 "Photo: TH EREVIEW/ Andy Bowden")
As eggs cook on the grill and bagels are caked with cream cheese, hungry, hungover students anxiously anticipate their first meal of the day.
Newark Deli and Bagel has long been a fixture on Main Street and a student’s paradise. With that reputation in mind, I decided to check out what it’s like behind the scenes at Main Street’s busiest breakfast spot.
I walk into NDB at 7:30 a.m. Saturday and there is already a line six people deep. I am immediately greeted with the familiar smell of bacon, fresh dough and eggs.
It may only be a half hour after opening, but the place is already running like clockwork, with three people working the front and three chefs in back.
Stacks of dyed green bagels line the shelves and students dressed in green shirts, clover earrings and green beaded necklaces gather around — it is NDB’s second busiest day of the year, “unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day.
I stand around waiting for my turn to get behind the counter: I watch one student employee bring in a bowl of lettuce, another spread cream cheese on a bagel and one more run the finished egg orders from the griddle to the front. There is a rhythm to the chaos.
Junior Kathleen Hackett arrives for work at 9:00 a.m., soaked from the pounding rain outside. She quickly takes off her coat, invites me in back and gets to work.
As busy as the waiting area is at NDB, the counter is even crazier. I follow Hackett back, dodging the aluminum-wrapped bagels and boxed sandwiches coming from the kitchen.
Hackett says on weekends, all 12 of the employees work, but on weekdays only three or four people come in. The baker who makes the bagels came in at 5:00 a.m. this morning to start baking.
On a day like today, NDB will sell several hundred-dozen bagels and reset each of the three cash registers five or six times, totaling somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 orders.
Hackett has been working here since October 2008, and although I find the behind-the-counter side of NDB frighteningly fast-paced, she tells me it’s easy to catch on.
Her co-worker, sophomore Neil Epstein, who has been working at NDB since the beginning of the semester, says it best.
"You just kind of get it done,” Epstein says.
Hackett shows me the kitchen — I always imagined 100 people throwing eggs on the grill to try to please all of the hungry students, but it turned out to be just one man and one grill.
Piled on top of the griddle were 10 eggs, four sausage patties, 50 strips of bacon and 12 bagels waiting on the side, and this is only at 9:00 a.m. Kathleen says when it’s really busy, order tickets will hang from the top of the grill to the floor.
“And then you get complaints from people asking where their food is,” Hackett says. “They say it’s been 20 minutes when it’s really been five. My boss has brought people back to look at the grill and said, ‘Stop, its coming.’”
Senior Nate States walks over — I recognize him immediately from my years of waiting in line at NDB. He is the student-proclaimed “NDB guy,” having worked 40 hours a week for the last three years.
He invites me over to the sandwich station to talk. I narrowly dodge a rack full of cinnamon-raisin bagels on the way over.
In between squeezing mayo onto bread and grabbing the lettuce and tomato to finish off signature sandwiches, he talks as if he’s not busy at all. He is relaxed and unphased by the movement around us.
States says he is actually more of a croissant-and-biscuit man and not a huge fan of bagels — but he still loves his job.
“I never regret coming to work,” States says. “It gives me a minute a day to interact with every person that comes to the University of Delaware.”
He claims has been working so long that he can now predict customer’s orders and has memorized the standard order for 100 to 150 regulars, he says.
He’s also seen some strange people and strange orders.
“There was once this guy who came in two days in a row he was in his 30s and the first day he was dressed as the tooth fairy and the next day he came dressed as a fluffy pink unicorn and gave me a bunch of 5-Hour Energy drinks,” he says.
Lately, States has been making a new breakfast sandwich: the cream cheese melt. Made with cream cheese and munster cheese on a bagel, he says it is the hot new item.
One of the most popular orders is what States has named “the sorority special:” chicken salad on a whole wheat bagel scooped out and toasted with lettuce and tomato, and served with a diet peach Snapple. He serves more than 400 of them a day, and says he has students now asking for them by the sandwich’s new nickname.
Hacket says working at NDB has some expected and unexpected perks and downsides.
“You smell like bacon and everything bagels for two days after working,” she says.
Conversely, you get to see some pretty funny things, States says.
“It’s great because NDB is a pit stop on the walk of shame,” he says. “I see [people] at their best when they go out and not their best the next morning.”
States says the job has made him very recognizable on campus as well. He says about a dozen times per night, people will tell him they know him from NDB. States has even been recognized in airports and around Philadelphia.
As I finish up the interview I can’t help but wonder how they do it all day — in the two hours I’ve been there no one has stopped moving, but still everyone seems happy as they talk, slice bagels and run orders.
“We’re really a team here,” States says.
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our feed
Contact us through email
2 comments