Where to Get a Good Bagel in the Financial District
By 17John Hotel ·
Quick answer
For the best bagels in the Financial District, start with Apollo Bagels at 41 John Street, which is on our own block and opens at 7am with a line most weekend mornings. Leo's Bagels at 3 Hanover Square is the sit-down-and-read-the-paper option and stays open weekends. Liberty Bagels at 32 Broadway has the longest cream cheese list downtown and keeps later hours, until 6pm on weekdays. All three are a walk, not a subway ride, from John Street.
Bagels come out of the oven early down here. Go before 9am. · Photo by Robert Gareth on Unsplash
We get asked about bagels more than almost anything else, and the honest answer is that the Financial District got very good at them in the last few years. You don't need to take a train to the Lower East Side. Three shops are worth your morning, and one of them is on our block.
A note on timing before you go. Bagel shops down here run on office hours, which means they open early and several of them close in the mid-afternoon. If you want a bagel at 5pm on a Sunday you're going to be disappointed, so go in the morning. We keep coffee in the lounge if you want something before you head out the door.
Apollo Bagels
· About a two-minute walk east along John Street from us · $
Hours: Opens 7am; closes mid-afternoon (3pm on the weekdays we checked)
This is the one to try first, and it's the reason people on our block talk about bagels at all. Apollo makes naturally fermented, boiled bagels fresh every morning, and the shop leans small and fast rather than sit-down. The catch is the line: photos of the John Street queue circulate in local groups, and weekend mornings are the worst of it. Go before 9am on a Saturday or wait until a weekday and you'll walk straight in. Get it plain-ish and warm rather than loaded up, since the bagel itself is the point.
Leo's Bagels
· About a ten-minute walk south, past Stone Street · $
Hours: Open weekends
Leo's is the one we send people to when they want to sit down, not queue. It's tucked on Hanover Square in the old cobbled part of the neighborhood, a block off Stone Street, so you can pair it with a walk around the oldest streets down here. It also stays open on weekends, which matters in a neighborhood where a lot of places shut on Saturday. This is the classic order: an everything with scallion cream cheese, taken outside to the square.
Liberty Bagels
· About a twelve-minute walk southwest, near Bowling Green · $-$$
Hours: From 7am to 6pm on the weekdays we checked
Come here if you want the enormous cream cheese wall, because Liberty's whole personality is the spread list, including the sweet, brightly colored ones that end up on everyone's phone. It's also the latest-closing of the three, open until 6pm on weekdays, so it's the one that survives a day of sightseeing. If you're a purist you'll roll your eyes at the funfetti; if you're feeding kids after the Charging Bull, this is the stop.
