A new worker-owned bagel shop in Northside is about to serve up great coffee and killer sandwiches.
The Bagel Group, located at 4172 Hamilton Ave in Northside, opens this Friday. Co-owners and decade-long service industry veterans Theodore Wininger, Alex Bauman and Zachary Capretta are making their hand-rolled bagels from scratch every day to bring the neighborhood a delicious new grab-and-go morning destination.
“I just want people to feel really happy and at home when they come in. The first place that somebody’s going in the morning should be foundational to the rest of their day,” Wininger said. “And if we’re creating a nice, hospitable environment where they can get great food and leave feeling amazing. That’s the perfect way for somebody to start their day, to me.”
The shop’s menu is chock-full of classic bagel sandwiches — like a lox bagel or a BEC — alongside wholly original items like the “Fuh-Goetta-Boutit,” which features egg, goetta, house cream cheese, smoked cheddar and green peppers on an asiago bagel, or the “Wombo Combo,” a lunch sandwich inspired by Oxford, Ohio’s well-known shop Bagel and Deli that features smoked cheddar, turkey, lettuce, Japanese BBQ sauce, pickles and your choice of chips on an everything bagel. And the coffee on the shop’s menu is provided by nearby roaster Proud Hound in Silverton.
Bauman, who worked at Bagel and Deli for over six years, says the new shop takes a lot of inspiration from the Oxford institution. He took special care to point out how The Bagel Group touts bagel sandwiches that are steamed instead of toasted, boiled or baked, just like the shop he started at.
“Anyone who lived in Oxford or went to Miami University will definitely recognize that steamed sandwich style. It rehydrates the bagel and makes it soft and chewy and a little moist,” Bauman said. “The sandwich that the Wombo Combo is based on was the favorite of a lot of our friend groups when we were going to school there. Alex and I wanted to bring something similar to the menu. So it’s kind of a little bagel family tree history there.”
Originally, The Bagel Group was going to be a stall inside one of Cincinnati’s many food halls; Bauman and Capretta were bartending at a food hall when the hall’s general manager approached them about having their own business inside, and so the two brought in Wininger as a third partner.
But the offer to open The Bagel Group inside the hall fell through at the last minute thanks to a “miscommunication” from building management. Regardless, the three held a pop-up as a “proof of concept,” and Bauman was approached later on about setting up shop in Northside — which prompted him to ask the group if they wanted to “go all the way with this.” The trio brought on Henry Reed and Alyssa Davis as assistant general managers, and began a construction period of about half a year to get the space in tip-top shape.
“It really kind of happened all by chance, and we were very lucky. And Northside was a location that we did have our eyes on already when we were throwing the ball around about where we would like to set up home. It was the perfect area for us,” Wininger said. “Six, seven months later, here we are, ready to open.”
The Bagel Group is a worker-owned co-op, which means all the shop’s employees will have agency in management decisions and take home a share of the business’s profits. The trio decided on the business model early on thanks to their past experiences in the hospitality industry.
“Overall, we really wanted to create a restaurant where the workers have a say in the operations and the direction of the shop … it gives them stake in the company, and it’s an incentive to care about the place you’re working at. We’re all people who believe in democracy. Democracy is supposed to be effective and supposed to work when done right. So, like, let’s do it right,” Bauman said. “We’ve all worked in restaurants before, good and bad, and we wanted to do something different … The name, The Bagel Group, is an ironic, faux-corporate name, sure, but it also denotes that we are a group and a collective.”
Currently, the storefront features little touches to encourage customers to sit down and stay a while, like a ‘physical media station’ that allows people to bring in their own vinyl and CDs. In the future, the shop will hold various events, and the group is looking into expanding into late-night hours in the future.
“There’s some great breakfast options here in Northside already, but we’re … providing a good alternative option,” Capretta said. “It’s a good place that people can gather for a few minutes, catch up on the day to day before they go into their office job or go downtown. We all want this to be a space for the community to get together and gather.”
The Bagel Group will be open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Northside. For more information, visit the shop’s official Instagram page.
