Oliver and Allee Cox know there’s a ton of baking going on in the Mount Vernon Square area. Seylou Bakery specializes in crusty breads, A Baked Joint has pastries. But there’s one kind of baking the neighborhood isn’t doing yet.

“There’s no real bagel shops here,” says Oliver Cox. That will change with the opening of Pearl’s Bagels, the shop the married couple expects to open in September or October. Their roughly 1,400-square-foot spot will be located at 1017 7th St. NW, next door to Kinship.

Oliver first got the bug to make bagels shortly after moving to D.C. in 2011, when he started a job at NBC News. The Central New Jersey native had grown up with a couple of “very decent bagel shops” in each town. As shops like Bullfrog Bagels and Bethesda Bagels opened around town, he still found his Logan Circle neighborhood to be a “bagel desert.” Before long, he was tinkering with his own bagel recipes in the kitchen. It was a hobby at first, he says, “born out of me wanting a weekend breakfast sandwich.”

Oliver and Allee (who grew up outside of Boston in a town with “lots of bagel shops—good ones”) took years to perfect their bagel recipe, which they describe as a combination of thick New York style and the smaller, dense Montreal style. (That’s a mix that Park View bagel shop Call Your Mother also cited.) It took time: The couple took bagel-sampling research trips to New York and conducted taste tests last fall by offering free bagel deliveries in exchange for feedback. They’ve been making tweaks along the way, even on details as minute as the seed ratio on the everything bagel.

Now, their rounds are a little smaller than New York bagels, boiled in honey before baking, as is Montreal tradition, for sweetness and shine. At Pearl’s—named for their French bulldog, who’s also immortalized on the company logo—they’ll serve up a menu of breakfast sandwiches, including a traditional bacon, egg, and cheese; a lox sammie with fish from Ivy City Smokehouse; and a Middle Eastern-inspired combination of spinach, halloumi, fried egg, and harissa. Allee’s favorite sandwich with scallion cream cheese, tomato, and bacon makes an appearance, as does Oliver’s: the New Jersey-inspired pork roll, egg, and American cheese combo topped with ketchup. Another bacon-egg sandwich comes topped with “Nana’s Hot Jalapeno Cheese Spread,” a sort-of pimento cheese spread created by Allee’s grandmother.

Allee and Oliver are working on developing “mini bagels,” as well as a menu of open-faced options that they’re calling “bagel toasts.” Options will come topped with higher-end ingredients like avocado, serrano ham, manchego cheese, sauteed mushrooms, and ricotta cheese. There are also lunch sandwiches in the works.

The menu shows plenty of love for New Jersey—and not just in Oliver’s insistence on adding American cheese to the pork roll bagel. Smoked tuna spread from Garden State-based company Nassau Street Seafood will be on offer, and Small World Coffee in Princeton, N.J., will likely be providing coffee and espresso.

Oliver and Allee are hoping to receive the same lines-out-the-door excitement that Call Your Mother experienced upon its opening last fall. “There’s a lot of hungry people here,” Allee says. “We want to feed them.”