When members of the Phoenixville Fire Department showed up to Street Cart Bagels & Coffee this week, it wasn’t the first time. But on Wednesday, they left with free bagels and coffee in hand.
The event — both a test run for the staff and a way to recognize first responders — was the soft launch ahead of the bagel shop’s third official grand opening, after two setbacks derailed the new business’ original February debut.
With a larger staff and the practice under their belt, husband-and-wife team David and Kimberly Frey were excited to open the doors at 240 Nutt Rd. to the public once again on Thursday.
“It felt like holding our breath for a long time,” David said. “It was really awesome to see us open, to see people working in each of the different stations in a live setting. I think it was a good intro to give everyone a chance to see what it was going to be like.”
The initial opening may offer some indication. When Street Cart launched on Valentine’s Day, it sold through its 2,000-bagel stock by 11 a.m. In the days following, customers kept coming.
“Our back-of-house manager kept saying, ‘I really want us to be able to actually sell our lunch sandwiches at some point, to actually get to lunch,’” David said.
But then the first hurdle arrived. A plumbing issue caused water to back up into the building. They halted operations for several days to install new pipes to handle the new load. They reopened for more than a week. Then around 2 a.m., David got a call that a fire had broken out in one of the kettle vents. Bakers, who work overnight preparing bagels for the 6 a.m. opening, were on site.
A neighbor had spotted the fire on the roof before smoke drifted into the building, and the fire department quickly contained it, David said. They’re still not sure what caused it, he said. Damage was minimal, but navigating insurance, patching the roof, fixing water damage, and changing equipment took months.
The community really rallied around them during their roughly 70-day closure, Kimberly said. They took on a bit of the folklore of the borough itself: a phoenix rising from the ashes of the old iron foundry.
“I think a lot of people still carry that story on,” she said. “Some of the community members have kind of placed that mantra onto our experience. They’re also likening us to the Bob’s Burgers cartoon.”
But even amid the stress, there were silver linings. During the rebuild, Street Cart has added more staff to meet the demand they saw in those early days.
“We’ve been able to grow a lot and have the opportunity to see things we need to improve right away, things we want to improve, what growth is going to look like for this brand, and how we can recover and really have resilience through it,” David said. “[The] message internally is, this sucks, but there’s good things still to come.”
The business has been a long time in the making for David, 39, and Kimberly, 41, who moved to Phoenixville six years ago.
David has been in food service since he was a teenager, spending time as a cheesemonger for Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia, before heading to the fine dining space at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in West Philly. He went back to school at Penn State, taught wine and cheese classes, and ran the cheese section for a Trader Joe’s.
Kimberly has a background in the arts, having run a small handmade and wholesale retail business and working in social media and marketing.
David eventually moved into marketing and product development, where he spent a number of years in the cream cheese industry, he said.
Through that work, the duo were always toying with what it would look like to build their own shop, and go into business themselves.
They thought about what they loved. And it coincided with a trend they were seeing across the country, and along the East Coast: bagel shops becoming the new neighborhood pizza shop.
“The industry is booming right now, and it was sort of like our powers combined, in the right timing and in our town,” Kimberly said.
The Freys began to study the bagel, frequenting traditional shops in New York City. They loved the old-school, Lower East Side style of a New York Bagel, à la the traditional Jewish appetizing store, he said. They began to tinker with their own recipe, seeking something a bit smaller, a bit chewier, and malt-boiled with a longer fermentation time.
As they started to build out their vision, they fell in love with an iconic New York-style paper coffee cup, now used in their design.
The Freys landed on the ‘50s diner aesthetic in their storefront, formerly a Boston Market and Pizza Hut.
Street Cart Bagels & Coffee has a coffee and sandwich shop up front, and a production bakery in the back. They aspire to be a scratch kitchen; they use 30-pound blocks of cream cheese to mix up nine different recipes — including vegan, lox, beet horseradish, spicy tomato, blueberry, and hot honey — make their sauces or roast beef on site for their sandwiches, and cook their eggs and bacon in the same ovens their bagels bake in.
And it’s nearly a 24/7 operation: A dough team kicks off the two-day bagel making process, coming in after the day shift’s time is over. The bagels — plain, sesame, everything, salt, cinnamon raisin — ferment for two days, and are batch baked between midnight and 6 a.m., so they’re ready to go for opening. Eventually, they want to open online ordering, catering, and subscription services.
As they approached reopening once more, David stayed with the team to get all of the bagels prepped and ready ahead of the grand reopening.
Kimberly said the reception had been steady Thursday, with some wait times for customers. She expected the weekend to be busier, but now they’ve had time to prepare.
“You burn the midnight oil when you have to, when this is your livelihood, and this is what you’ve committed to doing,” she said. “We’re going all in, and we are ride or die, so we just take it to the max and figure it out.”
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