when you want, where you want.
We Found the Mysterious Owner of the ‘New’ Absolute Bagels
Photo-Illustration: Grub Street; Photo: Getty
When Absolute Bagels closed in December, it shocked the Upper West Side residents who had come to depend on the 30-year-old store. (It also shocked them, perhaps, to learn about the multitude of health violations they had been willing to overlook for bagels that many of its fans deemed to be among the best in the city.) And then another jolt hit the neighborhood: Last week, the news broke that someone had taken over the space and was planning to reopen it as another bagel shop. But who is this someone? The building’s broker, Rafe Evans, would only say that the new owners operate stores in New York and New Jersey but have no association with Absolute’s owner, Sam Thongkrieng. And then there was the name: The new owner — whoever they are — had hung a giant banner on the front to announce that “New Absolute Bagel” was set to “reopen.” This struck some, to use the local parlance, as mishegoss.
Of course, the history of New York bagels is filled with controversies and mysteries. Around 100 years ago, bagel-makers formed a union in response to horrendous working conditions (often baking bagels and even sleeping between shifts in rodent-infested basements that could reach over 100 degrees). That same union went on strike and choked off the city’s entire supply of bagels in the early 1950s — news reports at the time referred to the bagel as “the roll with the hole” and “the doughnut with rigor mortis” — and later successfully fought off the encroachment of Johnny Dio and the Lucchese crime family. There was the great H&H dispute of 2000, Cynthia Nixon’s “horrifying” lox-and-capers-on-cinnamon-raisin order, and, last year, the curious tale of Court Street Bagels in Cobble Hill, which reopened much to the surprise of its previous owner and was only later revealed to have been taken over by the shop’s main competitor, Smith Street Bagels.
Could it be that the same fate had befallen Absolute Bagels? When I pressed the broker, he remained steadfast: The new tenant did not wish to be contacted and would reveal itself eventually, he told me. If I wanted answers, I was going to have to look elsewhere. What I didn’t know was that the more I dug, the weirder things were going to get.
Legal documents filed with the state relating to New Absolute Bagels at 2788 Broadway gave the first hint. A name change filed this March listed Ok Dang Ri Corp, a business that was incorporated last August — months before Absolute closed — at a totally different address: 278 Knickerbocker Avenue. This location will be familiar to any Bushwick bagel hound because it’s Knickerbocker Bagel, a popular local spot that also runs an outpost in Seoul. Had the shop decided to expand to Manhattan?
Well, no. I sent a message to Jay Jeung, a partner and a manager at the store, and he told me he had no idea what I was talking about. After I shared screenshots of the filing docs, he wrote back, “Thanks for letting me know, but we also don’t know who is involved and it’s surprising that we even received this email.”
I turned next to a source inside the bagel world, someone who works with a lot of different shops and didn’t want me to use his name because the bagel industry is apparently built on secrets and opacity. “It’s Koreans like Knickerbocker, but not them,” my bagel mole explained. “They’re just using the name in the filing.” He’d heard Knickerbocker had looked at the space but had passed. Whoever was behind New Absolute Bagel was, true to the name, someone new.
Eventually I tracked down a certificate of incorporation for New Absolute Bagel, signed by someone named Kyung Mi Kim, who has owned restaurants in Bayside and in Flushing. I called her, and she affirmed that she is the owner but then explained that she doesn’t speak much English, so we moved to text with the aid of translation. In Hangul, she confirmed that New Absolute Bagel will open this summer and that it’s currently under construction. When I asked about any potential partners in the project, she responded, “I’m 100 percent by myself.”
This struck me as strange because of Knickerbocker’s address on the name-change filing. Jeung, from Knickerbocker, says he does not know Kim, but the connection may have to do with two of Knickerbocker’s other partners: Wee Kwan Oh and Jeong Sook Lee. Lee is, at the moment, suing Oh, alleging that Oh was involved in a “discreet attempt to sell the business at a substantially low[er] price than fair market value” without involving her. And when I asked Kim — she’s the person opening New Absolute Bagel — about Oh, she confirmed that she’d previously “tried to buy his store last year, but it didn’t work.” Instead, when Absolute’s storefront became available, she used the same documents filed with the state from the previous purchase attempt and only changed the name and address of the new business. “Knickerbocker has nothing to do with me anymore,” she told me. Neither does the original Absolute Bagels, of course, but if Kim’s actual bagels are comparable, her new neighbors likely won’t care too much about that.
Related