Rise Bagels

In the restaurant world, the old maxim that “when one door closes, another opens” tends to be both true and observable – the key people from one restaurant frequently move to others, starting or staffing new concepts soon after existing old ones. Rise Bagels is a prime example, founded by the chef-owner behind Costa Mesa brunch spots Tableau and Toast, the former closed in 2025 and the latter remaining only in a second Tustin location. Rather than duplicating these full-service places, Rise presents as a simple counter service bagel shop with canned and bottled drinks, a small kitchen, and seat-yourself tables for roughly 25 people inside. Doors down from Fat of the Land and sharing a validated parking garage with Izakaya Osen and Sol Mexican Cocina, Rise first dropped jaws locally by offering luxe $20 bagel sandwiches – somewhat shocking even by Orange County standards – then won “Best of the West” and “Most Creative” awards at Bagelfest West, an annual industry event focused on bagels.

The non-descript bagel-shaped trophy now sits on a shelf next to the front counter along with plushes, merch, and gourmet ingredients, roughly across the dining room floor from a painting of a bagel-eating Kim Jong Un. Besides a cash register, the counter has cloches for cookies, a small refrigerated display with chilled cake slices and drinks, and bagel and special sandwich samples. Show up during busy times and you may find a line out the door, as we did on our first visit, though there were only a few people ahead of us on our second visit, and none at night: Rise is notably closed after 2pm each day, and doesn’t open on Sundays, seemingly catering largely to people who work and live immediately nearby.

Rise’s early menu was arguably too cute for its own good. When we arrived soon after the October 2025 opening to check it out, open-face bagels like One Fish ($20, salmon), Two Fish ($23, adding roe), and Pokemon ($24, poke with tuna/imitation crab/tobiko roe) were placed right at the top of the menu, next to closed-faced sandwiches Get Jjigae With It ($18, bulgogi), For the Nguyen ($17, basically a smaller version of a $7 THH banh mi), and McDeez ($16, sausage/egg/cheese with hash browns). In a cheffy touch that customers frequently find off-putting, the menu’s very first words after “Rise Bagels” were “We politely decline all modifications. Thank you for understanding!”

While one could find $6.50 schmear or peanut butter and jelly bagels at Rise if you looked for them, the message conveyed by the menu was that Rise was a pretentious place serving basic fusion food. That wasn’t our problem with the place. On our first attempt to visit, almost all of the bagels had something we didn’t want and couldn’t ask to remove, and the banh mi-style bagel one of us wanted (without modifications) was unavailable to order. So we left without trying anything, and didn’t plan to return.

At some point in 2026, the menu changed. The “politely decline” language was moved to the page’s bottom and rephrased to limit “alterations and substitutions;” unwanted items can be left off. Single bagel and schmear combinations – still $6.50 each – were moved to the top of the page, with similarly affordable specials ($8 to $12) near the bottom, bookending more affordable open- and closed-face bagel sandwiches. Names changed, too: Pokemon became “Poke” and dropped to $18, Get Jjigae With It was renamed KBBQ and fell to $16, and One Fish downscaled to “Lox” and now starts at $19. In other words, the $20+ bagel sandwiches are kind of gone, along with the $17 banh mi-alike, but Rise is still focusing mostly on $14+ options.