Pete's Bagels to open tiny drive-thru in St. Pete

Pete’s Bagels is ready to open a long-anticipated express version of its bagels and coffee concept at a historic St. Petersburg service station.

The bagel shop will open a drive-thru on Saturday at the Harbordale Standard Oil Station. The location at 2439 4th St. S., near the historic Driftwood neighborhood in St. Pete, will have a full espresso bar with beans from Look Alive Coffee and a full menu of bagels and bagel sandwiches like its three other Tampa Bay locations.

“We’re definitely serving an area where there are not a lot of food options,” Pete’s Bagels owner Steven Peterman said. “People in the neighborhood seem really excited that we’ve been able to keep the historic building and do something local and family friendly and community focused.”

Developer Robert Blackmon bought the 325-square-foot building in November 2019. Since then, he has restored the property and received city council approval to designate the building as a local historic landmark.

The bagel shop signed a lease for the location in 2023. Peterman said he had looked at the property as a potential location in 2021, but the timing wasn’t right, so this feels like a full-circle moment.

Pete’s Bagels opened its first location in St. Pete in 2019 in the historic Uptown neighborhood and moved to the Grand Central district in 2021. In 2023, it opened a location in Ybor City, its first in Hillsborough County. The drive-thru was planned as a third, but an opportunity to open in Seymour’s, a new café across the street from the Residences at 400 Central, popped up, and Peterman said it was too good to pass on.

Now, Pete’s has four locations, and Peterman said the business feels like it has become part of the community.

The drive-thru’s opening weekend will be a challenge, he said. The most popular item sold at Pete’s is a bacon, egg and cheese, so Peterman wants to offer that, but they’ve never cooked and operated in a drive-thru format before.

The 325-square-foot building can fit about four employees. Pete’s intends to have one employee take orders from car windows to speed up the process.

Although there is a walk-up window with seating under a canopy, the restaurant is meant to function as a drive thru.

“You can walk through the drive-thru, you can bike through. We’re not biased in any way, but keeping people in that process will make our flow go faster,” Peterman said.

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