Goldberg’s Famous Bagels

Hand-rolled bagels and a deli counter

Bagels are rolled by hand and baked fresh through the day, which is the whole basis of Goldberg’s Famous Bagels in Sag Harbor. The method is the traditional New York-style bagel-shop one rather than the machine-formed, bakery-bread approach, and it is what the family has been doing since the first shop opened in Southampton in 1949. Continuity, more than variety, is what the counter sells.

What goes on the bagels stays close to Jewish-American deli tradition: cream cheese, lox, a breakfast egg sandwich, and the larger Hobo for when a bagel with a spread will not do. Chicken soup holds the lunch end. Coffee and a few other breakfast items sit alongside, but there is no pastry-case ambition here; this is a bagel shop and deli, not a full coffee bar.

A Sag Harbor counter with a Hamptons lineage

The Sag Harbor shop opened in 2024 in the room that had been the Golden Pear deli and bagel store, taking over the same village function and adding an eighth location to the family’s South Fork run alongside Southampton, East Hampton, Wainscott and Water Mill.

The owner of the original Southampton shop oversaw the handover, so this is not an imitation trading on a name; it is the same operation, same recipe, extended east. The room works accordingly. Step to the counter, order a bagel, a sandwich, soup or coffee, and carry on with the day. The mood is practical rather than decorative, set by the morning rush and then by midday traffic, with dine-in, carry-out and delivery all treated the same way.

The lox bagel first, the Hobo when hunger wins

Start with the lox bagel for the clearest expression of the place: a hand-rolled bagel, cream cheese and lox in the classic arrangement. A plain bagel with cream cheese is the simpler route when the bagel itself is what you came for, and it is the fairest test of the rolling.

For something fuller, the breakfast egg sandwich is dependable, and the Hobo is the bigger deli-style order. Chicken soup rounds out a lunch and keeps things in traditional territory. Use Goldberg’s for its core: hand-rolled bagels, cream cheese, lox, egg sandwiches, the Hobo, coffee and soup, served fast and the same way every time.