Hexagon Bagels Brings New York Style and Texture to North Adams
Hexagon bagels are round, delicious, and beloved at Berkshire markets. Now they have a home.
Hexagon Bagels is going from sold-out stalls at the North Adams Farmers’ Market to a full-service cafe on Main Street, bringing baked goods, lunchtime fare, and their now-legendary bagels downtown later this month.
“It’s already way bigger than I expected it to be and the response has been pretty overwhelming,” says Patrick Lang, who runs Hexagon with his husband, Nicholas Rigger. “I feel really lucky to have found something I enjoy doing that people respond to with pure joy.”
It’s hard to find a good bagel in the Berkshires, especially up north; that’s just an unfortunate truth. These bagels are different. They are naturally leavened and hand-rolled, making them just the right balance of chewy and crunchy, a feast for the senses preferred by bagel snobs and casuals everywhere. They’re more New York than Montreal, dense and bready.
Nicholas Rigger and Patrick Lang ready their new cafe space.
Shaping Up
Made with local ingredients, the bagels can be paired with flavored cream cheese that includes ingredients like scallions, sundried tomatoes, and Rigger’s own chile crisp. Some of the accoutrements, like flavored raw sea salt and cinnamon, are rolled on the outside of the bagel, rather than incorporated into the dough.
There will be bagels, but also breakfast sandwiches and light lunch fare. Hexagon’s farmers’ market stall traditionally offers a bagel and schmear with special add-ins, plus scones and sometimes breakfast sandwiches replete with veggies and other ingredients sourced from local farms they’ve befriended. They incorporate special seasonal crops like ramps and beets, and made it onto Boston.com’s list of the best bagels in Massachusetts, notably the only Berkshire establishment listed.
And, if you were wondering, yes, the bagels are round. The two named Hexagon after a small, six-sided vegetable farm they ran together in western Wisconsin before Covid led them back to the Berkshires. Lang grew up in Great Barrington, and has roots in farming and food production; he started his career at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project.
You can see the chew.
The couple wanted to build a life where they could work together rather than balance separate demanding work schedules. Lang had been baking part-time and at home, but a visit to a biscuit-themed restaurant in Georgia opened both their eyes to a new way forward in their lives. “We started thinking about how our concept would work in the North,” Lang says.
They try to use the best local ingredients possible. “The bagels are very lean—they’re flour, water, and not much else,” said Rigger. “It’s about choosing ingredients really well.”
In three years, they’ve tried lots of flour from different small mills. “The resulting product is so different based on what you carefully choose,” Lang says.
Lang and Rigger started Hexagon at the farmers’ market in June of 2023, and sold out of product on day one (they also sell baked goods like light, flavorful scones). Their popularity grew from there, and saw the duo testing other markets and working on a preorder system, which is currently on hold as they build the restaurant. During farmers’ market season this year, Long and Rigger were rolling, boiling, and baking 3,000 bagels a month.
After Bailey’s Bakery closed earlier this year, the owners reached out to the couple to see if they were interested in taking over the space at 55 Main Street. They jumped at the chance. “It really is a special space,” Lang says. “There are options for us to build the things that will actually work for us.”
From Market Tent to Storefront
Scaling up a food business can be a tricky process. Lang and Rigger currently bake at the kitchen at Red Shirt Farm in Lanesborough, which has them commuting around 25 minutes to make their 3,000 bagels while balancing the renovation of the new space. “All the other time outside of bagel making is this,” Lang says. (Now that the market season is drawing to a close, they’re fully focused on getting the restaurant open.)
They’ll be adding brand new commercial kitchen equipment, including a giant walk-in cooler, and are creating a workspace that will meet the demand of their established and new fans. “We’re really excited to buy much more local produce,” says Rigger. “There’s only so much we can do without a dedicated kitchen. It’s hard to buy 60 pounds of Full Well Farm tomatoes and do something worthwhile with them while short on processing space.”
Nicholas Rigger shows off the goods.
The dining space is getting a facelift, too. A tall partition that blocked the ceiling-high arched windows that look onto Main Street is already gone, filling the narrow space with light. The old counter has been fully re-stained and sealed, a cool black-and-white tile floor from decades ago has been resurrected, and a new to-go window counter will soon be installed. There’s a chalkboard wall for displaying menu info and an old church pew from Hexagon’s first baking kitchen at All Saints Church has been repurposed as seating. Accessibility upgrades have also been made, replacing an awkward one-stair entryway with an open ramp.
“We started wanting to provide something to people, something food-based, community based, that they could feel warmly about,” Lang says. “Building that was the goal.”
