As a Brooklyn-born Polish Jew who mastered the craft of bagel-making at one of America’s top-ranking bagel shops, Oren Salomon has major bagel credentials. Since July 2021, he’s been discreetly serving game-changing, small-batch, kosher-style bagels at his shop, Starship Bagel, in Lewisville.
With a massive kettle and rotating deck oven in the back, the Lewisville location is the mother ship that will supply fresh, real New York-style bagels to Starship’s satellite location that opened in downtown Dallas on Jan. 20, 2023.
Bagels have always been Salomon’s favorite food, and his connection to them is special. Bagels are “bread brought by Polish Jewish immigrants to New York. So I feel like I identify with the bagel, just from like — this is the bread of my people.”
Dallas has seen a resurgence of New York-style bagel shops in recent years, with Shug’s, Sclafani’s and more. So is Dallas a bagel town now?
Salomon believes the reason New York and Montreal are bagel cities is because people demand them. “Whether Dallas becomes a bagel city is up to Dallas,” he adds. But he claims he’s never served a New Yorker who wasn’t ecstatic, and if he can create a bagel competition in Dallas, he’ll know he’s done his job.
To get a taste for the transcendence of Starship’s bagels, a slightly salty and malty plain bagel is anything but basic. With crisp edges and a fluffy chew, it’s a quality litmus before getting distracted by flavors like za’atar, onion, poppy seed, and garlic — with seasonings on the top and bottom.
Also prepared at Starship are a variety of wholesomely creamy schmears that make tearing into a bagel even more pleasurable. The pleasantly sour fermented blueberry schmear was inspired by a recipe from a Noma cookbook, and led to the development of a half-fermented jalapeño schmear. There’s also a chock-full of herbs and garden veggie spread, as well as one heavily dotted with chopped green olives. Salomon believes fermenting is one of the best things that can possibly be done to fruits and vegetables, especially when it comes to balancing the rich cream cheese of schmears.
For the dairy-avoidant, Starship makes six tofu-based schmears. A true bagel is naturally vegan, so all dietary backgrounds should feel invited to the walk-up window near the Eye on Elm Street. Dogs are welcome to join the line, too. Tables and chairs are provided by Downtown Dallas Inc.
Aside from bagels and schmears, Starship gets everything else from what Salomon considers to be the best purveyors. “There’s no reason to re-do the best,” so Nova lox and whitefish salad come from Brooklyn’s Acme Smoked Fish. Coffee beans are sourced from Arkansas’s Onyx Coffee Lab, which has won multiple first-place awards at the U.S. Brewers Cup, the nation’s most serious coffee competition. Onyx’s beans are brewed in a Ground Control batch coffee brewer using a high-tech extraction process geared toward eliminating bitterness.
Salomon says he chose “Starship” for the name of his shop to lean away from easy cliches and to connote a “concept of universal connection.” He can’t think of anything that brings people together more than food. “For me, that food is bagels,” he says.
He’s clear that Starship Bagel is a bagel shop, and not a deli or a sandwich shop where bagels are treated as an offhand bread selection. It doesn’t sell bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. “What we do is the bagel,” Salomon says. “We think the bagel is the one perfect thing.”
According to him, bagels are present at nearly every important event in American Jewish life, and after countless visits to New York visiting family, he knew what a good bagel was — and that Dallas didn’t have them. He describes eating bagels at events in Dallas as “painful” because “they were always bagels I didn’t want to eat.”
So, he began by making a dozen bagels at home and inviting friends. Positive feedback led to bigger batches, and he later used a church’s kitchen to offer a bagel delivery service called Oren’s Bagels in 2017 and 2018. It came to a tipping point where he needed to hire staff to keep going, but he says he got “sufficiently scared off” by family. The bagel business would lead to financial ruin, they said, reminding him that restaurants typically fail at a high rate.
Aside from bagels, Salomon tried work in technology and property management. He also owned a coworking space in downtown from 2012 to 2017, called Dallas Fort Work. “The thing is, I knew [bagels] made me happier than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life.”
The clarity led to a one-month stage at Boichik Bagel in Berkeley, Calif., a shop that scandalized egocentric New Yorkers when it was heralded by The New York Times as “some of the finest New York-style bagels” that “just happen to be made in Berkeley.” Salomon says the experience made him realize there’s nothing special about New York water. It’s where he learned to comfortably go from making dozens of bagels to thousands, and where he learned that handing off “a bag of happiness” was a full-circle, magical moment of spreading joy for him.
He says people ask him all the time why he’s in Lewisville, and it boils down to the fact rent would be eight times higher in Dallas. With his equipment and experience, however, it’s the perfect spot for testing whether Dallas can be a bagel town.
Starship Bagel opened Jan. 20, 2023 at 1520 Elm Street, Suite 107, Dallas. starshipbagel.com.
