By Arvind Dilawar
Photographs by Sabrina Eberhard

In the depths of the lockdown following the outbreak of COVID-19, Jeremy Rhodes found solace in the same source as so many others: sourdough starter. Baking for the holidays in 2020, Rhodes was left with spare ingredients for both pizza and bagels, inspiring him to experiment. He stuffed bagel dough with pizza sauce, attempting to put a new spin on Bagel Bites, a childhood favorite. The results, however, were nothing to write home about.

“It didn’t quite work,” recalls his wife, Ali Chetkof Rhodes, with a laugh. “He just became obsessed with trying to make it work, trying to get the sauce to stay in the bagel.”

Rhodes continued to experiment with stuffed bagels, and soon a new sensation was on the rise. With Moonrise Bagels, he and Chetkof Rhodes now offer more than a half dozen varieties of stuffed bagels from three storefronts in the Hudson Valley, including one in Poughkeepsie, as well as delivery nationwide.

Chetkof Rhodes and Rhodes, originally from the Hudson Valley and Long Island respectively, met in New York City, where she was a publicist for fashion companies and he was an accountant in the restaurant industry. At the onset of COVID, the couple retreated to Chetkof Rhodes’
hometown of Woodstock, filling the hours between remote work with cooking and social media.

After pizza sauce, Rhodes experimented with stuffing bagels with other comfort foods, such as buffalo chicken, eggplant parmesan, pastrami reuben, and bacon, egg and cheese. He documented the results on Instagram. The couple was already sharing the bagels with family and friends when someone expressed interest in purchasing them.

“We came up with the name Moonrise Bagels because we really wanted something that evoked eating bagels at all times of the day,” Chetkof Rhodes explains. “People think of bagels as just breakfast, so we thought of Moonrise Bagels as a way to say, ‘You can eat a stuffed bagel from
sunrise to moonrise.’”

Moonrise Bagels’ first foray outside of the couple’s apartment was a pop-up at a local bakery, where they sold out instantly. Rhodes continued baking in their kitchen until a sandwich shop across the street reached out about taking over their lease. So in December 2021, Moonrise Bagels opened its first storefront, in Woodstock. In July 2024, they opened another, in Poughkeepsie, which also serves as their commissary kitchen and where they produce for all three locations—Kingston opened in October of 2024—as well as for delivery nationwide.

Rhodes left his accounting career to focus on Moonrise Bagels full-time in 2022 and Chetkof Rhodes followed in 2024. Today, he continues to handle the businesses’ back-of-house production and accounting, while she deals with front-of-house service and marketing. The experiments also continue, albeit under the more professional purview of “research and development,” which continues to have hits and misses.

“We had a team member who made hamburger bagels with bacon and blue cheese,” Chetkof Rhodes recalls with a laugh. “That was not a big seller.” — moonrisebagels.com