H&H Bagels Begins Spreading Its UWS Roots Across The Nation: Report

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — It's a change in fortune for H&H Bagels.

From closure to revival, now the iconic bagel shop, which defined the New York City bagel from the Upper West Side for over 40 years, is looking for nationwide franchising, according to reporting.

While it's been known for some time that the H&H brand would begin proselytising the New York City bagel across the country, the company now say that at least 10 locations will open this year, including spots in Chicago, Boca Raton, Los Angeles, Dallas and even Boston, according to Eater.

The revived bageler will also open a pair of Big Apple locations, at Penn Station and in Kips Bay, this spring, the company told Eater.

The new stores will all serve bagels shipped from a 20,000-square-foot bagel factory in Woodside, Queens that the company unveiled two weeks ago, said Eater, where bagels will be kettle-boiled and parabaked, frozen and shipped to their final destinations, where special ovens will aim to regenerate and finish the bagel process.

Turns out, only of the four current New York City H&H locations boil and bake their bagels in-house: the original H&H re-launch across the park on the Upper East Side.

The story is more complicated than that: the Upper East Side location was, technically, already an H&H Bagel, both owned by the two co-owners, Helmer Toro and Hector Hernandez, according to a New York Times article from 1998 about a subsequent lawsuit over the name.

In 1985, facing bankruptcy, the two store split, and Toro bought out the Broadway location while a man named Perry Alexiou bought the Second Avenue spot.

Lawsuits between the two, now separate, H&H Bagels ensued over the use of the name, though thanks to shout-outs in shows like Seinfeld, Sex & The City and more, the Upper West Side store was indisputably much better known — and pulled in about $9 million more than the east side spot in 1997, according to the suit.

Down the road lay more money troubles for Toro, who was jailed in 2010 for withholding over $330,000 in payroll taxes from the state.

H&H on Broadway closed in 2011 and its Midtown shop and bagel factory shuttered a year later.

But Alexiou, whose operation was now legally called H&H Midtown Bagels East after the 2000 legal ruling, kept chugging along and eventually passed the business on to his daughter, Diana, and her husband, former Wall Street financier, Jay Rushin, who took over operations in 2014 and re-opened an Upper West Side H&H in 2016.

Many, including former President Barack Obama, named the original H&H as their favorite bagel spot in the neighborhood, though not everyone agreed.

One bagel critic told The New York Times that people only liked H&H Bagels ''because, No. 1, they're big, bagel elephantitis, and, on the West Side, they're invariably hot," said Ed Levine, food author and future founder of website Serious Eats, in 1998.

"A hot bagel makes up for a multitude of sins," said Levine. "They munch one down on the sidewalk and it makes them feel good, even if it doesn't taste like a real New York bagel.''

The places Levine recommended for real New York Bagels, Columbia Hot Bagels and the Bagelry, have both been closed for decades.