Northeast Portland has an under-the-radar, weekends-only spot for killer bagels. After about a year of doing wholesale baking for local coffee shops and holding occasional pop-ups, Red Hen Bagelry launched its residency at Red Sauce Pizza a couple months ago, selling bagels and bagel sandwiches every weekend for the foreseeable future—including some unusual varieties.
Egg everything bagels, which marry an egg bagel with all the seedy goodness of everything topping, are a rarity in Portland that you’ll find at Red Hen—and former East Coasters are hyped. “People are psyched about it, especially people from New York,” says owner Deirdre Tipley, who grew up on Long Island. There’s also a bagel with black sesame paste swirled into the dough and dotted with chopped chocolate, which Tipley originally launched at a pop-up at now-closed coffee shop Electrica last June. A sweet-salty sesame number inspired by sesame candy is delightfully sticky and chewy. Savory options include za’atar and rosemary sea salt.
There are a dozen flavors of bagels in total, including classics like sesame, poppyseed, and everything. But for Tipley, nothing is as nostalgic as a plain bagel.
“There’s something about the plain bagel that’s the true test [of a good bagel],” says Tipley. “I remember [as a kid] we’d always pick up a dozen bagels, I’d be going back home and I’d rip into the bag and into a plain bagel.”
When Tipley moved to Portland over a decade ago, they couldn’t find bagels like the ones they grew up with. Growing up in a pizzeria-owning family, they were no stranger to making dough and baking bread, so they set out to recreate bagels with the perfect texture and chew. “When I finally got it, I was like, this is it—I finally found the bagel from my childhood,” Tipley says.
While a plain bagel may be a great starting point here, there are plenty of intriguing flavor combinations to explore. Tipley makes Red Hen’s cream cheese in house, including plain, scallion, Calabrian chile scallion, charred onion, and lemon-dill. There’s also a vegan, cashew-based cream cheese from Cultured Kindness. For some playful pairings, Tipley recommends the sweet-salty sesame bagel with Calabrian chile cream cheese and the black sesame chocolate bagel with cream cheese and apricot preserves.
But what is a bagel without lox? The lox tartine here, at $16, comes with a generous portion of salmon on top, plus scallion cream cheese, house-pickled onions, a scattering of capers, and sprigs of dill galore, drizzled with olive oil and lemon. It’s hard to imagine this lox bagel could be improved much—but for a tiny tweak, Tipley likes subbing out the regular scallion cream cheese for the Calabrian chile variety. Vegetarians can swap the lox for tomatoes and cucumbers.
Coffee is an essential companion to bagels, and Tipley had a custom Red Hen drip coffee blend roasted for them by Elevator Coffee that we’re looking forward to trying next time. And for those who want to stock up on bagels, you can also pre-order bagels and cream cheese online. Stash them the freezer to get yourself through the week—at least until the bagel shop they’ve been dreaming of opens someday.
Red Hen Bagelry at Red Sauce Pizza, 4641 NE Fremont, Sat-Sun 7 am-11:30 am (or sold out), redhenbagelry.com, @redhenbagelry