Sunday Bagels, Southern Style

Andrew Vallone and Lizzy Lamarche didn’t set out to build a business. Then people started lining up for their handmade sourdough bagels.

Written by Lena Anderson   |  Photographed by Joe Worthem

On a busy, buzzy Saturday morning inside the Oxford Creamery on the Square, the line for Sunday Bagels is long. Luckily for hungry customers, the line moves quickly, and the smell of freshly baked bagels reminds them the wait will be worth it.

For owners Andrew Vallone and Lizzy Lamarche, it’s still a little hard to believe how far and how fast Sunday Bagels has come. What began about a year ago as a simple Sunday morning ritual between the couple and their friends has grown into a full-fledged business producing 700 to 800 bagels a day.

But Sunday Bagels didn’t start with a breakfast pastry: it started with pizza. Vallone, who grew up around the restaurant industry with his Sicilian family, got a pizza oven and began experimenting with sourdough pizza. That led to more dough experiments, and eventually he decided to try his hand at bagels.

He brought a test batch to Lamarche and her roommates. They were a big hit.

Soon, Sundays became bagel days. Friends would gather while Vallone made bagels and Lamarche put together a big cream cheese board and toppings. More friends started showing up. Eventually someone suggested they make an Instagram account.

Lamarche created the account and designed the logo around Vallone’s dog, Remi, who remains part of the Sunday Bagels branding.

A sorority sister with a small food-review account came for bagels one Sunday and posted a video that racked up about 25,000 views. Within hours, Sunday Bagels went from roughly 200 Instagram followers to about 1,000. Soon, strangers were showing up at the apartment to pick up orders.

Eventually, Vallone’s roommate walked out of his bedroom, looked around at the unfamiliar  faces, and asked, “Hey, who are these people?”

That’s when they knew they had outgrown the apartment.

With advice from Oxford chef and mentor Corbin Evans, Vallone reached out about getting into the farmers market. Oxford City Market director Betsy Chapman welcomed them in, and on March 17, their first market day, they arrived with about 70 bagels and low expectations.

Instead, roughly 150 people lined up before the market even opened. They sold out in less than an hour.

After several months at the market, and with demand continuing to grow, it became clear: They needed a commercial kitchen. That led them to Andy O’Brien at Oxford Creamery, who offered them unused space. They signed a one-year lease and opened shop on Aug. 27.

The move came with its own growing pains, including a malfunctioning oven that forced a temporary closure. But they were back up and running just in time to feed hungry football fans for LSU weekend. By then, they had learned that scaling up meant protecting what made Sunday Bagels special in the first place.

The bagels themselves are intentionally a little different. Sunday Bagels uses naturally leavened sourdough with no commercial yeast and high-quality flour that costs more but produces the flavor and texture Vallone wants.

They’re very clear that they aren't trying to make a traditional bagel. Vallone describes theirs as closer to a fluffy dinner roll. The dough is still boiled and baked like a traditional bagel, but instead of rolling it into a rope and wrapping it around the hand, they shape it like a small dumpling, let it proof, and then poke the hole through the center.

A New Yorker might object. They’re okay with that.

“We’re making a Mississippi bagel,” Vallone said, laughing.

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And these Mississippi bagels are rolled by hand, every single day. That means getting to the shop around 3:30 a.m. to get started. It’s a demanding schedule for even the most seasoned business owner. Still, for Vallone and Lamarche, both recent Ole Miss graduates in their early 20s, it also means living a lifestyle that looks pretty different from most of their friends. While others might be out late on a Friday night, they’re usually thinking about an early Saturday morning at the shop.

The work has grown beyond the two of them. Sunday Bagels now employs eight people, including some customers who were there from the beginning.

The menu stays relatively simple, with plain, salt, everything, cinnamon sugar and cheddar bagels forming the foundation. And Lamarche leads the schmears, dreaming up flavors such as a fully loaded version with bacon, chives, cheddar and jalapeño. She also created a chocolate chip banana bread schmear that became a crowd favorite.

Since the opening of the storefront, they no longer sell at the Oxford City Market. Still, they remain regular customers and try to incorporate locally purchased ingredients whenever they can, especially seasonal fruit such as strawberries and peaches in their schmears.

“There’s nothing like this in Oxford,” Lamarche said.

For now, that may be exactly the point. Sunday Bagels filled a gap they saw in Oxford: a handmade, naturally leavened bagel that wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t.

The next chapter for Sunday Bagels may involve more space, bagel sandwiches and eventually a restaurant of their own. Their ideal setup sounds almost too good to be true: bagels in the morning, pizza at night.

It would bring the business full circle, back to the sourdough pizza that started it all.

The young entrepreneurs also dream of pop-ups, outdoor dinners and eventually expanding into other college towns, particularly SEC communities where they see the same gap they found in Oxford.

But for now, Lamarche is just appreciating what’s happening right in front of them.

“We get to look at each other, when the store is packed, and everyone’s smiling, and eating a product that we put out, and we’re like, yeah, this is really cool,” she said.