The bagel company that turned a line out the door into a business model has put a date on its Garden City shop. PopUp Bagels lists August 28 as the opening for its store at 900 Old Country Road, according to the company's own location listings, which now show Garden City alongside its open shops in Roslyn and Westhampton Beach. That makes it the chain's third stop on Long Island, and its first in the middle of Nassau County's busiest retail corridor.

Two weeks is not much warning, and that is roughly the point. PopUp does not operate like a bagel store so much as a drop: small batches, short menus, limited schmear flavors that rotate monthly, and a following that treats a new location the way sneaker buyers treat a release date.

A bag of hot bagels and a tub on the side

The format is the whole pitch. PopUp sells five bagels: plain, salt, sesame, poppy and everything. They come out of the oven all day in small batches, they are sold hot and whole by the bag, and the cream cheese comes in a tub on the side. The company trademarked the eating method: grip, rip and dip. There is no slicing station and no sandwich board, and the schmear lineup changes monthly, with August's rotation including a chocolate chip banana bread cream cheese and a cherry pepper Parmesan.

To a Long Islander raised on flagels and baconeggandcheese, that reads as either heresy or genius, and the company has built a national business on people showing up to decide for themselves. Its Instagram following sits at 349,000.

From a Westport backyard to nearly fifty shops

Founder Adam Goldberg started PopUp Bagels in Westport, Connecticut, as a local pop-up, and the company has since grown into a national chain with nearly fifty locations from Boston to La Jolla, along with a bench of celebrity investors that includes Paul Rudd, Michael Phelps, Michael Strahan and JJ Watt. The company has pointed to plans for as many as 300 new stores nationwide. New York holds its largest concentration, with eleven locations listed across the city, Brooklyn and Long Island.

The expansion has been fast, and most of it has landed far from here, in Texas, Florida, Tennessee and California. Garden City is the stop that lands in PopUp's own backyard, in the region whose bagel culture it borrowed the product from in the first place.

Third stop on Long Island

PopUp's first Long Island shop, on Old Northern Boulevard in Roslyn, proved the format travels east of the city line and still anchors the chain's Nassau presence. A second shop followed at 130 Main Street in Westhampton Beach, which is open now and gives the East End its supply. Garden City is the third, and strategically the most interesting of the three.

Roslyn is a village storefront and Westhampton is a seasonal Main Street. Old Country Road is neither. It is the spine of Nassau retail, minutes from Roosevelt Field, with the kind of drive-past traffic the first two locations never see. A shop there is not a novelty outpost. It is a bet that the format can hold a permanent place in the weekend routine of central Nassau, next to supermarkets and big-box anchors, in the part of Long Island where the per-capita density of established bagel stores is at its most unforgiving.

The turf it is walking into

Long Island takes exactly two food categories personally, and bagels are one of them. Every hamlet has a shop with a thirty-year lease on the local Saturday morning, and the regional custom of the overstuffed bagel sandwich is close to the opposite of PopUp's rip-and-dip minimalism. A Connecticut company selling unsliced bagels by the bag, within a short drive of a dozen shops that will build you a sandwich the size of a softball, is a genuinely bold piece of retail placement.

Which is what makes the opening worth marking on a calendar. Either the line that forms on August 28 shortens by September, in which case Nassau's bagel establishment can stand down, or it does not, in which case Old Country Road has a new permanent fixture and the local shops have a new standard to argue with. If you want to have an opinion at the counter of your own bagel place that weekend, you will need to have made the trip. The date to know is Friday, August 28, at 900 Old Country Road.