Townie Bagels: Palm Springs' Best Bagels Worth the Wait

Townie Bagels has been water-boiling bagels in Palm Springs since 2015, and it’s built a following that stretches well past the Coachella Valley’s borders.

Andy Wysocki and Bill Sanderson are the co-founders. Wysocki spent months working through dough variations in his home kitchen before they opened. Neither of them had run a cafe before Townie. That’s the kind of detail that should be a warning sign, but over a decade in, the shop has done more than survive. It’s become one of the most talked-about bagel destinations in Southern California, which is a different category of achievement entirely.

The space is a single room with a patio out front. Most mornings you’ll walk into a line. Don’t panic. It turns over fast, and once you’re standing outside in the desert morning with something warm in your hand, the wait doesn’t feel like anything at all.

The bagel list is longer than you’d expect. Plain, sesame, apple cranberry, Asiago, everything, sourdough. That sourdough round earns its spot at the top of the order for most regulars. It’s got a genuine crackle on the outside and enough tang on the inside that you can tell the fermentation actually means something here. Not decorative sourness. The real thing. The bacon cheddar bialy rotates the format entirely, and Eater LA’s full review calls it a standout specifically because it breaks from what you’d expect to order at a bagel shop.

Serious.

The Feingold is a full commitment: egg, bacon, sausage, and ham, stacked on whatever bagel you want. It’s a lot. It holds together. For the Sunday morning New York deli experience, the Lox Works is the right call. Lox, cream cheese, tomato, onions, capers. The capers aren’t buried under the rest of it. The brine-to-cream-cheese ratio is calibrated in a way that a lot of West Coast shops can’t seem to get right, and Townie does it without making a fuss about it.

Cream cheese options run wide. Alongside the standards, you can get vegan cream cheese, peanut butter, strawberry jelly, and a maple cream cheese that the Canadian [snowbird retirees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbird_(person) who winter in the valley seem to have collectively claimed as their own. The non-bagel section won’t surprise anyone who’s been watching Wysocki and Sanderson think through their customer base: sourdough loaves, baguettes, and a pasta with red sauce sitting in the takeaway fridge for the drive back to L.A. That pasta isn’t an afterthought. It’s a signal that the people running Townie are paying attention to what their customers actually need on a Sunday afternoon heading west on the 10.

I talked to a woman at the counter on a recent morning who makes the trip out from the Westside specifically for this place. “Every February,” she said. “I book my hotel around it.”

That’s 9 words. They carry a lot of weight.

The dining room runs at the pace Palm Springs runs at: unrushed, comfortable, easy. It’s the kind of place where you can scroll through your phone over a second cup of coffee without anyone hovering, or stretch a breakfast out long enough that you lose the thread of what time it is. The patio is where people-watching actually gets good. The crowd shifts across the morning from [snowbird retirees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbird_(person) doing their slow lap of the desert season to younger visitors who drove in from somewhere in the basin and are now sitting with their shoes off, bagels in hand, looking like they don’t have anywhere to be.

Townie opened in 2015 without a template. It’s now the template.