Jeremy Rhodes and Ali Chetkof Rhodes started Moonrise Bagels after an experiment in their kitchen turned into a business selling bagels stuffed with entire meals. The couple had moved from New York City to Woodstock, New York, during the pandemic, and Jeremy had taken up baking bread and bagels while working from home. On New Year’s Eve in 2020, he was preparing pizza for dinner and had leftover tomato sauce. He wondered whether he could put the pizza ingredients inside a bagel rather than on top of it.
The first attempt needed work, but Jeremy kept experimenting with the dough and fillings. He tried other familiar foods, including Buffalo chicken, eggplant parmesan and bacon, egg and cheese. The fillings were enclosed inside the dough before the bagels were boiled and baked. He and Ali shared the results with family and friends, then began posting photographs on Instagram. People soon started asking whether they could buy them.
The couple had met years earlier in New York City, where they had built careers in different parts of the hospitality and consumer industries. Jeremy was an accountant who spent seven years at Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, eventually becoming a director of accounting. His work involved financial planning and operations for restaurants. Ali grew up in Woodstock and spent about 15 years in public relations and brand marketing, including work with fashion companies and consumer startups. Neither had planned to open a bagel shop.
They began selling small batches from their Woodstock apartment in the spring of 2021. Demand quickly exceeded what they could make at home, so they arranged pop-up sales at local businesses. Those events sold out as well. A nearby sandwich shop eventually approached the couple about taking over its lease, giving them an opportunity to open a permanent location.
Jeremy and Ali took out a bank loan and opened their first Moonrise Bagels shop on Tinker Street in Woodstock in December 2021. They handled much of the early work themselves, learning how to operate a retail food business while producing bagels that required more preparation than conventional varieties. Jeremy left his accounting career to work on Moonrise full time in 2022, while Ali kept her public relations job and helped build the business. She joined him full time in 2024.
The menu grew from the original pizza bagel to include combinations such as pastrami Reuben, chicken parmesan and Philly cheesesteak. The couple chose the name Moonrise to reflect their idea that bagels could be eaten throughout the day rather than mainly at breakfast. Each stuffed bagel was intended to serve as a meal, with the filling baked directly into the dough.
As demand increased, the Woodstock kitchen became too small to support further growth. The couple opened a second shop in Poughkeepsie in July 2024, choosing a space with substantially more room for production. The new location also served as a central kitchen, preparing bagels for the other shops and for orders shipped to customers across the country. Moonrise added a takeout location in Kingston later that year and began reaching customers well beyond the Hudson Valley through nationwide shipping.
The business gained wider attention through television appearances and food events. Moonrise won the Most Creative award at the 2024 New York BagelFest, and its stuffed bagels drew interest from customers who had encountered the brand online. By 2025, the couple had sold more than 100,000 bagels.
Jeremy and Ali brought Moonrise back to New York City in December 2025, opening a shop in Greenwich Village. The location drew lines of customers during its opening months. The business also expanded its delivery service, adding hundreds of bagel orders each week through DoorDash.
By late 2026, Moonrise had sold more than 250,000 stuffed bagels. Its three shops in Woodstock, Poughkeepsie and Manhattan were supported by the larger production kitchen in Poughkeepsie, while nationwide shipping gave customers outside New York a way to order the bagels.
