The line starts forming at 7 a.m. PopUp Bagels opened its Garden City shop this morning at 928 Old Country Road, in the Gallery at Westbury Plaza, and the company is marking the first day with a party: a DJ and merchandise giveaways from 8 to 11 a.m., plus a schmear created for this opening, a chocolate chip cannoli cream cheese that no other location has.

It is the third Long Island shop for the fastest-moving name in bagels, after Roslyn and Westhampton Beach, and the first to plant itself in the middle of Nassau County's busiest shopping corridor, in the plaza that holds Trader Joe's. The shop runs 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., seven days a week.

A month late and right on brand

Garden City was supposed to happen on August 28. The date slipped a month, which for PopUp barely registers as a delay, because the company has never sold convenience. It sells anticipation. Its shops open with lines that wrap around parking lots, its schmear flavors rotate monthly and disappear on schedule, and its followers treat a new location the way sneaker collectors treat a release date.

The format is unchanged in Garden City. Five bagels: plain, salt, sesame, poppy and everything. They come out of the oven in small batches all day, they are sold hot and whole by the bag, and the cream cheese comes in a tub on the side. There is no slicing station, no sandwich board, no egg on a roll. The company trademarked its eating method, grip, rip and dip, and it means exactly what it says: tear the bagel, drag it through the schmear, repeat.

To a Long Islander raised on flagels and baconeggandcheese, that pitch lands as either heresy or genius. The three shops now open here suggest enough of us have picked genius.

From a Westport backyard to Old Country Road

Founder Adam Goldberg started PopUp Bagels as a pandemic project in Westport, Connecticut, handing bags of hot bagels out of his backyard. Five years on, the company runs roughly fifty shops from Boston to Southern California, has announced ambitions for hundreds more, and carries a bench of celebrity investors that includes Paul Rudd, Michael Phelps, Michael Strahan and JJ Watt. New York holds its largest concentration of stores, and Long Island keeps climbing that list.

Garden City is a different kind of bet than the first two Long Island shops. Roslyn sits on a village boulevard and Westhampton Beach works the summer trade. Old Country Road is pure volume, the retail spine of central Nassau, and a bagel shop there is not a novelty stop, it is a daily habit play. PopUp is wagering that the drop-culture crowd and the Saturday-morning-dozen crowd are the same people, or at least park in the same lot.

The cannoli question

The opening-day schmear deserves its own paragraph, because chocolate chip cannoli cream cheese is a sentence engineered to divide a family. The company leans into exactly this kind of flavor: its monthly rotations have run from cherry pepper Parmesan to chocolate chip banana bread, and the limited-run flavors are the reason its Instagram following approaches 400,000. The cannoli schmear is exclusive to the Garden City opening, which means the only way to have an opinion about it is to get in the line.

The bagels themselves stay resolutely traditional, which is the quiet secret of the whole operation. The theater is in the tubs.

What it means for the bagel map

Nassau County did not need another bagel shop; it needed this argument. PopUp arriving on Old Country Road puts the national bagel disruptor within a bagel's throw of some of the most beloved old-school shops in America, in a county where bagel loyalty is inherited, not chosen. Whether the grip, rip and dip crowd converts anyone raised on a scooped everything with scallion is the most Long Island retail experiment of the fall.

If you want the party, the DJ plays until 11 this morning. If you just want the bagels, they come out hot until 4, today and every day. And if you want the cannoli schmear, history says the limited flavors do not wait around for you to make up your mind.