Elbow Bread

Bialys first, then the challah honey bun

The case runs on onion bialys, gleaming challah, potato knishes and a caraway rye palmier, which is the quickest way to read what baker Zoë Kanan is doing on the Lower East Side. The bialy dough is made with barley tea, giving it chew and an onion depth that separates it from a bagel-shop version, and it appears in variations that have included hatch chile, whitefish salad and white bean purée. The challah honey bun is the sweet anchor, laminated so it lands somewhere between croissant and challah. The knish is dill-heavy and comes with sauerkraut. Rugelach, a sourdough danish filled with coconut cream, Czech-style kolaches and miso chocolate chip cookies fill in around them, and weekend apple cider donuts tend to be gone before the afternoon.

A 300-square-foot room that keeps moving

Elbow Bread opened in October 2024 in the former Mel the Bakery space, with Kanan working alongside the team behind Court Street Grocers. The shop is minimal and takeout-focused: roughly 300 square feet at street level, a much larger kitchen below, a standing counter that comfortably fits a couple of people, and two benches on the sidewalk. Lines spill outside, but counter service is built for speed rather than lingering, so the queue is usually shorter than it looks. The setting does real work here. This is a stretch of the city shaped by pushcart food and old Jewish bakeries, and the building itself once housed a Jewish publishing company with a rabbi living upstairs. The baking reads as a continuation of that, filtered through pastry technique.

How to build an order

Start with a bialy, the clearest identity statement in the case, then add the challah honey bun so the order covers both the savory and the laminated sides of the bakery. For something more substantial, the schmaltz-scallion knot and the scallion schmaltz pocket carry the most flavor per bite, while the potato knish with sauerkraut and fresh dill is the closest thing here to a meal. The caraway rye palmier is worth taking if you want to see how Kanan handles rye outside a loaf, and soft pretzels made with sweet potato puree and served with spicy brown mustard turn up later in the day. The Infatuation listed the bakery in its 2026 bakery guide, which matches what the counter shows: a tight range drawn from Jewish American and Eastern European baking.