Burlington Bagel Bakery

Bagels baked daily, then built into sandwiches

The bagel is the structure here, not the wrapper. Burlington Bagel Bakery bakes them fresh through the day and builds them into breakfast bagel sandwiches and local egg sandwiches, with homemade soups, salads, baked goods and local coffee filling out the rest of the board. Sourcing leans on Vermont producers wherever it can, which is most visible in the egg sandwiches.

The counter runs in two halves. Mornings are bagels, baked goods and coffee, ordered quickly and often carried out. From late morning the soups, salads and sandwiches take over, and the same bagel that anchored breakfast becomes the base of lunch.

A bright, multi-level room on Church Street

The Church Street room is bright and spread over several levels, with counter service sized for the breakfast and lunch rush. Guests order at the counter and then choose between dining in, taking the order out, or sitting outside on the Marketplace. That layout gives the shop more café character than a purely grab-and-go bagel window, and it is what separates this branch from the suburban shops. The crowd shifts with the hour: downtown workers early, then residents, shoppers and visitors moving along the Marketplace.

The company has been in Vermont far longer than this address. It was founded on St. Paul Street in 1979 and grew for decades through South Burlington, Essex Junction and Williston before returning to the pedestrian heart of the city in 2019, taking over the former Bruegger’s Bagels unit and turning a national-chain site back into a local bagel counter.

Start with a breakfast bagel sandwich

The breakfast bagel sandwich is the clearest read on the place: a bagel baked that morning doing the heavy work, with eggs at the centre. The local egg sandwich is the version worth ordering if you want the sourcing to show, and it is the item most tied to the shop’s own identity rather than to bagel-shop convention.

For anything lighter, or for a visit that is not sandwich-shaped, the homemade soups and salads carry the middle of the day, and the baked goods pair with local coffee. The result is a counter that stays useful from first coffee through to a soup-and-salad lunch, which is what a downtown bagel shop has to be. Coffee and a bagel at the start of the day, an egg sandwich when breakfast needs more weight, then soup or a salad when it does not.