The hotly anticipated opening of Loveski Deli, with its much lauded bagels and other deli fare, came Wednesday in San Francisco's Jackson Square, marking the first foray into SF by Napa-based chef Christopher Kostow.

It was only just in late January that we first learned that Christopher Kostow and his four-year-old bagel operation, Loveski Deli, was coming to San Francisco. And opening day is already here. The Chronicle had the news Wednesday, with Kostow telling the paper that he hopes people will see Loveski as "a lot more than a bagel shop" and not your average "Jew-ish" deli.

Also, he adds, that being in the vibrant hub of Jackson Square, with its mix of tech startups, creatives, financial firms, and VCs, not to mention antique and antiquarian book shops, forces this Loveski location to be adaptable to the demands of the neighborhood. It will also double as a coffee shop — and the speed of the opening seems to have been helped by the fact that they took over the former Postscript Cafe, and kept much of the cafe staff intact.

This is the third location of Loveski Deli, after the original opened in 2022 in Napa's Oxbow Public Market, and a second debuted at the Marin County Mart in Larkspur in the fall of 2023.

Loveski's bagels, made in a Montreal-esque style and boiled in honey, come in eight flavors, including a gluten-free seeded everything option. You won't find any wild jalapeno-cheddar bagels here, but there is a bagel coated in Jacobson salt, poppy seed and sesame seed options, and cinnamon-raisin, as well as the "famous yeast" bagel.

Sandwich options on the Napa menu include those served on bagels and on other bread, including Japanese-style egg salad on milk bread, pastrami on soft rye, a Reuben and a tuna melt both on griddled rye, and a braised brisket sandwich on a crunchy roll. Grab-and-go salad and sandwich options will be more of a focus at the SF location, including the egg salad sando, and likely the turkey and cheddar sandwich made at the other locations. A vegetarian chickpea salad sandwich may also be on offer, as it is at the other locations.

Unique cream cheese spreads include miso-vegetable and yellow chive and fermented onion, and there is a vegan spread option too.

There are also roasted salmon and chicken teriyaki bowls at this location, along with a chicken Caesar wrap, and a new breakfast burrito made with pastrami, a smashed latke, and green onion.

There's no word on whether the after-4pm Thai fried chicken from the Napa location will be making it down here — maybe that would require a fryer and vent hood?

Loveski Deli is now open daily at 499 Jackson Street (at Montgomery) from 7 am to 7 pm.

Loveski Deli, purveyors of the delicious and excellently textured bagels that have been the talk of Napa and Marin for several years, is expanding to San Francisco with a new location in Jackson Square.

Chef Christopher Kostow, who has been on an extended hiatus from his Michelin three-star Restaurant at Meadwood since the restaurant was destroyed in the 2020 Glass Fire, has continued to expand his local footprint nonetheless. He opened The Charter Oak in St. Helena in 2017, and debuted the first Loveski Deli at Napa's Oxbow Public Market in 2022 — setting out to create a California version of a "Jew-ish" deli, including some chewy, thoroughly seed-coated bagels that he was calling Montreal-style at the beginning, but they are really in a class all their own. (Much like Los Angeles's acclaimed Courage Bagels, they've giving New York bagels a run for their money in terms of quality and flavor.)

In 2023, Kostow and his wife and business partner Martina also added Ciccio, the longstanding Yountville stalwart Italian spot to their empire, reintroducing the restaurant with a refreshed and modern menu.

And now, after adding a second Loveski Deli in the fall of '23, at the Marin County Mart in Larkspur, a third Loveski is due to open in late February or early March at 499 Jackson Street (at Montgomery), in the space currently occupied by Postscript Cafe. As the Chronicle reports, Postscript is set to close January 28, with Loveski to move right in after a quick remodel.

Kostow tells the paper he wants it to feel like "the world's coolest bodega," in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, and this location of Loveski will have more of a coffee component than the other two, smoothies, as well as more lunch options like bowls and non-bagel sandwiches — with bread from Josey Baker Bread. There will be some table seating as well, both inside and on the sidewalk.

Kostow has also been inspired by Japanese 7-11 stores to offer grab-and-go whitefish salad sandwiches on milk bread — like the egg salad sandwiches often found in Japan.

This opening not only marks Kostow's first restaurant in San Francisco, it also continues the bagel boom in SF that has been ongoing for the last six years. And Loveski has the distinction of making the Chronicle food team's favorite bagel in the entire Bay Area — as determined by a blind tasting last summer. (That victory likely  helped to spur the move to open an outpost in SF.)

As for the Restaurant at Meadowood, last I spoke to Kostow, it is still expected to return at some point — but it might be another year or two before we see that happen.

Previously: Meadowood Chef Christopher Kostow Opens 'Jew-ish' Deli and Bagel Shop In Napa

The second outpost of Shlok's Bagels & Lox softly opened Thursday morning in the Financial District, with a grand opening scheduled for Monday, August 11, and this time it's an actual shop you can walk into.

Yes, the still nascent San Francisco bagel scene has one more shop to add to its roster, as Shlok's Bagels & Lox debuts its second location at 315 California Street today. We first heard about plans for the second location back in February, with the five-year-old company having established itself first with a pickup window at 1263 Fell Street in 2022.

Now they've opened an actual, full-sized bagel shop in a former San Francisco Soup Company location. Shlok's joins rival Boichik Bagels downtown, with Boichik having opened their location at 22 Battery Street last year — bringing Shlok's to two locations in SF, and Berkeley-based Boichik to three.

While Boichik founder Emily Winston modeled her bagel recipe after the firmer, sweeter style favored by the likes of H&H Bagels in New York, Shlok's bagels are are on the more savory, yeasty, and puffier side of the spectrum, though still with a nice chew — and they crisp up well in the toaster too if you're not eating one fresh from the bagel oven.

Also unique to Schlok's: house-cured cold-smoked lox, and caper cream cheese.

Co-founder and bagel chef James Lok tells the Chronicle that the quality of Schlok's bagels has evolved and improved in the last couple of years, as he's determined the proper mineral balance for the water he boils his bagels in.

"​​It really is not a myth anymore,” Lok tells the paper, referring to the age-old refrain about how New York's water created superior bagels. "Inherently you do need to start with your medium, which is water."

Lok began testing and filtering the water to create the right balance of calcium, magnesium, and metallic ions, and he tells the Chronicle this gives the bagels their "toothsomeness" and "the sheen and the delicate, thin crisp texture of the crust."

Shlok's, which is an amalgam of Lok's name with co-founder Zack Schwab, was born like a number of Bay Area businesses out of pandemic boredom and experimentation. A bagel pop-up that the pair launched out of The Snug — which the pair also co-owns, along with nearby oyster spot Little Shucker — in the middle of 2020 became so popular that they soon began looking for a brick-and-mortar location, landing on a former dry-cleaner's shop on Fell Street. The bagel kitchen and its pair of windows, one for ordering and one for pickup, opened in early 2022.

Shlok's hadn't been around long enough to be included when the New York Times food critics made the earth-rattling declaration in March 2021 that "The Best Bagels Are In California (Sorry, New York)". That piece namechecked Boichik, along with LA-based Courage Bagels (they're delicious, you need to go), and Pop's Bagels.

But in the four years since that article came out, two of the SF bagel operations it mentioned are mostly defunct. Daily Driver, which began baking wood-fired, Montreal-style bagels in the summer of 2019 and closed permanently in December 2024. And Midnite Bagel, from former Tartine baker Nick Beitcher, went from pop-up and farmers' market stand to brick-and-mortar all too briefly in 2022 in the Inner Sunset, closing within six months — and while he may still make bagels, the Midnite website is now named Midnite Bakery, and refers only to Beitcher's loaves of bread.

Schlok's is left to battle for new-school California bagel supremacy with Boichik and Wise Sons, while the established brands continue to operate elsewhere in the city.

Old-school and somewhat maligned Noah's Bagel's still has four stores scattered around San Francisco, though its footprint has shrunk over the years. And The Posh Bagel, founded in Los Altos by Cambodian immigrant Anthony Lao in 1992, also has four locations in SF, and over a dozen around the Bay and Sacramento.

Schlok's Bagels & Lox - 315 California Street and 1263 Fell Street - California Street location softly open August 7 and 8, until bagels sell out

Local bagel purveyor Schlok's, which has won a cadre of fans who line up most mornings for their bagels at their Fell Street window, just announced a second location in downtown SF.

Following in the footsteps of competitor Boichik Bagels, which opened a downtown outpost last summer, Schlok's Bagels and Lox is planning a new location in the heart of SF's very slow-to-recover Financial District, as the Chronicle was first to report.

Shlok's is headed to a space at 315 California Street — a former San Francisco Soup Company location, if you're familiar with the block. Co-owner Zack Schwab tells the Chronicle that he and co-owner James Lok are aiming for a summer opening.

"This has been a long, thoughtful process over the past year, as we’ve all seen what quick expansion can do to quality," Schwab writes on Instagram, making a small dig at competitors. "We had to be sure our team and product were in a good place, and it had to be the right location."

Both Schlok's and Boichik have been lauded among a new generation of bagel makers around the Bay and down in LA (where Boichik just also expanded) — and I confess to being a bit more of a fan of Schlok's, in both texture and flavor.

Schwab, who co-owns The Snug on Upper Fillmore, and Lok (the name is a combination of their names, in addition to being akin to a Yiddish word for something low quality) launched Schlok's as a pandemic pop-up. They opened their brick-and-mortar shop at 1263 Fell Street — really just two windows on the street near Divisadero, one for ordering, one for pickup — in late winter 2022, and it been steadily popular ever since.

In addition to making well yeasted bagels daily, Schlok's makes its own applewood smoked lox and excellent dill-cured gravlax, and offers unique schmear options like herb-citrus, habanero, and caper — having the capers already in the cream cheese is a rather nice touch.

They also offer a sandwich featuring burnt ends from the salmon-smoking process, made with scallion cream cheese and blackened everything spice.

Check their Instagram for updates on the California Street opening.

Daily Driver, the wood-fired bagel bakery and creamery that launched in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood in 2019, just announced it is closing down its two remaining locations.

In an Instagram post Sunday, Daily Driver's owners announced that the business is shutting down after close of business Monday. Few details were provided about the closure, but, they say, "The model isn't working," and they promise "Exciting developments will be coming for the Dogpatch location under new ownership."

A marriage of a cheesemaker, a creamery, and a bagel baker, Daily Driver opened in June 2019 at 2535 Third Street, offering wood-fired bagels that are not really Montreal-style in shape or texture, but unique among Bay Area bagels because of the wood-oven baking. The partners in the business were bagel baker David Kreitz, cheesemaker and wife of Kreitz, Hadley Kreitz, and Tamara Hicks and David Jablons, owners of Tomales Farmstead Creamery in West Marin.

In addition to bagels made fresh daily, Daily Driver uniquely aslo offered European-style butter, cream cheese, ricotta, and quark (a yogurt-like, German-style cheese) to accompany the bagels, along with coffee from Oakland-based Red Bay Coffee.

Within six months they were expanding with a quick-service location at the Ferry Building, and they also later opened locations at Ghirardelli Square and in Cow Hollow, which have since closed. The Cow Hollow location, which opened in the fall of 2023, lasted less than a year before closing in August.

Another kiosk location was planned for Crane Cove Park, and the Port of SF will apparently need to find a new vendor for that.

We don't yet have information on the new takers for the Dogpatch space, but the owners said in their announcement that the existing staff at the bakery-cafe will stay on with jobs at the new restaurant, "which was extremely important to us."

This marks the second casualty in SF's recent bagel boom, after the quick demise of Midnite Bagel's brick-and-mortar location in the Sunset, which opened and shut within four months in 2022. (Midnite Bakery continues on as a pop-up and granola purveyor.) A clear winner, so far, has been Boichik Bagels, which has opened two recent locations in SF with a third to come, in addition to having locations in Berkeley and Palo Alto. And Schlok's Bagels & Lox continues going strong with their window on Fell near Divis.

Photo via Daily Driver/Instagram

The second of three locations of Boichik Bagels made its debut Tuesday morning on Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights.

Boichik Bagels, which has been something of a sensation on the Bay Area bagel scene of the last several years, now has its foothold in San Francisco proper with two locations, the second of which opened Tuesday in the former Glaze Teriyaki Grill space at 1946 Fillmore Street (at Pine). This new location follows the March opening of Boichik's first SF spot in Laurel/Presidio Heights.

Like the other location, the Fillmore Boichik opened with a ceremonial Champagne sabering at 7 am Tuesday.

The new location offers seating in an interior courtyard, and counter service, with the same menu of delicious bagels, schmears, and sandwich options. (I highly recommend trying the Pink Label whipped creamed cheese, which is just cultured cream cheese that has a little more tang and flavor than the standard, as well as the Eggything bagels, which are Egg Everything bagels.)

The exterior of the new store features a fun blue-and-white bagel mural by artist Nigel Sussman.

As you've surely heard by now, Boichik was among several California bagel operations that was featured in a notorious New York Times piece from 2021 that proclaimed "The Best Bagels Are In California (Sorry, New York)."

The bagel style is more firm, somewhat chewy, and slightly sweet, in the style of New York's H&H Bagels back in the day. (The company's original, main production facility closed over a decade ago, and while the brand still exists along with a couple of Manhattan outposts, things aren't really the same.)

Owner and bagel master Emily Winston claims her childhood love of H&H as her main inspiration, and when that original location on 46th Street closed in 2011, Winston told the New York Times, "I was so upset I would never have that bagel again."

A third SF location of Boichik at 22 Battery Street, at the edge of the Financial District and two blocks from the Embarcadero BART Station, is set to open next, presumably this summer. That will bring Winston's local bagel empire to eight locations, including the flagship shop and the factory in Berkeley.

The new Boichik on Fillmore will now be open daily from 7 am to 1:30 pm. And please note, for Pride Month, while Boichik does not make rainbow bagels (which are gross), they do make rainbow and Progress Pride Flag cookies, and they're selling a Pride bagel baseball cap.

At long last, the acclaimed and quickly expanding Berkeley bagel operation known as Boichik Bagels has announced its first San Francisco locations, which are all set to open this spring.

Boichik Bagels currently has five Bay Area locations, but none in San Francisco. That is about to change, with the SF Business Times reporting that Emily Winston's company has secured three SF locations that are set to open in quick succession within a few months.

One of those locations will be downtown, at 22 Battery Street, just steps away from Market Street and about two blocks from the Embarcadero BART station.

A larger, sit-down cafe location will open first in the former Glaze Teriyaki Grill space at 1946 Fillmore Street, in Lower Pac Heights. And a third location will open in Laurel Heights, at 3665 Sacramento Street — adjacent to the restaurant Sociale.

As the Business Times notes, these openings come fast on the heels of December openings for Boichik Bagels in Larkspur and Santa Clara. The company also has two stores in Berkeley, one at its factory, and a fifth store in Palo Alto.

With a capacity to produce 50,000 bagels per day, the Berkeley factory now supplies a retail line of bagged frozen bagels as well, with dozens of grocery customers around the Bay and two now in Southern California as well.

"The world wants more good bagels in it," says Winston in comments to the Chronicle. "That is now my job, to put more good bagels in the world."

Winston also says that she's not looking to expand wildly or "be Noah’s Bagels... [with] 12 shops all over the city."

The Battery Street location is, interestingly, across the street from a Noah's location, and the first Berkeley location of Boichik, at 3170 College Avenue in Rockridge, was the very first location of Noah's Bagels, which closed in 2017.

Boichik Bagels began as a pop-up and home-baking operation out of Winston's Alameda home in 2017. And after first gaining attention at the Eat Real Festival, a Bon Appetit story in January 2019 put the brand on the national stage, 10 months before the first brick-and-mortar store had even opened.

Two years later, in March 2021, the New York Times made the stunning declaration that the country's best bagels were now being made in California — with Boichik's among those noted — and the rest is history.

Other upstart bagel brands have appeared on the San Francisco scene in recent years, following in the wake of Wise Sons and its standalone bagel shops — the first of which debuted on Fillmore Street in 2016. Midnite Bagel began as a pop-up at Tartine Bakery in 2019 and has expanded to farmers' market stands and a short-lived shop in the Inner Sunset. Daily Driver also came along in 2019, followed by Schlok's — whose first brick-and-mortar opened near Divisadero and Fell in early 2022.

But none has taken off with quite the momentum of Boichik, and the popularity of Winston's bagels drove $5.4 million in revenue in 2022 — and that was prior to the recent expansions.

We'll update you when opening dates for Boichik Bagels' SF locations are available.

A new food festival for the carb-crazed is coming to North Beach this summer, and it's being organized by none other than Tony Gemignani, of Tony's Pizza Napoletana fame.

It's been two years since we learned of master pizzaiolo Tony Gemignani's new bakery and bagel business. It opened as Toscano Brothers Bakery and Dago Bagel, and now Gemignani is uniting his new passion for New York-style bagels with his longtime passion for pizza-making in a new food festival.

As Eater reported this week, it's called the San Francisco Pizza, Bagel, and Beer Festival, and it's happening Saturday, August 19 — i.e. the weekend after Outside Lands.

Tickets are on sale now, and this thing seems likely to sell out — because this town is always hungry for pizza and bagels, and the SF Beer Fest is always a big draw too. VIP tickets ($150) gets you one hour of early entry without a lot of standing in lines. Otherwise, it's $75 for unlimited pizza, and bagels, and four beer tickets from noon to 4 p.m.

(VIP ticketholders will also get access to an open bar in the Italian Athletic Club, with some charcuterie bites as well.)

You'll find bagels and schmears from from the likes of Daily Driver, Boichik Bagels, Midnite Bagel, Bagel Macher, Dago Bagels, and Laundromat Bagels — so you can try 'em all!

But don't fill up on bagels if you're there for pizza, because Gemignani's businesses Capo's and Tony's Pizza Napoletana will be joined by all the SF heavy-hitters: Ragazza, Montesacro, Delarosa, Doppio Zero, Del Popolo, Il Casaro, Long Bridge Pizza, Pizza Hacker, A16, Mozzeria, and Shuggie's, as well as others including Much Ado About Pizza and Pizzeria Da Laura, the new Berkeley spot from Gemignani protege Laura Meyer, who used to run the kitchen at Capo's.

Beer-wise, SF will be represented by Fort Point, Anchor, Standard Devient, and SF Brewing. And they'll be joined by others big names from around the region and beyond like North Coast, Calicraft, Lagunitas, Allagash, Faction, Sierra Nevada, New Glory, and Altamont, with some hard seltzers and ciders to boot.

There will apparently be some pizza-tossing performance by Gemignani and others, and there'll be an appearance by Wild ‘N Out rapper Kosha Dillz.

We'll see you there!

The SF Pizza, Bagel & Beer Fest will be located at the intersection of Stockton and Filbert streets, with VIP entry starting at 11 a.m. on August 19, and general admission at noon. Find tickets here.

If it’s Boichik Bagels, you know there’s going to be plenty of hype and long lines involved, and that’s what happened at 7:30 a.m. in Berkeley Friday morning as the runaway blockbuster bagel brand opened its 18,000-square-foot production plant and cafe.

Berkeley-born craze brand Boichik Bagels is very good at making a tasty New York-style bagel, but they’re even better at creating hype. Amidst the pandemic-era Bay Area bagel boom, Boichik Bagels was catapulted to the front of the pack when the New York Times raved in 2021 that Boichik Bagels owner “Emily Winston’s bagels are some of the finest New York-style bagels I’ve ever tasted.” It was off to the races from there, as Boichik Bagels opened a Palo Alto location the following year, then started showing up in cafes and grocery shelves across the Bay Area.

And today the Bay Area News Group reports that at 7:30 a.m. Friday morning, Boichik Bagels opened their 18,000 square foot bagel production plant in Berkeley, which is a production facility, cafe, and merchandise shop.

What’s genuinely neat here is that you can not only get a coffee and the bagel at the new plant, but also watch the bagels being made by some sort of robotic bagel-maker. “The main thing is that I designed the whole place around the showpiece, which is the heart of the plant, the dough line, which has been like my new baby,” Winston tells Eater SF. “It’s super awesome, it’s really fun to watch — it’s quite mesmerizing.”

The media hype in this case is obsessed with “robotic technology” making the bagels. Now I spent decades in food service, and the contraption seen in the top left photo above just looks like a glorified version of the Hobart mixer I used when I worked at Pizza Hut in 1991.

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The video above shows the BakTek machinery, which has actually been around for decades, though this version is slightly customized. And other than a robotic arm, I don’t see much here that’s that a lot more advanced that what we saw in the factory-line opening credits for Laverne & Shirley. But the owner Winston turned to retail investors to crowdfund this venture, and investors care a whole lot more about automation than they do about quality food service. So if automation is the aspect Winston chose to promote, well, it worked.

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I’d say the innovation here is that the production plant has a cafe and a community dining space. It looks fun to watch the production (which involves plenty of actual human labor too), from the dining space, and the Bay Area News Group says the facility can produce “12,000 bagels an hour.” Eater SF adds that “Winston says she’s hoping to host events such as mahjong, bridge, and chess clubs to play alongside some coffee and bagels.” That may well have the makings of a very popular destination.

Personally, I’m digging the trucker ballcap more than the robotic technology (and again, the new facility has lots more schwag like this in the merchandise shop). It’s clear that Boichik Bagels is now determined to become Big Bagel, and hey, it’s nice for a Bay Area brand to gain national fame. But careful what you wish for...

Related: Two New Bagel Shops That Began as Pop-Ups Arrive Shortly In SF [SFist]

Image: Biochik Bagels via Facebook

After months of anticipation, Midnite Bagel quietly opened its first brick-and-mortar shop this week in the Inner Sunset, and by Saturday word had gotten around.

Former Tartine head baker Nick Beitcher began delighting San Franciscans with his sourdough bagels via a pop-up that began making evening appearances at Tartine in 2019. During the pandemic, Beitcher secured himself a commissary kitchen in the Dogpatch out of which he began a bagel and bread wholesale and delivery business — and Midnite Bagels products began appearing on the shelves at Bi-Rite and elsewhere.

In February we learned that Midnite Bagel would be getting a brick-and-mortar shop at 646 Irving Street (near 8th Avenue), and Hoodline reported last month that the opening was imminent. And the place finally swung open its doors on Wednesday, June 1.

"The City and all of its wacky, magical inhabitants have been so good to us, and the act of opening our door and inviting you into our space... will feel simply incredible," Beitcher wrote on Instagram.

Midnite Bagel was one of a handful of bagel operations that was name-checked in last year's incendiary New York Times article that declared "The Best Bagels Are In California (Sorry, New York)." It may or may not be absolutely true that bagel purveyors in L.A. and the Bay Area have eclipsed their New York counterparts for the first time in recorded history when it comes to quality (but I will say I've had Courage Bagels in L.A. and that shit is good and lives up to the hype, if you care about good bagels).

And the lines are sure to form outside the new Irving Street shop, much as they have most mornings — but especially weekend mornings — outside Schlok's at Fell and Divisadero.

Where Shlok's bagels are on the less dense end of the spectrum, while still giving a satisfying chew — perhaps thanks to conventional yeast — Midnite's bagels are denser and richer in flavor, and can be quite chewy. The flavor is top-notch, but a word of caution: My bagel sandwich, after spending a half hour in a box on the way home, was almost unpleasantly chewy before I took the toppings off and re-toasted it. Toasted at home and then topped with cream cheese and lox, this may be the best bagel ever to grace San Francisco. But I would recommend buying fresh, whole bagels ($3 each) and the toppings separately at the shop and doing the toasting and assembly at home if you want to get what I mean. The toaster does some magic with the texture of these naturally leavened bagels that brings them back to the state of being twenty minutes out of the oven — a little crispy on the outside, densely bready on the inside — which is probably the moment of their peak perfection.

Beitcher makes a couple of bagel flavors you won't find in many other shops: pumpernickel and buckwheat-black sesame, the latter of which has black sesame seeds in the dough and is a uniquely delicious creation. And in addition to bagels, the new brick-and-mortar shop offers whole loaves of fresh bread daily, including the bread version of that black sesame bagel that goes equally well with cream cheese. There are also extra-onion-filled bialys, and rotating sweets that currently include passionfruit macaroons, buckwheat-banana muffins, and a currant scone with coffee glaze.

Bagel topping options at Midnite Bagel include plain, scallion, and jalapeno cream cheese, as well as butter, jam, honey, cashew cheese, Humboldt Fog cheese, and almond butter. And the smoked salmon and veggie sandwich options can be made closed or open-faced, each topped with lemony pickled onions, capers, and dill.

The place opens at 8 a.m., so if you want to avoid long lines and sold-out flavors, you know what to do.

Midnite Bagel - 646 Irving Street near 8th Avenue - Open Wednesday to Sunday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. - Pre-order platters, bagels by the dozen, and spreads here.

Originally set to open Friday and pushed into next week, Loveski Deli is the newest project from Michelin-star chef Christopher Kostow and his wife Martina, inside Napa's Oxbow Public Market.

The bagel boom in San Francisco and the East Bay has been well underway for a couple of years now, and just this spring alone SF is getting two new bagel shops — Schlok's, which just opened off Divisadero a couple weeks back, and the first brick-and-mortar location of Midnite Bagel.

But little did we know that Christopher Kostow, who for years has been at the helm of the currently dormant, Michelin three-star Restaurant at Meadowood — the building was destroyed in the Glass Fire in September 2020 — has been plotting a bagel business and "Jew-ish deli" concept of his own.

Kostow, a Chicago native, has spent most of his adult life — and culinary life — in California. And he tells the Chronicle this week that he wasn't interested in building a brand that had "this faux reference point of New York City or the Old World." Instead, there's a clear freedom on this deli menu to do things as a California chef would.

"It’s a very big tent, this way of cooking, and it should be firmly rooted in who we are and where we are," Kostow says.

At Loveski Deli, the breakfast menu is ruled by Montreal-style sourdough bagels and bagel sandwiches. In the bagel flavors, you can already get a sense of Left Coast differentiation. There's poppy and sesame, sure, as well as "seeded" everything. The salt bagel specifies that's artisanal Jacobsen Salt Co. salt, though. There's a gluten-free bagel option. And there's a "famous yeast" bagel that's coated in nutritional yeast and develops a special crust.

In addition to a pastrami, egg and cheese sandwich, there are smoked salmon and trout roe sandwich options. And there's a veggie bagel with "veggies from our farm," topped with miso veggie spread and "Loveski vinaigrette."

The reuben sandwich, available for lunch and dinner, features white kimchi in place of sauerkraut, and gochujang dressing. And while there's a standard, classic sounding pastrami on rye available, your whitefish salad at Loveski will come with a dash of Thai chile.

And there are a couple of "drinking noshes" on the daytime menu as well, which will be quite in demand for the wine-tasting tourist set, descending into town after a day of sipping with some drunk hours to kill before dinner. Those include some pastrami-topped "loaded" fries, as well as potato latkes, with the option to add trout roe ($25), or some baller caviar ($75).

The starter that's being used for the bagels, as Kostow tells the Chronicle, is 30-year-old Charter Oak starter — The Charter Oak, which Kostow opened in 2018 as a more casual offshoot to Meadowood, however the next-door Charter Oak Winery has been there for a century, and perhaps the starter originated with the family there, or the predecessor restaurant to Charter Oak, Michael Chiarello's beloved Tra Vigne.

Once all the inspections are complete, presumably by Monday or Tuesday, Loveski Deli will be open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, with both indoor and outdoor seating available.

Loveski Deli - Oxbow Public Market - 610 First Street, Napa

Schlok's, a much-awaited new brick-and-mortar bagel shop for a popular pandemic pop-up, is finally opening next week after a number of delays.

SFist last expected to see Schlok's open at 1263 Fell Street in February, but co-owners Zack Schwab (who also co-owns Pacific Heights spot The Snug) and James Lok say they're just another example of how the city's reams of red tape can cost small businesses precious dollars before they can even open.

Scklok's made an appeal to fans on Wednesday, posting about their predicament on Instagram.

"We are ready for you, but the Department of Building Inspections requested a three-sentence statement from our structural engineer, which we submitted on February 7th," the owners wrote. "We have been waiting for them to process this one-page document so we can get our final sign-off to open. It’s an excruciating delay after months of delays due to Omicron. For those eagerly anticipating our opening, thank you for all the encouragement, and we are just as frustrated as you are."

As the Chronicle reports, the three-sentence statement seems to have had something to do with a door they installed? It's not clear. But DBI had to sign off on said door, and they couldn't schedule their final health inspection until they had that sign off. So, it's dragged on.

But, after telling everyone to email Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Dean Preston, they announced that they got their green light from the city as of late Wednesday. And, they tell the Chronicle, March 2 will be the official opening date.

Schwab said that Mayor Breed's Prop H, which was meant to streamline some of the permitting process for small businesses like his, likely helped a bit. "But I think the issue was Prop. H only gets you so far," Schwab tells the Chronicle.

Expect your chewy bagels and house-cured lox starting next week. And then, in a couple of months, there will be even more bagels to seek out in the Inner Sunset when Midnite Bagel opens on Irving Street.

Photo courtesy of Schlok's

Two new bagel purveyors — Schlok's Bagels and Midnite Bagel — are opening brick-and-mortar shops at long last in San Francisco, adding to the growing and increasingly well respected West Coast bagel pantheon.

It wasn't that long ago that transplanted San Franciscans who came from the East Coast — specifically New York — lamented long and hard about how impossible it was to find a decent bagel in the Bay Area. There were theories about how the water in Manhattan must just be that much more perfect for producing the ideal bagel, or maybe it was something in the yeast.

The New York Times sent shockwaves through the food-media realm last spring when it deigned to assert that California now makes the best bagels in the country. (I've yet to find a bagel anywhere that compares to Absolute Bagels on the Upper West Side of Manhattan... fight me.) And it cited as examples Boichik Bagels in Berkeley and Midnite Bagel, the pop-up and delivery-based bagel business launched in 2019 by former Tartine head baker Nick Beitcher.

Now, as Eater reports, we only have to wait a few more months before Midnite Bagel will have a brick-and-mortar home in the Inner Sunset — though you can still order bagels for delivery or pick some up at Bi-Rite or Rainbow, and Beitcher has a production facility already up and running at 23rd and 3rd streets. Midnite Bagel has inked a lease for the former Tea 4 You space at 646 Irving Street, which Eater broke the news of last month.

Beitcher says it will be a "small, no-frills bagel shop" after a brief remodel inside — and bagel baking is going to continue at his commissary kitchen, with fresh bagels delivered to the shop a few times per day.

There will be bagel sandwiches, breakfast sandwiches, babka, "everything" cookies, and coffee, and Beitcher is promising one sandwich inspired by one he first had growing up in New Rochelle, NY — with egg, cream cheese, and jelly.

Sooner than that opening, as soon as the next week or two, you can expect to see the opening of Schlok's Bagels in the NoPa neighborhood. Schlok's announced its move last spring to a brick-and-mortar location at 1263 Fell Street, and as of last week, they've confirmed that some inspections are already done and they're prepping for an imminent opening.

"We're officially on track for a February opening," they said on Instagram.

Co-founders Zack Schwab and James Lok (the brand name is a combo of their last names, you see) have a fan base built from their pandemic-times pop-up at The Snug in Pac Heights, where they took orders and doled out bagels and bagel sandwiches through a window.

The small shop on Fell Street, just off Divisadero, looks like it could also have a window situation — or else it will just be a small counter-service operation next door to Hahdough Bakery, around the corner from Falletti's.

Unlike Midnite Bagel, which uses sourdough starter in a very West Coast vein, Lok favors conventional yeast for his bagels at Schlok's. And, he and Schwab have previously said they "want to have a small menu, and do the things we do really really well."

So that's a lot of new bagelry action in just a couple of months! And the competition should give established shops Wise Sons and Daily Driver a run for their money.

Possibly as soon as Friday, noted new SF bagel purveyor Daily Driver will be opening a pop-up bagel stand in the Ferry Building that it hopes to make permanent.

As co-owner David Kreitz tells the Chronicle, "It’s a pull-down-butcher-paper, write-the-menu, quick-turnaround, serve-the-commuters sort of situation." And they're trying to get it open very quickly. The place will feature Daily Driver's well-reviewed Montreal/New York-style bagels, as well as cream cheese, cultured butter, and a few extras like tomato, capers, and onion. There will also be Red Bay Coffee and Daily Driver's fresh pretzels.

The stand plans to be open at 6 a.m., seven days a week, and closing times may vary. Kreitz says the pop-up deal will be for at least a year, but there's a plan to lease space at the Ferry Building permanently. Also, he hints, expansion plans are afoot elsewhere as well.

Daily Driver just debuted in Dogpatch in June, and so for everyone who hasn't made it over there, this will be a more central and convenient way to try Kreitz's bagels. The business is co-owned by his wife, cheesemaker Hadley Kreitz, and Tamara Hicks and David Jablons of Marin County's Tomales Farmstead Creamery and Toluma Farms. And very quickly they have risen to the top of many people's lists of the best bagels in the Bay Area — a category in which there's been some actual competition in just the last few years, for the first time ever.

And JFYI, their bagels are now available for delivery on DoorDash.

Look for Daily Driver's stand to debut in the Ferry Building on Friday, or by next week.

Previously: Dogpatch Is Getting A Big New Bagel Bakery And Creamery Called Daily Driver

A panel of tasters in the SF Chronicle Food Department just conducted a taste test of 10 of the Bay Area's more respected bagel shops, and they conclude that we do, indeed, have good bagels to show for ourselves out here. (Ahem, SFist made a similar assessment back in 2016.)

The latest bagel-judging roundup coincides with the June 15 opening of Daily Driver in Dogpatch, the expansive new bagelry that also makes its own European-style butter Jersey milk cream cheese for smearing on the bagels. And the tasters conclude that Daily Driver's wood-fired bagels are, indeed, excellent, though they take third place in the ranking, with tasters saying they have "a great chew and crust."

First place is actually shared by two spots, one that's been operating in Oakland for several years and one that is just one year old. Beauty's Bagels, which draws long lines at their two shop in Oakland's downtown and Temescal district for their wood-fired beauties, gets praise for complex flavor and "levain-like texture." (Notably, Beauty's was also SFist's #1 back in 2016.) And SF's one-year-old Pearl 6101 in the Richmond district, also wins top honors, with the tasters saying the bagels have "supreme crustiness and malty flavor."

The news isn't as great for the ever-expanding Wise Sons Bagels, which come in 8th place and which they say (and I'd have to agree here) are "solid yet unspectacular."

Marla Bakery's bagels rank a bit higher at 7th, though they're criticized for being bland; and "a random Cambodian-owned cafe" in Emeryville called Dee Spot takes 4th place, and gets praise for "great texture with a crisp exterior."

It should be noted that Midnite Bagel, the occasional evening pop-up that's been happening at Tartine Bakery since May, was not included in the ranking, though it already has many fans.

Related: The 11 Best Bagels In The Bay Area, Ranked