Taste

Bodega Bagel finds a permanent home in Henderson

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Brisket and eggs, matzo ball soup and the Lower East Side from Bodega Bagel
Photo: Wade Vandervort

Are you a Downtown foodie who found your new favorite bagel in Las Vegas at Sonia El-Nawal’s Bodega Bagel pop-up at Vegas Test Kitchen last year? Or does your devotion go back further, to when the Libyan-born, Lebanon-raised chef transformed her Rooster Boy Cafe in Desert Shores into a pick-up bagel and pastry shop during the uncertain times of 2020?

Guess what? El-Nawal has been boiling and baking bagels for much longer.

Chef and owner Sonia El-Nawal holds a photo of herself at age 27 in Brussels, Belgium.

“In 1992-93, I had a coffee shop in Belgium, and that’s when I started making bagels. It’s a process I’ve been working on for years,” she says.

That process intensified when El-Nawal lived and worked in New York City, which inspired the Bodega Bagel concept that has blossomed from that popular pop-up to a full-fledged brick-and-mortar restaurant, which opened this month near St. Rose Dominican Hospital on Eastern Avenue, in partnership with the Lev Group.

“When the pandemic hit and I closed Rooster Boy as a seated restaurant, it became a store, and [bagels] really took off,” El-Nawal explains. “But I already knew I wanted to open Bodega Bagel and had been planning it in my head. That’s how it happens for me: I start feeling what I want to do and what the brand should be.”

The brand is a bagel shop that has other really good things for lunch, not a Jewish deli per se but certainly an ideal place for egg salad or a pastrami sandwich or latkes.

“I’m so excited to see the vision come to life, to make a place that feels and tastes like New York,” El-Nawal says. “It just has great energy.”

Her popular shakshouka from Rooster Boy—eggs baked in a spicy tomato sauce—will return to action along with other signatures like brisket and eggs, challah French toast, a chopped chef salad and the Decker Special sandwich with house-cured gravlax plus the classic combo of cream cheese, tomato, red onion and capers.

El-Nawal essentially wants you to come for breakfast and grab something to take home for lunch, like hot or cold borscht, mushroom barley soup or the Hudson River whitefish salad sandwich. And she’s just as excited about the cute merch, the beer and wine list and the La Colombe coffee as she is about the food.

But it mostly comes down to the bagels, and El-Nawal always has enjoyed making them. Despite the wonderful culinary evolution in this and most other Valley neighborhoods, amazing bagels are still hard to find.

“For me, it’s the recipe of the dough, and the way they are shaped. It makes a huge difference when they’re artisanal and hand-shaped, as opposed to machine-made,” she says. “It’s the attention to detail. I really love making bagels. It’s such a satisfying thing, and when you eat one, it’s always, Damn, this is pretty good. And you’re happy.”

BODEGA BAGEL 10075 S. Eastern Ave., 702-527-7663, bodegabagel.com. Tuesday-Sunday, 7 a.m.-3 p.m.

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Tags: Dining, Food
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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of managing editor at Las Vegas Weekly ...

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