Local bagel shop expands to Durham

As they prepared to inherit Chapel Hill bakery Bagels on the Hill in 2012, Bagel Bar co-owners Jon Collins and Karra Pate knew one thing was for certain: the product—a crispy, New York-style bagel—was already there.

“We knew that the product was solid and customers really liked it,” Pate said. “It was just a matter of that they wouldn’t come in the store because it was so dirty.”

Several aspects of the business, in particular the bakery’s 84/100 sanitation inspection grade, had earned it the reputation of a place, as Collins put it, “that should have been shut down a long time ago.”

However, after months of constant cleaning and renovations, the business duo were able to rebrand the store as The Bagel Bar—a cleaner restaurant serving the same beloved product.

Four years later, the business is prepared to expand across the Triangle.

Collins—a Chapel Hill class of 2004 graduate—and Pate opened The Bagel Bar’s second location in downtown Durham this April, deciding on a location at City Hall Plaza.

For Collins, a current Durham resident, opening a store in the city was the logical next move for a business that has become increasingly more profitable in recent years.

“Seeing how quickly Durham is developing and how much of a food scene there is there, it seemed like it was the right time to jump into that,” Collins said.

The new store will feature all of the same bagel, cream cheese and coffee options that have made the current Weaver Dairy Road location popular, while also adding several new bagels and an espresso bar to boot.

Collins and Pate are committed to introducing an affordable, delicious product to the high-end food scene of Durham.

“Seeing what’s becoming available in downtown Durham, a lot of it just has a slightly higher price tag on it as well,” Collins said. “We want to be able to stay affordable, because there is a general absence of that [in the area].”

Collins and Pate first began working together in 2010, the same year Collins returned from teaching English in South Korea, at Merritt’s Store and Grill in Chapel Hill.

They immediately realized they had solid chemistry in the workplace.

“[Pate] and I have always worked really well together, like back at Merritt’s, there was always a good balance between her skills and mine,” Collins said. “We’ve never had one of those big knockdown, drag out fights you hear about people having.”

“We work well together because we feed off each other,” Pate added. “We can kind of read each other in a way we know what the other might need, even if the other might not realize it.”

After leaving Merritt’s, the two were six months into helping manage Bagels on the Hill when they were met with an irresistible business opportunity.

“The owner realized that he didn’t want to keep [owning the restaurant], so he gave us the first option to buy the business from him,” Collins said. “I was 25 at the time and it just seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.”

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