This Bagel Shop Is a Wes Anderson Movie Come to Life

You go to Sadelle's for out of this world babka and bagels, but you stay for the old-fashioned vibes—the bagel swords, the toile patterning—made possible by expertly executed design.


Has a man wearing a white butcher’s frock and an origami deli hat ever pulled a fresh bagel off a wooden “sword” for you? Has your supremely flaky, chocolate-y babka ever been delivered to you in a box lined with cheeky toile patterning? And has your lox ever arrived to your table perched atop a silver tiered tray worthy of a traditional English afternoon tea?

If you answered yes to those questions, it’s a good bet you’ve been to Sadelle’s, the new New York deli from the Major Food Group. We’re dazzled by those whimsical design flourishes, and wanted to know how those kooky ideas became reality.

Sadelle’s look came about when Bay Area designer Ken Fulk got a call from Jeff Zalaznick, managing partner at Major Food Group. As Fulk remembers it, Zalaznick said, “We have an idea for a place. We have name, it’s called Sadelle’s, and we have a woman who’s going to make the best bagels in the world.”

Quite a claim for a newcomer to a city that bills itself as the bagel capital of the world, but Fulk believed if anyone could do it, it would be the team behind Carbone and Parm. “What they do really well is take things we, especially New Yorkers, have fondness for—Italian-American food from the ’50s, for example—and blow it out of the water,” he says.

The ideas were there, but what Major Food didn’t have down pat was the design. That’s where Fulk came in. “They love the theatricality of food and performance, so it was a good fit for me,” he says. “They wanted to take something that had the prettiness of a confectionary patisserie and mix it with the love of a New York deli.”

So Fulk and his team got to work.

There’s a touch of Wes Anderson to the whole affair. Both Fulk and Lesley Johnson (who’s also drawn the lettering and signage for other Major Food restaurants such as SantinaDirty French, and Parm) compares everything from the signage to the outfits of Sadelle’s staffers to that of Mendl’s, the fictitious bakery from Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Fulk designed the baby-blue to-go babka boxes with Mendl’s in mind—down to the pastel colors and the clean-line bordering. Much of it was inspired by the often lively colors that pop up in deli food—”the sesame that lives on the bagel, the cream cheese getting spread on the bagel, the crazy pink of fresh-cut salmon or lox, and that perfectly bright green undertone of chives.” Sure, the outside of the box is delightful, but it’s what’s inside the box that’s really dazzling, he seems to be saying.

To drive that home, lining the boxes (and decorating the take-out bags) is a white-and-green line-drawn toile. “There’s folly and whimsy to it that adds a bit of playfulness,” Fulk says. The pattern, replete with coffee pots, bagel sticks, and fish, “provides that fussy, old-school feel that’s not modern, but yet is,” he says. “It’s the perfect foil for everything, and adds texture.”

Rafael Arana, who works at Fulk’s interior-design firm, was the artist behind the line drawings. When he drew them, he didn’t know they’d be landing on boxes at a restaurant, but he’s happy to know they did. “When I was in college, I just started doodling with pens. You can’t blend too much because of the ink, so I developed a style where lines and lifework create dimensions,” Arana says. “I’m just happy to have my artwork out there.”

One of the more dramatic design ideas came about as a solution for a purely practical problem: Where would they keep the bagels? A nixed proposal planned for a row of tubes to hold the bagels behind the counter, but it was too expensive and impractical, so bagel tubes went the way of the pickle-shaped topiary, another wacky idea that never came to fruition. (Fulk settled for pickle barrels instead.) So Fulk decided to make use of bagels’ defining attribute: their holes.

Now staffers can carry around a dozen or more of the bread rings at a time on wooden dowels, or “swords.” “We had an idea that there would be an area where we could have a sort of bagel theater with the swords and people yelling ‘Hot bagels!'” Fulk says. “It’s a celebration.” Because sometimes you want a bagel and schmear from the nearest no-frills corner store—and the rest of the time, you want the works.