‘Thanks for all the yummy memories!’ SLO County bagel shops close after 20 years
After more than two decades in business, Broadway Bagel has shut the doors of both its beloved bagel shops in San Luis Obispo County.
A sign posted to the window of Broadway Bagel’s Arroyo Grande location on Grand Avenue notified customers that owner Sally Lauringson was retiring.
The Arroyo Grande location closed Christmas Eve, while a second Broadway Bagel, located in the Pismo Coast Shopping Plaza in Pismo Beach, closed on Dec. 6.
“It was a really special project for us,” Lauringson told The Tribune on Thursday. “We loved it, and it was just time to move on.”
“People don’t understand this unless you’re in the restaurant business — you can’t plan anything,” she said. “Twenty-three years, that’s a lot. I was just ready to retire.”
How SLO County bagel shops began
Lauringson began Broadway Bagel in Arroyo Grande in 1996, selling New York-style bagels out of a renovated pizza shop.
What was her inspiration for the business? “I ate a bagel every day,” she said with a laugh.
Lauringson opened the Pismo Beach location about three years after the first, offering the same menu of bagels, sandwiches, soups, smoothies and coffees already growing in popularity at the Arroyo Grande location.
“I had a lot of fun,” she said, looking back on her 23 years in business. “I was in my early 40s (when it opened), but I was so young. I was so young.”
“It was a lot of fun,” she added after a pause.
Soon after the sign was posted on the Arroyo Grande Broadway Bagel’s window in December, fans began to flock to Yelp to declare their love of the businesses.
“Gonna miss you!” wrote one reviewer. “Thanks for all the yummy memories!”
“What are we gonna do without you?” another wrote. “You were my bagel fix. You will be missed.”
Broadway Bagel business ‘made people happy’
Lauringson described the final days of the business as “a madhouse.”
“It was really hard, really emotional,” she said, noting that, during its final two weeks, people flocked to the Grande Avenue restaurant in droves. “We had a constant line in the dining room because people were lined up down the sidewalk. It went like that for six or seven hours, and the drive-through wrapped around too.”
At one point on the final day, Broadway had to block off the drive-through and shut the front door to stop people from coming in, she said.
“It was really wonderful,” she said of the community response.
In a lengthy public Facebook post on Dec. 24, Lauringson’s son, Garrett Lauringson, shared some of his favorite memories of his mother’s business.
“Unknown to most is the fact that I don’t think either of my parents had any restaurant experience before diving into this venture with both feet,” he wrote. “That very naivety, their work ethic and determination is probably what helped them push through the difficult times, and establish a business that served you and provided for our family all these years.”
Garrett Lauringson recalled both his parents working up to 80 hours a week for several years running the businesses, and how he and his brother also pitched in to lend a helping hand.
He also noted that, at its peak, Broadway Bagel served almost 1,000 families a day.
“I wouldn’t understand (until) later into my 20s of what my parents had created,” he wrote. “A business that ultimately made people happy every single day of the week, one that people formed traditions around — whether it was a customer who had been there since day one, or a family that would come there every weekend after church.”
Moving forward, Sally Lauringson said, she and her husband plan to travel more and enjoy time with their grandchildren.
Lauringson said the devotion of customers and employees she had over the years will be her favorite memory as she goes into the next phase of her life, post-retirement.
Asked what she’d like to tell everyone, she said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I couldn’t have done it by myself.”
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