy line, my instinct is usually to go somewhere else.”
On the flip side, Upper East Sider Thomas Palladino, 34, is willing to leave his neighborhood in search of a good bagel.
He trekked to Best Bagel & Coffee in Midtown because he doesn’t feel like the UES has enough worthy options, adding that the real trick is showing up at an off time if you want any shot at avoiding the long wait.
“As a born and raised New Yorker, bagels are one of those very New York foods where once you leave the city, it’s just not the same,” he said.
“The way they’re made is different, the texture is different, the whole thing feels different.” His reward of choice? The Bacon Honey Sriracha, which he described as “a gift to this earth,” or Banana Nutella, if he’s feeling adventurous.
While West 35th may be the flashiest single-block example, there’s evidence this bagel boom is much bigger than one Midtown showdown. Manhattan bagel storefronts climbed from 81 in Q1 2020 to 136 in Q1 2026, a nearly 68% jump, while the citywide total rose from 345 to 407 over the same period.
And that growing appetite doesn’t mean New Yorkers are blind to the cost of feeding it.
“I definitely have moments where I get a bagel sandwich and it’s like $17, and I just kind of shake my head,” Glass told The Post. “That also feels very New York, though — you order like money is no object, and then five minutes later you remember you’re broke.”
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