This is not a review of PopUp Bagels.

Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent of the ancient Near East, humans domesticated wheat and cattle.

On Friday, PopUp Bagels, the “super popular NYC bagel shop” that is actually from Connecticut, opened a storefront in Harvard Square in the hollowed-out remains of a Pokeworks.

The arc of human history nears completion.

PopUp Bagels, the “not famous but known” bagel shop (whatever the hell that means), boasts the lightning-quick wait times of a Ray Kroc McDonald’s on steroids, serving customers nearly instantly by chucking their orders into brown paper bags.

As I’m sure you know by now, PopUp Bagels does not make sandwiches and only sells their uncut bagels in packs of at least three. It’s a business with enough hype and what I assume are massive enough margins to make any mom-and-pop restaurant owner throw in the towel.

If the arc of culinary history bends towards progress, then PopUp Bagels has bent the arc back around into a circle: a bagel ouroboros eating its own delicious everything-bagel-seasoned tail.

It is the end of history. What else could be improved? Each bagel comes fresh from the oven, a glistening crust, a perfect soft yet chewy crumb — heat, warmth, carbs. Customers are enjoined to “grip, rip and dip”™ pieces into vast vats of cream cheese, coating the crisp warmth in cool, mouth-coating fat and lactic tang.

The bagel flavors are limited to the classics: poppy, salt, plain, sesame, everything. The cream cheese is more… let’s say… creative: plain and scallion, sure, but this month also the “Kraft mac n cream cheese” — wedding nostalgic factory-engineered umami to the already perfect dyad of bagel and schmear in an unholy corporate trinity.

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But maybe the new PopUp Bagels in the Square isn’t the inevitable Synthesis of the Bagelian Dialectic.* It wasn’t long ago, after all, that Harvard Square was entirely bereft of bagels, or at least, good ones. In 1952, the Crimson still had to explain to its readers that “a bagel looks like a month-old doughnut and tastes delicious.”

In these post-War years, expanding American diets, rising incomes, and industrial processes catapulted foods like pizza — previously seen as ethnic and urban — into mainstays of the American culinary canon. The bagel, an Ashkenazi Big Apple food, slowly gained national attention, especially in urban and Jewish areas.

But by 1997, the Square still had “a serious bagel problem” and as late as 2013, Flyby’s best bagel came not from a dedicated shop but from the now-defunct Crema Cafe. The runners up: J.P. Licks, Gato Rojo, and — deep breath — Annenberg. The bagel stood beside its close friends the pretzel and the English muffin in stunning mediocrity.

Bagelsaurus only opened in 2014, Black Sheep in 2018 (both comfortably selling sandwiches, I’ll have you know). So a third bagel shop now opening in 2025 seems less to do with the inherent superiority of the bagel than with its decades-long evolution from regional food to national option to gentrified trend. PopUp Bagels may be particularly obnoxious in its millennial foodie virality, but let’s not forget that bagels as a whole — like matcha, boba, and cookies — are a trend in and of themselves.

After all, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Maltese PopUp Ftiras, an Uzbek PopUp Samarkand Nons, or even PopUp Bialys — the closest relative of the bagel — any time soon, even if these breads are just as delicious as the humble bagel.

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When I arrived at PopUp Bagels on Friday at 8 a.m. sharp — the reported “grand opening” time — I was disappointed to see there was no line.

Despite what ECON 10 might tell you, humans are not rational creatures. The prospect of waiting in line for a bagel I knew could not possibly be worth the wait should have lowered the utility of this expedition, but only raised it. Lines are, as British cultural culinary commentator Ruby Tandoh puts it in her new book “All Consuming,” a “conspicuously visible way of quantifying hype.” Without a line telling me the bagels’ value, how could I justify waking up at an ungodly hour on a Friday to walk through and stand in the freezing cold? (Ok, more like 50 degrees, but I didn’t have a jacket on.)

My dreams of a long, cold, late-stage-capitalist line winding towards a just-released viral product — like the great iPhone and Harry Potter lines of yore — were further degraded when I learned that PopUp Bagels had already been open for two days making “test batches” I could easily have tried instead.

Grand opening? More like sham opening! But, my spirits were kept high by a live DJ blasting upbeat noise and a “bagel bouncer” explaining in a far-too-enthusiastic voice all the ways PopUp Bagels wasn’t like other bagel shops.

As I listened, I was pleased to see that the line had now grown around the block! Perfect, now I could have the real experience!

After I got my $16 three-pack with a quarter pound (quarter pound!) of cream cheese (for reference, my local and beloved Bagel World in Reading, Mass. sells this same amount for around $9), I interviewed some of my other bagel-loving brethren:

A couple taking shots of a steaming ripped bagel ran the Instagram account “twotastebuddiez,” which currently has around 121,000 followers of their Boston-area sometimes-review-sometimes-ad food content. Aaron R. Thompson ’27, an aspiring lifestyle blogger, was enticed by a free six-pack of bagels PopUp had sent him. Isaiah Bullock ’26 and Lani Tran ’26 keep a Notes app with every bagel they’ve tried and their respective rankings.

In fact, the possibility of a review seemed more important to most than the food itself. The bagels were not to be consumed by mouth, but by word of mouth and a diffuse set of eyes glued to screens. And while I hid behind the thin veneer of being a “real” reporter, I too was there as a superspreader for the viral bagels. I — and most everyone else — wanted to be like the bagels: not famous but known (and maybe a little famous, too).

So, I will not be reviewing PopUp Bagels; everyone else in line seemed to have that more than covered. If you want to see a review, you do not have to look very far. Instagram and TikTok will fill your feed with hundreds of “Come with me…” and “We haddd to try” videos and endless saturated foodporn of overflowing vats of pillowy cream cheese with a side of bagel. There’s nothing you can see that isn’t shown.

PopUp Bagels serves bagels and cream cheese. The bagels are quite good. They are probably not the best in the Square. You have to get three of them. They do not serve anything else.

—Magazine writer Henry G. Levenson can be reached at henry.levenson@thecrimson.com.

*Put simply, this is a pun on the “Hegelian dialectic,” which, as exegeted by Chalybäus, posits the forward march of history through a “thesis” and “antithesis” that, through dialectic, form the “synthesis,” which serves as the next age’s thesis.