Daily Driver, the wood-fired bagel bakery and creamery that launched in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood in 2019, just announced it is closing down its two remaining locations.
In an Instagram post Sunday, Daily Driver’s owners announced that the business is shutting down after close of business Monday. Few details were provided about the closure, but, they say, “The model isn’t working,” and they promise “Exciting developments will be coming for the Dogpatch location under new ownership.”
A marriage of a cheesemaker, a creamery, and a bagel baker, Daily Driver opened in June 2019 at 2535 Third Street, offering wood-fired bagels that are not really Montreal-style in shape or texture, but unique among Bay Area bagels because of the wood-oven baking. The partners in the business were bagel baker David Kreitz, cheesemaker and wife of Kreitz, Hadley Kreitz, and Tamara Hicks and David Jablons, owners of Tomales Farmstead Creamery in West Marin.
In addition to bagels made fresh daily, Daily Driver uniquely aslo offered European-style butter, cream cheese, ricotta, and quark (a yogurt-like, German-style cheese) to accompany the bagels, along with coffee from Oakland-based Red Bay Coffee.
Within six months they were expanding with a quick-service location at the Ferry Building, and they also later opened locations at Ghirardelli Square and in Cow Hollow, which have since closed. The Cow Hollow location, which opened in the fall of 2023, lasted less than a year before closing in August.
Another kiosk location was planned for Crane Cove Park, and the Port of SF will apparently need to find a new vendor for that.
We don’t yet have information on the new takers for the Dogpatch space, but the owners said in their announcement that the existing staff at the bakery-cafe will stay on with jobs at the new restaurant, “which was extremely important to us.”
This marks the second casualty in SF’s recent bagel boom, after the quick demise of Midnite Bagel’s brick-and-mortar location in the Sunset, which opened and shut within four months in 2022. (Midnite Bakery continues on as a pop-up and granola purveyor.) A clear winner, so far, has been Boichik Bagels, which has opened two recent locations in SF with a third to come, in addition to having locations in Berkeley and Palo Alto. And Schlok’s Bagels & Lox continues going strong with their window on Fell near Divis.
Photo via Daily Driver/Instagram