Nate’s Bagels opens Scott’s Addition spot, working on Henrico production facility

The building in Scott’s Addition was formerly home to The Yoga Dojo. (Mike Platania photos)

Seven years after opening its first shop in the Fan, Nate’s Bagels now has two city storefronts and a production facility in the works in Henrico. 

The company this week opened its Scott’s Addition location at 1219 Highpoint Ave., while it’s building out a commissary kitchen at 2607 Willard Road. 

Known for its doughy, New York-style bagels, Nate’s started as a pop-up in the mid-2010s before opening its first brick-and-mortar spot on Cary Street in 2018. The Scott’s Addition location is its second and the Fan spot remains open. 

The menu at the Scott’s Addition Nate’s Bagels is slightly larger than that of its original spot, namely with the addition of a full espresso bar and pizza bagels, per Sara Wignall, Nate’s director of operations and development. It’s also open seven days per week, up from the Wednesday through Sunday hours at the Fan location. 

The bagel shop opened this week.

Nate’s put the plans for the Scott’s Addition location in motion about two years ago when an entity tied to its founder Nate Mathews bought the Highpoint property for nearly $1 million. The roughly 1,800-square-foot building was formerly home to The Yoga Dojo. 

A third, less public-facing Nate’s location is also currently being built in Henrico. The company is turning a former flex office building on Willard Road into a commissary kitchen to help increase Nate’s production capacity. Work is underway on the 6,400-square-foot building, which Nate’s purchased for $1.2 million last September, according to county records. 

Wignall said they initially considered using the Scott’s Addition location to be the production hub for Nate’s, but they ran into space constraints. 

“To do bagels right, you should kettle, boil and bake them on rotating stone deck ovens, and those pieces of equipment are humongous,” Wignall said. “They take up a lot of space on Cary Street, and we wanted to figure out a way to have them not impede on the actual retail store.”

At the Fan location, Nate’s has been producing about 5,000 bagels per week, and though Wignall said it’s too soon to forecast what the output will be with the Scott’s Addition and Henrico spots, the company is positioning itself for more growth. 

“The goal is that out there, we’ll be able to do more, and hopefully facilitate even more growth within Nate’s, (whether) that’s more retail spots or other ventures with catering or large order pickups,” Wignall said. “We’re not really sure yet. We’re going to allow that to be an organic process to figure out how best we can feed the community.”

The commissary kitchen is scheduled to be complete in the next few months. 

The Scott’s Addition Nate’s is the third bagel shop to open in Richmond in the last year. Baltik’s Bagel debuted on Forest Hill Avenue last fall and Julio’s Bagels opened earlier this year on Brookland Park Boulevard. In Northside, Kickshaws, a gluten-free bakery out of Fredericksburg, is signed on to open a shop on MacArthur Avenue in Bellevue. 

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