Music City Bagels

Music City Bagels moved to Oxford, Alabama in March 2025, bringing an authentic New York style bagel bakery to Hamrick Drive after three years of operating a few miles away in Anniston. The shop is the work of Aldo Stassi, who was born in Palermo, Italy and moved with his family to the New York area in the 1950s, where he grew up around the smells and tastes of a neighborhood bakery. After a career spanning more than three decades in the airline industry and over fifty years connected to the food business, Stassi finally opened Music City Bagels in April 2022 to bring that childhood memory back to life.

Every bagel is made from scratch on site, boiled and baked daily using all-natural ingredients with no preservatives or additives. Stassi is particular about what separates a true New York bagel from an imitation. It needs a shiny, slightly hard crust with a good glaze, a chewy but not doughy interior, a subtle tang, a modest size, and a generous layer of topping baked into both sides rather than just sprinkled on top. The shop bakes more than seventeen bagel varieties, from plain and everything to cinnamon crunch, blueberry, and asiago.

Beyond bagels themselves, the menu covers breakfast and lunch sandwiches built on bagel, panini, or toast, including a Reuben, an Italian cheesesteak, a Cubano panino, and a signature club sandwich called the Squirrel’s Club House. Breakfast options range from a classic bacon, egg, and cheese to a spicier signature called the Wake-Up Call. Nearly all of the bread used for those sandwiches, not just the bagels, is made from scratch in-house.

The bakery case extends well past bagels into a full lineup of scratch-made sweets. Muffins are baked fresh daily in flavors like strawberry, blueberry, lemon poppy, and red velvet, and the shop also turns out croissants, cinnamon buns, cookies, and grab-and-go desserts. Two items reach back to Stassi’s family roots in Sicily: house-made cannoli and tiramisu, both prepared from recipes he brought over rather than a generic bakery-supply version.

Coffee and tea are made from freshly ground arabica beans, and the drink menu also includes a long list of fountain drinks, bottled beverages, and a rotating lineup of smoothies and specialty soda-fountain drinks with names like Brooklyn Fizz, Black Cow, and Cherry Limeade. The shop leans into an old-fashioned soda counter feel alongside its New York deli identity, giving it a wider drink menu than most bagel shops attempt.

Catering is a significant part of the business, with packages built for office meetings and luncheons that bundle sandwiches, muffins, cinnamon buns, bagels, and cream cheese with all the necessary condiments, available with relatively short lead time by calling ahead. The shop also takes orders through its own mobile app for pickup, which is where current pricing is listed since prices are not posted on the website itself.

Music City Bagels is open seven days a week at its Oxford location on Hamrick Drive East, with hours running from 6:00 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon Monday through Saturday, and a slightly later 7:00 to 3:00 window on Sundays. The relocation from Anniston to Oxford in 2025 put the bakery closer to the retail corridor near Quintard Mall while keeping the same scratch-made approach that built its following in its original location.

The schmear selection alone runs to nine varieties, from a classic plain cream cheese to jalapeno, sun-dried tomato, honey walnut, and a sweeter chocolate spread, letting customers build their own bagel however they like it. Seasonal items round out the case at certain times of year, including a cup of chili and soup in the winter months, chicken and tuna salad in the summer, and key lime pie during the warmer months as well.

For a shop rooted in a New York deli tradition, the atmosphere still feels distinctly local. Regulars often know the counter staff by name, and the Oxford location has quickly become a stop for both dine-in breakfast crowds and office workers picking up catering trays for meetings nearby. It stands out along Hamric Drive as one of the few bakeries in the area making everything from scratch on the premises rather than shipping in frozen dough.