Old-timer Athenians have a familiar breakfast take: We miss Zim’s Bagel Bakery. But since the beloved bagel joint closed its doors in 2009, Athens has been graced with not one but two locally owned bagel shops. Both have undergone major changes this year.
Athens Bagel Company (ABC), owned and operated by David Asman, fully reopened last fall after a nearly four-year saga of repairs. Ideal Bagel was adopted by new owners in February: Naoko Uno and Jef Bredemeier, folks familiar to the Athens art and music scene, but brand new to business ownership. Thanks to the dedication and personal sacrifices of all three, the Classic City continues to enjoy fresh, house-made bagels seven days a week.
With the opportunity to rebuild ABC from scratch, Asman aimed for a true-to-Athens version of a shop you’d find in Brooklyn or Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The menu even calls its version of a classic bacon-egg-and-cheese “The Widespread Wakeup.” Looking around, you’ll spot relics of the city’s fallen past. There’s a slim bar crafted from a ginkgo that once stood on Clayton Street. Peering in the kitchen, longtime locals may notice that the dough is made in the same mixer that served Zim’s for 15 years.
Getting the shop to its glowing, finished state was hardly easy. When a sprinkler head in the kitchen went off on a fateful morning in May of 2021, Asman never imagined the heartache and years of delays he would endure before the doors opened again. During what was supposed to be a simple tile replacement job, workers uncovered asbestos deep in the floor layers—an unsurprising, but certainly unwelcome, discovery for a 125-year-old building. Insurers demanded the unit be stripped down to its studs. Rebuilding was agonizingly slow. Pandemic-related supply constraints were partially to blame for delays. So was a dysfunctional contracting company, one that ultimately folded halfway through the project.
“It was Murphy’s Law of renovation projects,” Asman recounts. “If there was something that could be a problem, it was like dominoes: Everything else fell down.” He ended up doing much of the work himself. Skilled labor filled in the gaps and tackled the rest. He admits he may not have gone through it all if he had known everything the renovation would entail, but a stubborn idea pushed him to get the doors open again: “I felt like it was Athens’ bagel shop, not mine. I felt like it was super important to put it back there.”
The stresses of business ownership have made themselves well known to Uno and Bredermeier, as well. “It was very much sink or swim,” Bredemeier, a painter and documentary filmmaker, recalls about his onboarding. The restaurant lost its longtime general manager/prep worker before the handoff, so he opted to take on the role himself. Other than a handful of former employees, there wasn’t anyone to ease the transition. The couple didn’t receive any sort of official recipe book, so Bredermeier was left to decipher how to make offerings like the salmon cream cheese himself.
The first few weeks demanded long days and sleepless nights, with plenty of kinks to work out. Uno, a full-time researcher working for the University of Georgia, handled the books and took on odd jobs to share the load. When eggs were scarce, she went hunting for them daily at places like Sam’s Club and Costco.
Bredemeier came with experience, having managed restaurants like Square One. However, he soon realized that being solely responsible for vital menu items could quickly turn into the stuff of anxiety dreams.
“The cream cheese takes a lot outta ya,” he says. He recalls being stuck behind a busy line, his arms and shoulders cramping after repeating the same task for hours. “This town is going through cream cheese like crazy, and I physically wasn’t able to keep up.”
Things have gotten easier since those first months, though, and the couple’s outlook is positive. They want to use the space to engage more with Athens art and culture. Its sizable walls will soon feature a rotating selection of artists, starting with selections from Bredermeir’s own photography portfolio. Ideal Bagel is testing out opening the shop at night for art shows, open mics or other live performances—after all, Uno points out, it closes every day at 2 p.m. This Friday the shop will host garage rock supergroup Pull Chains with local support Honeypuppy and Infinite Favors, opening the doors at 6 p.m. with music starting at 7 p.m.
Despite their ambitions to expand Ideal’s mission, the couple says they will stay true to what made it a staple in the first place. Treasured menu items like the Dottie and Cadillac will remain untouched.
In the end, they say that all the stress, newness and uncertainty have been worth it for one major reason: When they were approached with an offer to buy Ideal Bagel, the original owner suggested he might close it otherwise. Uno immediately felt she didn’t want to see another cherished Athens institution go the way of The Grit, Caledonia Lounge, Go Bar and so many others. “Everything in Athens is changing very fast, and I just want something stable,” she says.
Owners of both bagel shops say they appreciate the role each plays in the Athens business ecosystem. In other words, they’re not out to start a schmear campaign. Everyone involved, including staff, puts their heart, soul, sanity and time on the line to keep the doors open. The end result: thick, chewy, delicious bagels—like a warm hug in your guts—and the opportunity to run into friends, old and new, in beloved spaces we all share.
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