Bev's Bagels Is Set to Open on East Liberty Street

Bev's Bagels is targeting 115 East Liberty Street for a fall 2026 opening. As I reported in January, Metro Times broke the news of the expansion in December 2025, describing a 1,500-square-foot storefront and quoting chef Max Sussman on the Ann Arbor location as a return to the city where he ran Bev's as a pop-up in 2020, before building the business into a fixture of Detroit's Core City neighborhood. No exact opening day has been confirmed since that report.

The Bagels

Axios Detroit's coverage of the original Core City shop describes the production method as hand-shaped, refrigerated overnight, boiled, and baked. That overnight cold retard is what separates a real bagel from a dinner roll with a hole in it: the slow fermentation builds the dense, chewy interior a same-day dough can't produce, and the boil sets the shiny, taut crust before the oven ever gets involved. None of that is a shortcut. It's also not fast, which is part of why dedicated bagel shops are rarer than cafes that happen to sell bagels.

Menu specifics for the Ann Arbor location haven't been announced. The Core City shop's board is built around the standards, plain, sesame, poppy, salt, onion, alongside a rotating special. Whether that structure carries over exactly is one of the open questions the actual opening will answer.

The Block

The location is not an accident. 115 East Liberty sits between Spencer, which USA Today named to its 2026 Restaurants of the Year list, and RoosRoast, one of Ann Arbor's longest-running independent coffee roasters. This is one of the stronger food blocks in the city, and a 1,500-square-foot bagel shop fits neatly into it. A morning bagel, a RoosRoast coffee, and a walk through Kerrytown could become a real Saturday circuit once the doors open.

The space is planned for counter service and takeaway: order, wait, get your bagels, sit or go. That format matches how the Core City shop runs. Nobody goes to a bagel shop for the room.

What Took So Long

Ann Arbor has sold bagels for decades. Grocery stores stock them, bakeries offer them, cafes put them on the menu. But a shop where bagels are the entire point, boiled and shaped rather than shipped in frozen, has not existed here in recent memory. A cafe selling bagels among twenty other items has little incentive to run a full boil-and-bake process on every batch. A dedicated bagel shop doesn't have that option.

The Takeaway

The Liberty Street corridor, Spencer, RoosRoast, and soon Bev's, is shaping up to be one of the better food blocks in the county. Once an exact date lands, it will be worth the walk.

Bev's Bagels is planned for 115 E Liberty St, Ann Arbor. Originally from Core City, Detroit. Confirm opening status and hours through the shop's own announcements before visiting.