Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Bagel Empire: From Bay Area to NYC's Best

17 Jun 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:33

In this segment of the YouTube video, the bagel shop owner recounts how a New York Times feature catapulted his Bay Area bakery into sudden, massive popularity, creating two‑hour lines that wrapped around the block. After the initial frenzy settled into a higher, steady level of demand, he faced a pivotal choice: remain a single, wildly successful location or pursue larger ambitions. Drawing on his lifelong passion for strategy games like Civilization, he frames the decision as a campaign, envisioning his "bagel armies" expanding into new outposts to combat inferior competitors. This metaphor fuels his enthusiasm for opening additional stores and scaling the brand beyond its original home.

Chapters

So about a year went by, and then the New York Times article came out saying, you know, sorry, New York, these are some of the best bagels anywhere. And it blew the roof off the place. And we had these lines. It was a 2-hour-long line, like, going around the block. It was just totally bananas. And I thought everyone in the Bay Area already knew about us, but apparently not, because everyone— the floodgates opened. Things were totally nuts for several months. And when that calmed down to— and we were at a new higher plateau, I said, okay, well, now I have some more big decisions to make because I could either just stay here in my wildly successful bagel shop and just kind of roll with it, or— No pun intended, of course. Um, so I'm like, well, I'm gonna get bored with the one shop because that's, that's what I do. I'm like, and I think it'd be fun to focus and try to go big. Because I, you know, one of the things I've done for most of my life is play really nerdy strategy games like Civilization. And it's like, yeah, how do we take our resources and deploy them and, and build the empires and, you know, do all the, you know, do this? I'm like, so in my mind I'm playing a game like that where my little, like, my bagel armies are going out and we're, you know, we're building a new store. It's like a new outpost in the civil— the bagel civilization. And there's, you know, we're We're fighting the lousy bagels and trying to vanquish them. So it's fun. Like, I want to build it.