I wanted to hate Maryland’s newest bagel shop. They made me a believer.

If I’m being honest, I headed over to Maryland’s first PopUp Bagels location yesterday ready to be a hater.

We take our bagels seriously in Montgomery County. See: The Banner’s blind-bagel-ranking last year that, to put it mildly, prompted many passionate comments on social media.

Could a viral bagel chain famous for its rotating cast of inventive schmears and its “grip, rip and dip” method of chowing down on a bagel — no sliced-open bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches in sight on the menu — really survive in a town and county of bagel snobs?

Founded in Westport, Connecticut, by Adam Goldberg in 2021, PopUp Bagels has since expanded to nearly 50 locations including in New York, Washington, D.C., and Texas. It’s garnered a cult following, and even made The New York Times’ list of the best bagels in New York City.

The first Maryland location, at 7607 Old Georgetown Rd. near the Bethesda Metro stop, officially opens Friday at 7 a.m. Elsewhere in the area, an Arlington, Virginia, storefront is coming soon, and the franchise has its eye on a couple more potential capital region locations in the coming months, PopUp Bagels regional partner Brian Harrington told The Banner.

It initially felt easy to dismiss this private equity-backed trendy shop as the breakfast equivalent of a corporate slop bowl. The eatery is tailor-made for thumb-stopping TikTok videos and Instagram stories, which doesn’t usually translate into a top-tier dining experience. The fact that their business model of enticing customers to return weekly with new schmear flavor drops, much like the buzzy and polarizing Crumbl Cookies, didn’t give me much hope, either.

Instead, my first PopUp Bagels experience turned me into a fan.

The bagels, made in-house, were surprisingly solid: great color and sheen with micro-blistering on the outside and a pleasing chew inside. It takes a lot for me to be satisfied by trying a completely plain bagel, but I would gladly reach for another.

That said, the perk of ordering plain bagels is the breadth of schmear options you can sample. The permanent menu features plain and scallion cream cheeses and salted and brown sugar cinnamon butters. Every two weeks, new limited-edition schmears join the lineup, which currently includes chocolate chip banana bread, tangerine dream butter and a Bethesda-exclusive Chesapeake-spiced (Old Bay) cream cheese.

One employee tried to convince me that an everything bagel worked with the brown sugar cinnamon butter. I tried it in the name of journalism, but can’t say I recommend anyone follow suit. You’re better off sticking to plain bagels for the sweet schmears and saving the everything, salt, poppy and sesame bagels for the scallion cream cheese.

PopUp recommends ripping and dipping while the bagels are hot, straight out of the bag. It’s worth noting that there’s no indoor seating in the small store — just two small neon orange highboys outside and a bench closer to the curb. If casual outdoor dining isn’t your jam, don’t fear: I had another few bites a few hours later after returning home and the bagels still held up well.

One caveat: This place isn’t cheap. I got a half dozen, which included one schmear of my choosing. That amounted to $24. I added another four schmears ($8 each) to get the full PopUp experience, which brought my total to a whopping $46 for six bagels and five schmears.

For comparison, a half-dozen bagels and one container of cream cheese at other bagel shops in the area are considerably lower: $14.50 at Goldberg’s New York Bagels, $18.50 at Bethesda Bagels, and between $18-$22 at Call Your Mother, depending on the schmear.

This may be a bagel-saturated area (less than two weeks ago, Call Your Mother opened a Bethesda location just a seven-minute walk away) but the ripping and dipping and novelty schmears place PopUp Bagels into a league of its own.

It won’t replace my visits to more traditional, locally-owned bagel shops. I’d struggle to decide where it fits within The Banner’s bagel rankings in Montgomery County — or maybe I’m just scared of angering Reddit again. It just feels like its own, separate thing.

It’s like — and I mean this in the best way — Domino’s Pizza. If I want pizza, I never mean I want Domino’s. But every once in a while when I’m in the mood for Domino’s? There’s nothing better.