New Bagel Shops in Berkeley: The University Avenue Story

Walk University Avenue between Milvia Street and Bonita Avenue on a Saturday morning and you'll pass four separate lines for bagels, all within an easy walk of each other. That's the current state of a stretch of downtown and central Berkeley that, about a year ago, had two established bagel shops and no obvious reason to expect a third or fourth to show up.

The obvious explanation is that Berkeley suddenly developed an appetite for bagels it didn't have before. The story is less about a sudden citywide appetite than about two different paths to opening a bagel counter: one emerged from a pizzeria's existing kitchen, while the other grew out of a longtime Berkeley institution's expansion.

The Pizzeria That Didn't Plan to Bake Bagels

Cafe Brusco opened at 2000 University Avenue, on the corner of Milvia Street, on September 17, 2025, in the space that Au Coquelet Cafe occupied for years before closing in 2020. It's owned by Alexis Rorabaugh and Gerad Gobel, the same team behind Rose Pizzeria a few doors down, and the original plan was straightforward: coffee and wine by day, wine bar by night, pastries from the East Bay pop-up Good Luck Bakery.

Bagels weren't part of that plan. They showed up because an employee named Chris Warden, who'd worked pastry programs at Meadowlark Farm and Mill in Wisconsin and Bub & Grandma's in Los Angeles and run his own sourdough microbakery in Portland, sent Rose Pizzeria a resume about a month before Cafe Brusco was set to open. Rorabaugh and Gobel realized that pizza dough and bagel dough use the same mixer and the same oven, so why not try it. The bagels now ferment for 48 hours using the same Cairnspring Mills flour that goes into Rose's pizza dough, and they're baked in that same pizza oven before the restaurant opens for the day.

What makes Cafe Brusco worth a special trip isn't just the bagel itself. It's that they let you mix and match open-faced halves, pairing something like the Brusco, a mortadella and Calabrian chili cream cheese combination with a honey drizzle and pickled pepper, against a rotating seasonal option on the other half. That's a small operational choice that turns into the actual draw. Cafe Brusco turns one year old today, on September 17, and it's already being mentioned in the same breath as Berkeley's most established bagel counters.

Fifty Years on Gilman Street, One New Address

The other new arrival has the opposite origin story. As Berkeleyside reported, Berkeley Bagels has been making bagels out of its original Westbrae location since 1974. That's over fifty years at one address, using the same recipe and the same equipment, without ever opening a second shop.

That changed on August 17, 2026, when Berkeley Bagels opened its first-ever expansion at 1941 University Avenue, at the corner of Bonita Avenue. The new location opened just as UC Berkeley students returned to campus for the fall semester, putting a fifty-year-old recipe directly in the path of thousands of new customers who'd never had a reason to make the trip to Westbrae. The space itself had been Dessert N Spice, a halal cupcake shop that opened in 2023 and is relocating to become Dera Cafe in North Berkeley, which means the storefront musical chairs on this stretch of University didn't stop at bagels. It just happened to land there.

Gilman store manager Alex Suon put the decision plainly: customers had been asking for a location closer to University Avenue for years, and when the Dessert N Spice space opened up, they saw the opening and took it. All of the bagels for both locations are still kettle-boiled and baked at the original Gilman Street store, which means the fifty-year recipe hasn't changed. What changed is that Berkeley Bagels finally found a downtown address worth betting on, decades after it first could have.

The Neighbors They're Competing With

Cafe Brusco and Berkeley Bagels aren't opening into empty territory. They're stepping into a corridor that already had its own reputation, built by Bageltopia and Lox Stock & Bagel, the two shops that Berkeley Bagels' own expansion coverage named as the standing competition on this stretch of downtown and central Berkeley. Bageltopia has built a following on monthly rotating specials, rolling out combinations like a chili crisp bagel or a Sabich-inspired sandwich with jammy egg, falafel, and harissa tahini, the kind of menu that keeps regulars checking in every few weeks rather than treating a bagel order as a one-time stop.

Here's the current lineup, for anyone keeping track:

• Cafe Brusco, 2000 University Ave at Milvia St, open since September 17, 2025
• Berkeley Bagels, 1941 University Ave at Bonita Ave, open since August 17, 2026
• Bageltopia, downtown and central Berkeley, known for monthly rotating specials
• Lox Stock & Bagel, downtown and central Berkeley, one of the corridor's longtime regulars

Four shops, none of them chains, all within easy walking distance of each other on the same avenue.

What This Corner Actually Proves

The interesting part isn't that Berkeley has a lot of bagels now. Plenty of cities have a handful of good bagel shops. What's specific to this stretch of University Avenue is how the two newest entrants got there. Neither one started with a business plan that said "open a bagel shop." Cafe Brusco backed into it because a skilled baker happened to apply for a job at the right moment, and the pizzeria realized its own equipment could double as a bagel operation before the cafe even opened its doors. Berkeley Bagels opened a downtown location after half a century in business, when a specific storefront became available just as a wave of returning students arrived.

That's a different story than "bagels are having a moment." It's closer to proof that Berkeley's existing food infrastructure, the ovens, the flour suppliers, the bakers who already live and work here, is flexible enough that a pizzeria can become a bagel destination almost by accident, and a bakery can open a second location when an available storefront makes the move possible. The bagel counters didn't create this pattern. They're just the most visible recent example of it.

If you're the kind of person who can tell you which corner used to be Au Coquelet before it was Cafe Brusco, or that the Berkeley Bagels storefront was a halal cupcake shop before this year, you already understand Berkeley in a way that generic guides never capture. That kind of granular, block-by-block familiarity with how a neighborhood actually changes is exactly what Estela Sallat and Michael Perry bring to clients looking at Berkeley real estate, not just what a listing looks like today, but how a street like this one keeps reinventing itself. If you're curious what that kind of local read looks like applied to a home search or a sale, schedule a consultation and find out.