Dallas' award-winning Starship Bagel racked up another award on November 16, when the bagel shop won top prize in the 2025 New York BagelFest, an annual bagel competition drawing two dozen bagel purveyors from around the globe.
Starship won "Best Bagel" — the top award that the festival bestows — as well as awards for Best New York-style bagel, Best Showmanship, Best Schmear, and Most Creative.
This marked the third year Starship competed, following 2023 when they first won Best Bagel, and again in 2024 when they won Best Schmear.
Competing in another city in the food & beverage realm is challenging, as it takes the operator out of their usual zone, away from the processes and equipment they rely on every day — and especially in a category as temperamental as baking, which involves unpredictable factors such as yeast, a living thing, and water, whose makeup famously differs from city to city.
But this year, Starship Bagel founder Oren Salomon devised a formula that, on paper, might seem risky, but ended up being a wild success.
"We took a huge gamble and it paid off," Salomon says. "We made the winning bagels in Lewisville a week before the event."
Wait, what?
"We par-baked them, froze them, and brought them to New York on dry ice — then finished them off in an oven I purchased in New York and brought to the Citifield venue," he says. "We turned an 'away game' into home field advantage."
The word "par-baked" means partially baked, a process where bread or pizza dough is baked for part of the total cooking time, then frozen to be popped back into the oven for a final finishing bake.
"Par-baked" can be a dirty word in the baking world since it's a technique most often employed by supermarket chains and big companies, not the little guy. Your typical "artisan" baker baking a loaf of crusty artisan bread is not par-baking.
But Salomon says that the technique proved to be ideal for bagels.
"Bagels lend themselves to it and it’s a very bagel-specific technique," he says. "Par-baking actually makes a superior product and that’s exactly why we wanted to enter it into the competition."
For bakery nerds: They first baked their bagels in a rotating deck oven, to give the bagels a crisp bottom. After freezing, they did their second bake in a convection oven, which gave the bagels a nice crispy top.
Starship Bagel Starship Bagel
"It's a hybrid approach with results only made possible by using two ovens," Salomon says.
They'll continue to experiment with this technique at their three locations in Lewisville, downtown Dallas, and North Dallas.
"Now we’re going to roll out parbaked bagels to all of our stores so we can serve hot bagels all day long," he says. "It’s a transformation that will allow us to increase quality, freshness, availability while reducing costs and our carbon footprint by reducing our need to deliver to our satellites multiple times per day."
It may not be enough to keep up with what they anticipate will be a huge burst in business in the upcoming week. Their win got major coverage not only in the hometown press but also nationally. (The New York Post: "Schmear campaign! The best bagel shop in America isn't in New York, it's in Texas — worse, the judges were mostly New Yorkers.")
Since they've returned from the competition, they've been slammed, and Salomon anticipates possible shortages this weekend and going into the holiday.
"We look forward to feeding all these new faces, we just hope they come with proper expectations for the moment," Salomon says.
Starship Bagel has enoyed a meteoric rise since Salomon opened the first location in Lewisville in 2021. A second location opened in downtown Dallas in 2023, and a third opened in North Dallas in 2024.
For this year's Bagelfest, they brought a big menu of items including:
- French onion pre-soup: onion bagel with French onion schmear topped with melted Gruyere and chives
- Beer Schmear: poppy bagel with hops-infused schmear topped with candied orange and barley malt drizzle
- Mushroom Shawarma: Sesame bagel topped with seasoned mushrooms, tahini, and Israeli salad
- Schmeara Masala: garlic bagel with Makhani sauce schmear, topped with cherry tomatoes and cilantro
- Ube For You, Bae: plain bagel with ube schmear topped with toasted coconut flakes
- Black Garlic Chili Crisp: Italian bagel with black galic schmear topped with kimchi cucumber and chili crisp
Winning the Best Bagel award in New York was a coup since New York is generally considered to be the bagel capital of the world, with many aficionados insisting that the secret ingredient is New York water.
"We won with Lewisville water!" Salomon says.
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Nothing Bundt Cakes are getting patriotic for the 4th.Photo courtesy of Nothing Bundt Cakes