A New San José Pop-Up Makes the Most Unique Bagels in the Bay
A decent bagel is hard to find in the South Bay. A great one? Nearly impossible. I knew I was in for something special when a line formed in front of the Wonn Bagels pop-up inside a coffee shop in South San José before it had even opened. Customers gazed longingly at the display case filled mostly with non-traditional bagels, some speckled with blueberries or topped with jalapeño slices. Later, after purchasing their bagels, they slathered them with chili crisp cream cheese.
As a benchmark, I ordered a plain bagel. The shiny surface was rugged and bubbly with a firm crust. The inside was dense yet fluffy and had just the right amount of chewiness; the flavor was subtly tangy and sweet.
The bagel was great — and not just by San Jose standards.
Tech workers Vivian Kim and Tony Nguyen started The Wonn Bagels as a weekend project this past May, popping up once a month at the San José Japantown Farmers Market. Kim is the head baker; Nguyen is in charge of business operations. The inspiration for the business came when Kim developed an affinity for breadmaking during the pandemic. Although she never cared much for bagels, she was intrigued by the boiling and shaping process. The first time she made her own bagels, she was surprised by how much she enjoyed them. The homemade bagels came out moist and springy, unlike the tough, dry specimens she’d grown up eating.
The bagel recipe Kim settled on after years of tinkering is an amalgamation of several regional styles. “I started exploring different bagels like New York style, Montreal style and Japanese style,” says Kim. “I brought a little bit of everything and came up with my own.” The New York influence appears in the addition of malt (to achieve the ideal texture) and slow-proofing (which helps yield a nutty flavor Kim compares to Korean scorched rice). From Montreal, she borrowed the technique of boiling the bagels in honey water to improve the crust. And like the new vanguard of bagel shops that are now popular in Japan, she uses flour with a lower percentage of protein to create a crumb that’s more tender and moist than the typical New York bagel.
Kim says the hardest part of the process is the 20-hour wait for the bagels to finish proofing before they can actually taste how the final product turned out. Right now, the couple produces around 75 bagels for each event. There’s also ongoing R&D for seasonal specials like their corn bagel. Their next project is introducing dessert bagels to the menu.
For now, The Wonn Bagels is one of the Bay Area’s only Asian American–owned bagel businesses. That said, Kim says that even though she’s Korean American, she’s cautious about forcing Korean fusion into her bagels.
“Maybe down the line I’ll find the right Korean flavor profile that genuinely clicks,” she says. “But it will never be about labeling them ‘Korean bagels.’”
Instead, Kim describes her bagels as West Coast inspired, reflective of the region’s diverse food scene. Her favorite creation so far is a sweet double blueberry bagel, which she developed after eating too many other blueberry pastries that lacked a potent fruit flavor. The first layer of blueberry comes from mixing blueberry comp0te into the dough. The second involves meticulously incorporating pieces of fresh blueberry — by hand to avoid crushing the berries, which maintain some of their juiciness.
Many of the pop-up’s housemade cream cheese spreads, on the other hand, do draw inspiration from Asian ingredients — a “chili crunch” cream cheese and another that incorporates Japanese yuzu kosho chili paste. Kim also has a fondness for sweet bagel spreads, with flavors like strawberry compote, mango coconut and sweet corn. On the other hand, Nguyen’s go-to order is savory: an everything bagel loaded with bacon-scallion cream cheese.
At the pop-up I visited at Spectra Coffee, customers could also order a box of standard bagel toppings like smoked lox, capers, cornichons, tomato and onion. I ordered the box so that I could build a sandwich with my jalapeño corn cheddar bagel and yuzu kosho cream cheese. The shell of the bagel made an audible crunch when I bit in, and the jalapeño bagel itself was chewy, light and spicier than I expected. The yuzu cream cheese provided a tart, fragrant contrast to the salmon’s richness. It was a delicious bagel sandwich.
Kim and Nguyen have sold out at every event they have booked in the last few months. They currently host two pop-ups per month, alternating between cafes and farmers markets. As farmers market season wraps up, they’re searching for other locations so that they can host more frequent pop-ups. Someday, they might even open a proper brick-and-mortar bagel shop.
“Long-term we want to switch our careers to focus on [The Wonn Bagels],” Nguyen says. “Not sure when that will be, but that’s our goal.”
The Wonn Bagels pops up around the South Bay. The next pop-ups are at San José’s Japantown Farmer’s Market (357 E. Taylor St.) on Sep. 13 and Spectra Coffee (5353 Almaden Expy #52) on Sep. 27. Check the pop-up’s Instagram page for the most up-to-date schedule.