This winter, a new bagel spot opened thrillingly close to my apartment, and seemed to target my particular tastes. Gertie, which moved into the former R&D Foods space on Vanderbilt Ave., promised a nostalgic riff on classic Jewish appetizing shops, leavened by the millennial zip of pickled peppers and preserved-lemon mayo. But when I stopped by, I was stumped. The only bagels offered are everything, sesame, and plain. Where was a bagel with heft, darkness, and a bitter bite that curled into nutty sweetness? Where was the whiff of caraway seeds that reminded me of my Oma and her Leidse Kaas gouda? Where was the pumpernickel?
“I’m a nut job about the numbers,” says Nate Adler, a co-owner. “We want to be streamlined and efficient.” His three bagel varieties can all be made with the same dough, giving him more flexibility to scale up or down based on demand than he can with pumpernickel, which would require its own workflow to produce. Not that demand for pumpernickel has been an issue for Adler. “Not a single person has asked about pumpernickel,” he says. “Or maybe one.”
Gertie’s is part of a wave of new-look shops that promise bagels made with lighter, fluffier, fresher dough, all of which favor blonde bagels. Apollo Bagels, the sourdough-bagel spot with TikTok lines, now has six locations and yet only three flavors. (How little do they care about pumpernickel? They wouldn’t even return my calls asking about it.) PopUp, a Connecticut-founded brand backed by celebs, has those same three — plain, everything, sesame — plus poppy and salt. Even old-guard bagel shops are reconsidering pumpernickel. Sales have been so sluggish lately at Utopia Bagels that second-generation bagel man Jesse Spellman looked into cutting them. And Bagel Pub no longer lists pumpernickel on its online menu, a choice I thought was a technical fluke until I asked about it. “A lot of people complain about that,” an employee told me. Yet nothing changed.
There are plenty of theories about why demand is dying for pumpernickel bagels: The dark color doesn’t photograph well, the flavor is too overpowering for most sandwiches, younger customers just prefer a blander bagel, or people have simply forgotten about them. It probably doesn’t help matters that the name, in German, translates to “a goblin’s fart.”
“I don’t want to use the word ‘dying,’ but I think it is a flavor of yesteryear,” says Adam Goldberg, the founder of PopUp Bagels, who associates the smell of a pumpernickel bagel with a particular salad bar in Millwood, New Jersey. “I’m 50 years old. I know what pumpernickel is. But I don’t think a lot of people do.”
Pumpernickel is likely a relic of the moment when two Jewish food cultures crossed paths, says Mitchell Davis, a historian with the Jewish Food Society. First comes the bagel, in the 18th century. Then, a 19th century wave of German Jewish immigrants brings over their dark rye breads. Pumpernickel was likely a combination of two types of bread, which Davis compares, surprisingly, to the muffin-inspired trajectory of the blueberry bagel. If that’s an “abomination,” Davis says, then maybe pumpernickel was, too.
Avery Robinson is a baker and food historian who’s trying to encourage farmers to take on rye crops and promote the healthier, more climate-friendly breads we could be making from them. It’s a challenge since the pumpernickel we know is made from a mix of rye and white flours. For American bakers who are trained to bake with white flour alone, working with this dough requires a different skill set. And the white flour used to leaven traditional rye also saps its color, which means additives like molasses or cocoa get thrown in to achieve a darker shade. Finally, sharpening the flavor often means adding caraway seeds. Goldberg says they tried a limited batch of pumpernickel at PopUp, and it was a headache. “We were able to get it right,” he says, “but the process was outrageous.”
The operators that still carry pumpernickel — they do still exist — understand that doing so isn’t about optimizing their bottom line. It’s about catering to a very specific kind of customer: As Nathan Turtledove, the Strategy and Operations Lead of Ess-a-Bagel puts it, “The people who want it come in specifically for it, and will keep coming in for it until the day they die.”
At Russ & Daughters, Tim Von Hollweg, the director of operations, says pumpernickel stays on the menu to remind people it’s always been on the menu. “We are, in many ways, the keepers of tradition and history,” he says. “There are certain things, even if they’re not the most popular, we’re going to continue to make.” Taking pumpernickel off the menu could mean lessening demand for it even further. “It’s a chicken and egg type question,” Von Hollweg tells me. “Do the changing tastes of New Yorkers dictate whether pumpernickel bagels are popular? Or do the whims and financial issues and the real estate of the bagel makers dictate what’s available?”
This post has been updated to clarify PopUp’s origins.
