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.