Gabriel’s Bagels: Atlanta’s best new bagel, six years in the making
📍 Atlanta, GA
🔗 hotplate.com/gabrielsbagels
Gabriel had been baking bagels at home for six years before he ever sold one.
Just a few weeks ago, he hosted his first pop-up and sold 52 bagels. He’s already sold over 100 for his upcoming third drop.
“It was a long time coming,” he says. “But about a month ago, I just decided - I’m going to start doing this. The ball just started rolling and getting bigger and bigger and bigger and all this crazy stuff is happening.”
How it started
Gabriel’s been baking for a long time, experimenting with pizza, bread, croissants, cinnamon rolls, donuts, and more. Bagels were what stuck. They were what he felt most confident in and enjoyed most.
“Bagels are both what I felt I'm best at, can be consistent at, and what I love to eat all the time. I eat way too many bagels. And so the last couple of years, that's what I've been really trying to perfect.”
Even so, starting a real operation and actually selling felt like a big step. He went back and forth on this for years. What finally convinced him was seeing other bagel bakers on social media.
“I'm scrolling reels a month or so ago. And I see people doing it…And they're being successful with what they're doing.”
Watching other entrepreneurs “just owning it and doing it” was the turning point for Gabriel. It led to the realization that:
“If they can do it, I can do it because I know what I’m able to bake. It just all just happened after that. I got a rush of that motivation and just went with it and took it and it's still going.”
Getting his first customers
Before he posted his first drop on Hotplate, Gabriel wanted to see if people would even be interested. He tried something simple to test the waters.
A week before his first drop, he scaled up his normal recipe for 12 bagels to 60, and took the best 45 to a local farmers market.
“I set up a table on the street leading into the market and handed out samples,” he says.
He also had also printed out his Hotplate SMS QR code, making it easy for people to subscribe after sampling.
A week later, he got two orders from friends, and seven from strangers who had stopped by for samples. From that one morning outside the farmer’s market, he attracted genuine fans, some of whom have ordered every drop since.
What his bagel business looks like today
Right now, Gabriel is hand rolling, boiling, and freshly baking his bagels alongside his full-time job in data consulting. He keeps his schedule focused and manageable to balance both.
He preps on Friday and bakes Sunday morning ahead of pickups. He dedicates a few hours throughout the week to other tasks like planning and getting ready for the next drop.
Things have started to pick up quickly, especially through word of mouth in the Atlanta food community. When we spoke to Gabriel last week, he was waiting on a Costco delivery for an extra refrigerator so he could proof more bagels at once. He’s also upgrading to a larger convection oven as demand continues to grow.
“It used to be making them for myself once a week…But now it’s like, I have to do it three times through this weekend for people who are giving me money to do it. Like it doesn’t feel real.”
He’s also starting to expand beyond direct-to-customer drops. He brought his bagels to a local coffee shop for the owner to try.
“He texted me over the weekend…He wanted to drop his factory bagel supplier for me. He gave away samples as well and he said people were floored by them.”
Looking ahead
Gabriel might just be starting out, but he has hard-earned momentum and goals. Long term, he’d love to open up his own shop but for now, he’s focused on building something steady through pop-ups, preorders, and local partnerships.
Like many microbakers, he’s also learning from others in the space, especially Barrett’s Bagels in Madison, WI, who shares advice about not expanding too quickly.
That perspective has helped him stay patient and focus on getting the fundamentals right first. Right now, the goal is to keep improving, keep showing up each week, and keep building a loyal customer base.
Keep crushing it, Gabriel! Your Hotplate team is rooting for you!
