Photograph courtesy of Emerald City Bagels
After two years of selling bagels at the Green Market in Piedmont Park and pop-ups in Cabbagetown, Deanna Halcrow is finally ready to open a permanent storefront for her Emerald City Bagels. Two weeks ago she moved into the now-closed Gravity Pub in East Atlanta Village. Still, the landlords need to install a new grease trap before renovations can begin. She hopes that the store will open early next year. “We already have a customer base over in Cabbagetown, Grant Park, and East Atlanta Village, so we thought that it would be a great place to start out,” Halcrow says.
Halcrow and her daughter Jackie churn out almost 1,000 bagels a day at Prep Atlanta, a small, shared kitchen. Now that she’s moving into a 2,000-square-foot shop and upgrading her equipment, she hopes to more than double her daily production and make upwards of 5,000 bagels. “We will have the capacity to add some bagels that we don’t make right now. Flavors like pumpernickel and rye. We’re going to experiment with some whole wheat,” Halcrow says. “We’ll probably be doing pretzels, too. We tried doing that, but the space we were in was limited.” Halcrow also wants to serve lunch items such as salads and soup. The restaurant will have a few seats but plans to focus mainly on to-go service.
Halcrow, who grew up in Long Island, started making bagels because she wasn’t happy with the ones in Atlanta. Now, Emerald City Bagels caters to more than 20 restaurants and coffee shops, including Home Grown and the Westside location of Octane Coffee.
