Badass Bagels Retail Stores in CT + NY Open for On-Premise Featuring Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee

Five years ago, when we covered the transition of the popular Norwalk restaurant, Sugar & Olives, over to the wild yeast sourdough Badass Bagels, it was just a place-your-order and pickup operation.

But since 2021, Badass Bagels has grown beyond their Norwalk baking operation to seasonal farmers markets in Darien, New Canaan, Ridgefield, Rowayton, and Rye, and year-round markets in Westport and Larchmont. They’ve also expanded to storefronts in Armonk, Rye, and New Canaan. And even if you don’t live in Fairfield or Westchester counties, Badass Bagels can be had in various grocery stores all of the country, including Florida, Montana, Utah, Arizona, California, and Maine.

One of the iced lattes early on featured a homemade toffee syrup, intended to mock one of Sugar & Olive’s popular desserts from back in the day, sticky toffee pudding, using Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee.

If there is another layer that Badass was missing, however, was being able to sit and relax inside of the Norwalk HQ or their other brick-and-mortars to enjoy a toastie, a pastry, or a sandwich with a solid cup of coffee.

Until now!

Badass Bagels has teamed up with Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee, a legendary coffee brand, started in 2003 by Jack Mazzola in Manhattan, that earned notoriety by being New York City’s first coffee shop to exclusively serve certified organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, using a house-invented, patented "Stir Brewer" machine, an idea that hit Mazzola when he remembered something from his upbringing and his grandmother constantly stirring tomato sauce as to  properly incorporate the ingredients. He’d apply that same philosophy to coffee, in creating a balanced brew, and thus, an invention was born.

“Even dating back to when we were Sugar & Olives, we’ve only ever had three coffees here in 20 years; Panther from Miami, Gorilla Coffee from Brooklyn, and now I have Jack’s,” says Badass Bagels founder Jennifer Balin. “Jack’s is like the first-and-a-half wave of original coffee roasting. He was known for his cold brew. It’s an amazing brand and people are fanatical over it.”

Mixing bevs behind Badass Bagels’ coffee bar and overseeing the program at all their locations is well-known barista, Jason Varga, who you may know from Neat, Tusk & Cup, and as the longtime manager of Shearwater Coffee Bar.

“Jen reached out to me in Indeed, but it turns out, we have a good mutual friend in Rachel (Haughey) from Neat,” Varga says. “I was sort of looking around and at my last job I was doing everything, but I’m really happy to be more focused on the coffee part of things. A long time ago, I fell in love with coffee and I stuck to it.”

Handmade wild yeast sourdough bagels are obviously still a thing here and going strong, too. Grab a dozen to-go, eat one there, do both.

And there is a BEC!

Working with those ethically sourced beans from Colombia and Brazil, Badass and Varga are excited to offer lattes with house-made syrups, pour overs, cold brews, and all the classic coffee concoctions.

“This is my first experience with Jack’s and I’m really enjoying it,” Varga says. “They’re also so supportive of our stuff. Jen has known them for so long and when they had her bagels in their shops in the city.”

Alongside the coffee program, Badass will offer a few sandwich specials (early on it was egg salad or their popular whitefish salad), bagels and schmears, and a stunning version of a bacon, egg, and cheese with a thick, fluffy omelet style egg, parsley oil, and salty-sweet homemade bacon jam, a callback to Sugar & Olives days when it was a beloved burger topping.

badassbagels.com