It’s Bagels!
Location: Two locations in London
Restaurant type: Café
Cuisine: Bagels
Years open: 2
The start: Dan Martenson started making bagels during the pandemic. For a New Yorker who had recently moved to London, it was a way of finding comfort through food. In 2022, after relentless recipe testing, he launched It’s Bagels! as a pop-up and weekend delivery service. A year later, it became a permanent fixture in Primrose Hill with a bricks-and-mortar bagel shop.
Looking back at the early days, Martenson says it was “insane”. Think The Bear but in North London instead of Chicago. He remembers an incident when the fridge broke and he was cleaning out rotten food while on the phone to the insurance company. “I had to stop watching The Bear,” he says, “it was triggering”. Martenson and his team overcame the challenges thrown at them and today It’s Bagels! is thriving: a Notting Hill outpost opened this summer and a third location in Soho is coming soon.
The challenge: In the bagel business, “speed is everything” and the pace can be “frenetic”. “It’s actually chaotic and sort of mayhem,” Martenson admits, “but it’s beautiful because to me that's exactly like this slice of New York.” It’s Bagels! has become so popular, there are queues down the street, and the team can serve hundreds of customers in a single day. The operation has to be slick. “Getting people in, getting people loaded and getting people out is 99% of my business,” he says.
To keep up with the pace, the café needs a system that’s simple and efficient. The system they started with didn’t fit the bill: “It was complicated, it was glitchy and no one knew how to work it.” After a month and a half, Martenson switched to Square. The interface is so intuitive, he says, that “my team learned it [on] day one.”
It's not just service that needs to be speedy. Martenson has to react quickly to changes in demand. Even changes in the weather can make a marked difference to sales. Plus, with social media, trends can take off at lightning speed. “You never know what bagel is going to be popular from week to week,” he says. Luckily, Martenson found that the Square Dashboard gives him all the data he needs to make quick decisions. “I could see the trends and be able to adjust our PR levels to match what we need, day to day […] it really gives me a lot more control.”
The present: Today, Martenson has a team of great staff he can trust to run the operations, which frees him up to get creative, thinking about merchandising and collaboration opportunities. And it gives him a chance to dream up exciting new recipes.
The recommendation: His advice to his other café owners is to embrace their local community. He believes that quick and casual eateries should be for everyone: a meeting place to bring people together. “I think the community that we've built […] has been really amazing. They've been so supportive, especially the other businesses on the block,” he says. “We've all become friends. We have our regulars. We have people coming from America. People coming from just down the block. Old, young, everything in between.”
Square products used: Square Point of Sale
