Woo Jae Kim fixes himself breakfast each morning at his bagel shop on Union Street in Flushing. Hot bagels get butter. Cold ones get cream cheese.

Since buying the store 17 years ago, the 52-year-old has faithfully abided by that routine, passing up a traditional Korean breakfast at his nearby home for the Old Faithful of New York options, a bagel, at work.

Mr. Kim learned his bagel-making technique from the Jewish businessman who sold him the store. He was, essentially, an apprentice in a field he knew little about. Now, Mr. Kim has become an unlikely authority on bagels. And in his primarily Chinese and Korean community in Queens, he is not the only Asian-American expert on the subject.

Like many other commodities, the bagel, first a Jewish concept and now an indispensable New York dietary mainstay, is providing other ethnic groups with a way to pay the bills and support a family.

Chinese-American and Korean-American business owners, who already operate the majority of the stores in Flushing, have, for the past few years, increasingly begun baking the food once associated most closely with the Jewish breakfast table and celebratory lunch.

City Council Member John Liu, who represents the district and is a regular customer at J.K. Bakery, Mr. Kim’s shop, joked that while he had not yet heard of an association for Korean bagel-store owners, similar to organizations that grocers, dry cleaners, and nail-salon owners have formed, he would not be surprised if one sprouted soon.

“This is a New York story,” Mr. Liu, who as a child immigrated to Queens from Taiwan, said during a drive from City Hall to Flushing last month. “It’s no different than Bangladeshi-run pizza joints, and there are already a number of those.”

Mr. Kim, who has a full mane of salt-and-pepper hair and speaks broken, but sufficient, English, emigrated from Korea in 1982 and then floated between jobs, selling everything from leather bags to fruits and vegetables before he found a partner to buy the store with him.

“A lot of bagel stores are owned by Korean people,” Mr. Kim said, sitting on a milk crate in the kitchen of his store, with a white apron fitted snugly over his clothes. “It’s a good business.”

The owner of Hot Bagels on Northern Boulevard, about a mile from J.K. Bakery, said the bagel business is less grueling and more profitable than the grocery-deli business, which in the city is made up largely of Korean-American owners.

“It’s a good profit and less work compared with other jobs like the grocery,” T. Chang, who bought his store three months ago from another Korean owner, said.

That does not mean waking up early every morning and running a business is easy, but it does not require trekking out to the Bronx to pick up vegetables in Hunts Point, the largest produce clearinghouse in the city, well before the sun rises, or working behind a cash register late into the night.

“This is a good business for Koreans because they are newer immigrants,” Mr. Chang, whose store also sells challah and bialys, said. “There are not as many Jewish people who have small businesses like this anymore, because they have been in this country longer.”

Like Mr. Kim, Mr. Chang reserves bagels for work, preferring kimchi, a spicy pickled vegetable dish, rice, soup, and other Korean foods at home.

The executive director of the Korean American League for Civic Action, Veronica Jung, a graduate of Harvard Law School, said occupational patterns are rarely intentional among immigrants and are generally a function of opportunity.

“I don’t think many Koreans come to the states thinking that they are going to become greengrocers. It’s usually just happenstance,” she said.

Korean immigrants in New York, she said, often come with college degrees but do not generally speak and write English well, making white-collar office jobs harder to find.

“The food industry is one in which hard-working immigrants can make a living without have to verbally sell their good,” she said. “The product speaks for itself. A fresh apple is a fresh apple.”

Korean owners of bagel shops at Flushing and the surrounding communities are a prime example. The owners of Bagel Plus in Whitestone, Sun Rheem, and of K&B Hot Bagels in Bayside, Paul Kim, both have engineering degrees from colleges in their homeland.

“When I opened my store, many people asked me, ‘You’re not Jewish, why do you make bagels?’ ” Mr. Kim said during a phone interview, adding that he learned the trade at a Jewish-owned deli in Manhattan.

Like the other Mr. Kim, he is now a bagel connoisseur in his own right, taste testing every morning to ensure that the bagels are not too salty or too bland, and serving them with lox and spreads.

Woo Kim said he buys a bagel every time he goes into Manhattan to see what the competition is up to. For the most part, he said, they are more “like a kaiser roll” with only a slit for a center hole. Too big, he said.

While statistics on Korean-American bagel-store owners in Queens seem not to be kept, it is clear that South Korean immigrants do not have a monopoly on the industry in Flushing. Bagels also are being made and sold by Italian, Russian, Egyptian, Afghan, and Bangladeshi proprietors, according to those who answered the phones at area stores. To many it is no surprise. It mirrors past patterns. When new waves of immigrants arrive in a neighborhood, this type of crosspollination invariably occurs.

The author of several Jewish cookbooks, Joan Nathan, who has done research on bagels, said she has seen almost every ethnic group making them.

As for the Korean-Americans, she said, it’s not that different from making a dumpling, which also starts as dough and is boiled in much the same way.

“It’s happening all over, not just in Queens,” she said. “It’s a way to make a dollar. And it’s largely the same technique. So why not?”