Bakery Four’s pastries, bread and bagels have been in high demand ever since owner Shawn Bergin started baking out of his basement in 2019.
The high-end bakery even moved from its tiny, 350-square-foot space in the Highlands to a larger 3,000-square-foot space on Tennyson Street in 2022 to keep up with its two-hour-long lines. But that still wasn’t enough room to push out enough product for its carb-loving customers.
“Our goal was to just do bread and pastry on Tennyson,” Bergin said. “But we were selling so many bagels that we knew this needed to be its own thing. It was taking up too much space and keeping us from doing some other things, like breakfast and lunch sandwiches. It was also affecting everything on the pastry side since we were using the same ovens.”
In mid-February, Bergin and his wife Alex Urdanick opened pre-orders for their new bagel shop in Wheat Ridge: Rich Spirit Bagels. On the first day, they sold out of 300 bagels in half an hour.
This month, Rich Spirit Bagels, located in Gold’s Marketplace at 10081 W. 26th Ave., opened for walk-ins. It’s joined tenants XO Gift Co., Esters Neighborhood Pub, Illegal Pete’s and Queen City Collective Coffee. The bagel shop still had no signage as of last week, but the second you catch a whiff of the freshly baked, naturally leavened bagels, you’ll know you’ve made it.
“Now we’re making around 800 bagels, including for walk-ins, and pre-orders usually sell out by the night before, but we have the ability to make as many as we need to,” Bergin said. “We just want to make sure we’re not creating waste.”
Rich Spirit Bagels is selling plain, salted, poppyseed, salted sesame and everything bagels for $2.50 a pop, $15 for half a dozen or $28 for a dozen. You can get a bagel with cream cheese for $5 or buy an 8 oz. tub of plain, chive, veggie and lox cream cheese on the side.
“One of the things I’m most proud of on Tennyson is I’ve never had a single person complain about the price of our products, and that’s really what I wanted to do here too,” Bergin said. “We’re lucky enough that we can do the volume to keep our prices at what they are.”
“I’m not the kind of person that would go and spend $17 on a bagel sandwich,” he added. “That seems silly, so why would I ever charge that?”
Rich Spirit Bagels, named after Bergin’s favorite Kendrick Lamar song, doesn’t sell any typical egg, bacon and cheese bagel sandwiches “because we don’t have the infrastructure for it,” Bergin said. The 1,100-square-foot shop does offer freshly sliced lox, and Bergin plans to eventually expand the menu to include open-faced sandwiches with fresh heirloom tomatoes and produce from the local farmers markets.
Bergin and his team of bakers use a dark malt in the bagel dough and boiling water to give it “a beer-like maltiness that’s really familiar in New York,” Bergin said.
He and his wife moved from New York to Denver in 2019 and never settled on a go-to bagel spot in town. But they don’t consider Rich Spirit Bagels a strictly New York-style bagel. “I always like the saying that if it were the water in New York that made the bagels special, everyone would have good bagels,” Bergin said.
The bagels’ crisp exterior is reminiscent of a Montreal-style bagel and the dough is naturally leavened, much like the bakery’s sourdough and pastries. A pillow of steam erupts when you cut it open to reveal the light and airy center.
“French pastry can be not the most approachable thing for a lot of people, who might assume it’s more hoity toity or expensive,” Bergin said. “This is just another way to ease people into more naturally leavened products because it creates so much flavor, but it doesn’t have to be a stereotypical sourdough.”
Pre-orders for Rich Spirit Bagels open online every Sunday at noon with pick-up times available Thursday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., when walk-ins are also free to pop in.
“We’re hoping this will solve the line problem for now,” Bergin said.
