By 9:30 on a Sunday morning at the Monroe Street Farmers' Market, the line at the Barrett's Bagels table already stretches past the honey stand. By 10:30, the trays are thinning. Some weeks, the last bagel is gone before the market's official close at 1 p.m., and the people who show up at noon leave with nothing but a promise to come earlier next Sunday.
That has been the rhythm on Monroe Street for three years. Ben Anderson started selling hand-rolled bagels under the name Barrett's Bagels in 2023, working out of a shared kitchen at Pasture and Plenty on Old University Avenue and setting up once a week at the market outside Edgewood High School. The scarcity was never a marketing trick. It was just the math of a one-person operation with one weekly outlet. This fall, that math changes. Anderson is opening a storefront at 3742 Speedway Road, and the six-day wait between bagels is going away for good.
Three Years of Sundays Built the Demand
The name itself is a small piece of Monroe Street history now. Barrett is Anderson's middle name, his mother's maiden name, and the first name of his young son, who was an infant when the business started and is old enough now to notice the bagels with his name on the sign. Before bagels, Anderson had worked at Madison Sourdough and Batch Bakehouse, spent time in the kitchen at the Willy Street Co-op, taught middle school, and farmed at Sprouting Acres in Cambridge. The bagel operation grew out of that background one Sunday at a time, sold exclusively through the Monroe Street Farmers' Market and the occasional pop-up.
Selling out every week did what limited weekly availability tends to do in a neighborhood market: it turned a bagel stand into an event. Regulars learned to show up early. The scarcity became part of the appeal, the same way a food truck with a line down the block generates its own momentum just by making people wait. But an operation built entirely around one four-hour window a week has a ceiling, and Anderson had hit it.
The Building at 3742 Speedway Road
The storefront Anderson is moving into has its own neighborhood history attached. The space at 3742 Speedway Road, a short walk from the market, was Sunset Yarn for five years, a shop that opened in 2020 and became a gathering spot for local crafters straight through the pandemic. Owner Lynette Tucker decided to retire and close the shop this year, and Anderson bought the building in May 2026, keeping it in the hands of a small independent business rather than losing it to a chain tenant.
Renovation work has been underway since summer, and the target opening is this fall. That puts the storefront's debut squarely in the same season as this article, which means Monroe Street regulars checking the block on a weekly walk should start seeing real signs of activity, if they haven't already.
What Actually Changes on the Block
The most immediate shift is availability. Instead of one window a week, Barrett's Bagels will operate as a daily storefront, with an expanded menu that adds espresso and coffee drinks alongside the existing bagel sandwiches. Anderson has said the goal is a staff that works more than once or twice a week, which is a different kind of business than the one built entirely around Sunday mornings.
There's a practical wrinkle worth knowing for anyone near campus. The new location sits along the J line, roughly a 23-minute bus ride for UW students, and Anderson has talked about building in specials tied to Camp Randall game days. That's a detail that matters less to someone driving in from across town and more to a student or staffer who now has a walkable, bus-accessible bagel shop that didn't exist before.
None of this replaces the market presence. Anderson has said Barrett's Bagels will keep vending at the Monroe Street Farmers' Market for the remainder of the 2026 season, which means the Sunday line isn't disappearing so much as it's getting a second, less crowded outlet the other six days of the week.
The Market Keeps Its Own Calendar
The storefront is opening inside a market that has its own long-running clock. The Monroe Street Farmers' Market held its first Sunday on June 7, 2015, and 2026 marks its tenth season. It runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., May through October, in the parking lot at Edgewood High School, and it's built specifically to serve the neighborhoods within walking and biking distance: Dudgeon-Monroe, Nakoma, Westmorland, Vilas, and Regent.
The market has grown a roster of vendors with their own followings. Madison Sourdough regularly sells out its own stock by mid-morning. Underground Butcher and Creme de la Coulee bring pastured meats and artisan cheese. A Mexican food cart, El Sabor de Pueblo, sets up with tacos, tamales, and quesadillas most weeks. The market accepts EBT and SNAP and participates in the Double Dollars program, which doubles the buying power of SNAP dollars spent on fresh food, and it's been run since 2023 by market manager Amber Middleton. Live music plays most Sundays, and the fall calendar leans into the season with a Veggie Friend Scavenger Hunt, squash bingo, and trick-or-treating for kids near Halloween.
Some Sunday regulars treat the market as the first stop of a longer morning, walking or biking over before continuing on to Henry Vilas Zoo or a loop through the UW Arboretum. That pattern, a market visit folded into an existing weekend route rather than a destination on its own, is part of what makes the Barrett's Bagels story land the way it does on this stretch of Monroe Street. A shop that used to require planning your whole morning around a four-hour window is about to be there on a Tuesday, too.
The market's tenth season runs through the end of October, and by the time it wraps for the winter, the storefront at 3742 Speedway Road should be settled into its own daily rhythm. For a neighborhood that's spent three years planning Sunday mornings around a bagel line, that's a small but real change in how the week gets structured.
If Monroe Street's shift from a once-a-week bagel line to a seven-day habit has you thinking about what else is changing on the near west side, the Phair-Hinton Group keeps a close watch on blocks like this one. Reach out and let's talk about what's next for the neighborhood.
