From carriage rides in Central Park to the bright lights of Broadway and every pizza parlor in between, New York City is known for its larger-than-life buildings and personality. And when you’re looking for breakfast after a night in the city that never sleeps, the bagel has become as synonymous with New York as Sinatra himself.
Dan’s Bagels isn’t in New York, but this successful Trophy Club bakery was born from the love of the quintessential New York bagel.
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON
Dan Hilbert never imagined he would enter the restaurant business. As a marketing executive working with Fortune 100 companies including Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch and State Farm, Dan spent 30 years working on the East Coast before moving to Texas in 2015. But it was while he was living in New York that he discovered and fell in love with New York-style bagels.
“It’s boiled and baked,” Dan says. “A true New York-style bagel is crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, sometimes to the point where you’re really working the jaw. The boiling process is really what makes the difference.”
When Dan and his family moved to Trophy Club, he sorely missed the firm, chewy textures of a New York-style bagel. He wouldn’t taste them again until 2020 after his hours were cut from his corporate job. That was when he made the decision to replicate the method himself.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” Dan says. “Anytime our New York friends were in town, we would have them taste our bagels and give us feedback. It really just came out of wanting to have that kind of bagel again and making our own at the house.”
Eventually, Dan found success in using sourdough as the base, which coincidentally enough, harkens back to the bagel’s origins in the 1600s.
“Bagels were traditionally sourdough when they were originally made in Eastern Europe,” Dan says. “By bringing that back, we’re essentially saying that sourdough is where it started, and that’s where we believe it should be.”
After Dan finalized his process, he started posting in local Facebook groups, informing them he was selling homemade bagels for delivery. It quickly became a word-of-mouth hit, with customers ordering half a dozen to a dozen at a time.
“What we were finding was there were a lot of transplants from the East Coast living in this area,” his wife and business partner Jennifer says. “Most folks that were ordering from us were transplants looking for the New York-style bagel like we were when we first started making them. We got so busy delivering them that we eventually turned it into pickup.”
The “watershed moment,” as Dan and Jennifer describe, happened in November 2020 when Dan set up a Facebook page and an online preordering system.
“After we went live, we sold 1,000 bagels in seven minutes,” Jennifer says. “We were sitting in our living room, and our phones were beeping constantly — like ‘ding, ding, ding, ding.’ That was our ‘aha!’ moment. That was when we knew we were onto something.”
IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE...
Shortly after their successful online launch, Dan and Jennifer left their corporate jobs and looked to open a brick-and-mortar store. Honing in on a spot in Trophy Club Plaza, Dan and Jennifer were intentional about making the space feel like an authentic New York bagel shop with all of its hustle and bustle. Before customers even open the door, they’re greeted with a friendly reminder on the front — “Be nice. It’s just bagels.”
Upon entering, guests will notice there aren’t any tables or chairs set up. Instead, there’s a speedy checkout line where people can grab and go or pick up their preorders. A chalkboard hangs on the wall that shows all of the shop’s offerings, including lox, shmears and egg sandwiches. And on their way up to the cashier, customers will pass by a drink fridge, as well as a display case of all of their favorite bagel flavors, from plain and poppy seed to jalapeno cheddar and cinnamon sugar.
“We designed it very specifically to the layout that we knew,” Jennifer says. “It’s very cool when someone walks in who has never been here before and is from New York, and they’re instantly like ‘Oh my God, I’m back home.’”
In another nod to New York’s grab-and-go culture, the store’s walls host a whimsical black-and-white mural of a city skyline complete with busy people making their way through a typical day in metropolis.
“We had this vision of depicting 19th-century New York City,” Dan says. “We wanted it to be modern-looking while harkening back nostalgically.”
It took about nine months to complete the entire storefront, and in August 2021, Dan’s Bagels opened its doors for the first time.
“A lot of the community already had our bagels, so there was already this pent-up excitement,” Dan says. “That was great, but it also put a lot of pressure on us to do the same level of service as we did in a controlled environment.”
Despite neither Dan nor Jennifer ever working in the restaurant industry, the first day of business was an overwhelming success.
“We actually opened two minutes late because we wanted everything to be perfect,” Dan says. “We made 700 bagels, and we sold out in two-and-a-half hours. It wasn’t nearly enough.”
Since then, they’ve made it a standard to produce at least 1,000 bagels a day. Even then, they’ll still manage to sell out on the weekends, usually within hours after opening.
“The No. 1 challenge we had was educating customers that a bakery sells out,” Dan says. “It’s like barbecue. If it’s scratch-made, what we make is what we have. There’s no pulling from the back. If there’s no bagels, there’s no bagels.”
And it isn’t hard to see why Dan’s Bagels sell out so frequently. One of his most popular variations is the rainbow bagel, where he rolls several layers of colored dough to create bagels popping with red, blue and yellow colors. Sometimes he can mix in specific colors for occasions such as the Fourth of July, Halloween, Christmas and Dragon graduation parties.
“It’s at least seven different layers of hand-rolled dough,” Dan says. “It’s about three times the labor, but it’s so worth it. It looks awesome on the inside when you slice into it.”
TIME TO MAKE THE BAGELS...
Dan’s Bagels' prominence has only grown in the two years since it first opened. Not only was it named to best-of lists in “76262 Magazine” and “The Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” but it was also consecutively named the best bagel in Southlake Style’s Readers Choice in 2022 and 2023.
Dan attributes their success to three key factors — consistency, community and culture. Every morning at 3:30 a.m., Dan and his staff go into the shop to take the dough out of the coolers. Once near room temperature, the team then begins shaping and fermenting each one before the boiling and baking process begins.
“That day-to-day, hour-to-hour effort is essential,” Dan says. “We’re open six days a week, but we’re making dough seven days a week. We’re always working in the back of the house.”
Customer service has also been key to their success. Dan and his team always go above and beyond to satisfy any customer, whether that involves fulfilling special requests or fixing a wrong order. The high-quality bagels and service have paid off with a fiercely loyal clientele who often line up on weekends long before the store opens at 7 a.m.
“The one thing that’s always been consistent is the community,” Dan says. “The word-of-mouth is tremendous, and we’re proud of our customer response.”
But the biggest point of pride for Dan is the culture that his shop helps inspire. With a kitchen staff of 25 people, they emphasize inclusiveness and compassion while ensuring everyone feels equally appreciated. On those occasional weekdays when they don’t sell everything, they’ll donate the remaining bagels to local police and fire departments. Anything left over will be sliced thin and baked as bagel chips.
More than anything else, Dan appreciates the privilege of rounding out the culture with a taste of New York. To him, they aren’t just making bagels — they’re making memories.
“A bagel is such a humble product, but it elicits such strong nostalgia,” Dan says. “We have so many customers who take a bite and are reminded of being in [New] Jersey when they were a kid sitting at brunch and having these bagels. It’s unbelievable what kind of emotions a bagel can inspire.”