Bring On the Bagels — Sophisticated St. Louis

When the Bagel Factory closed in December, St. Louis lost its only bagel shop. Today the bagel business is booming.

By Christy Marshall / Photos by Carmen Troesser

Alex Pifer grew up in Clearwater, Florida and her favorite bagel shop stood next door to her high school. “I’ve been a lifelong lover of bagels,” she says. “I moved around the country and I always found the bagel shops … until I moved to St. Louis.”

Alex Pifer of Baked & Boiled, with a tray of her yet-to-be baked bagels.

Today, Alex has her own bagel business, Baked & Boiled. “I’ve mostly been a chef but I always wanted to get into baking because it’s fascinating,” she says. “It’s borderline alchemy. During the pandemic everything shut down but bakers and butchers still did well. I thought that was what I should probably get into. It took me at least 8 months to a year to make a really solid bagel.

“I’m a bagel snob,” Alex adds. “My husband is Jewish so he is no stranger to a good bagel. He really, truly enjoys them. Baking in general makes me happy.”

At first, Alex sold at a pop-up at Wild Olive Provisions in the Shaw neighborhood but quickly her business started picking up steam. She formally opened Baked & Boiled in May, 2022; last April, she started baking at Carondelet Bakery. Sugarwitch gourmet ice cream sandwich creators, Martha Bass and Sophie Mendelson, own the bakery and rent out space as incubator kitchens for small businesses “It has a huge five-level rotating oven that worked out perfectly for bagels,” Alex says. “I’m still baking there.”

Baked & Boiled offers a variety of bagels including a ghost pepper cheddar, a jalapeno cheddar, rosemary sea salt, as well as the standards of the Everything, sesame, poppy, onion, chocolate chip, plain, and cinnamon raisin. To prepare for her weekly sales at the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market, Alex bakes on Fridays until “2:30 a.m., which gives the bagels time to cool,” she says. “We load up and get there around 6:30 a.m. The market opens at 8 a.m. and we sell out by 10:30. We’re trying to make it to 11:00 but no matter how many bagels we make, we sell out at 10:30.” She bakes about 50 to 55 dozen weekly.

Aside from Tower Grove, Baked and Boiled Bagels are available at Zoomie’s Pet Café on Macklind. But Alex has set her sights set on a shop. “Ideally, I will be opening my own storefront as soon as possible and hopefully in the Shaw area. We have built a customer base and the families continue to come.”

Heading West to Chesterfield at the corner of 141 and Olive Street Road, Scott “Lefty” Lefton and Doug Goldenberg, brothers-in-law, teamed up to open Lefty’s Bagels. Neither of them has a culinary or business background. But when Scott’s local Einstein’s Bros. Bagels shuttered, he started baking bagels at home.

After months of trial and error, Doug says “He finally produced something that was pretty decent.” After friends and family egged him on, he started baking at a co-op bakery then called the Baker’s Hub and now known as the Trolley Stop Bakery.

“We started with a six-month commitment to go in and bake. It was fairly risk free for us because we didn't have to have any capital expenditure. And, it was a great excuse during COVID to get out during the weekends in a fairly safe environment.”

Some of the varieties at Lefty’s Bagels.

The initial goal was to sell a dozen dozen or 144 bagels weekly. They breezed by that end zone almost immediately.

“After about three weeks, we had lines forming as much as an hour before we'd open the doors, and we’d sell out in an hour,” Doug says. “It stayed that way for the entire time that we baked there, which is about a year-and-a-half in total. We were making dough in very small batches and 20-quart mixers. We were hand rolling them and boiling in kitchen stock pots. We were baking in convection ovens that are all wrong for what we were doing.”

So, the brothers-in-law decided it was time to expand and to build their own bakery.

They created a business plan and started researching bagel establishments in other cities. They did one 12-hour whirlwind tour of Chicago’s best bagels. From New York, Doug says they drew a lot of inspiration from Zucker’s Bagels.

“We knew that we had a great bagel product and that in the process of expanding, we wanted to ensure that we maintain the quality of the bagel, but not degrade the bagel by bringing in other types of ingredients that are just subpar,” Doug says. “For example, for a bacon, egg, and cheese, I don't want to bring in subpar bacon because that would just degrade our quality bagels.”

The shop is open from Tuesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. A sign specifies that Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham of Congreation B’nai Amoona has certified the bagels as kosher. But Doug explains, “It is not a kosher facility. We have the best of both worlds. We have kosher bagels and bacon.”

Union Loafers founders and co-owners Ted Wilson and Sean Netzer were ready to expand their fledgling empire. While Netzer said any new venture “has to fit neatly under the umbrella of carbohydrates,” they decided to try bagels.

“We weren't immediately drawn to it for a number of reasons, but the more we thought about it, the more we were like, ‘Oh, there's a gap in the market here,’” Sean says. “There's not a ton of spots that are taking bagels seriously. It just took us awhile to come around to the idea. It was really the fact that not a lot of people had talked about bagels. Bagels aren't a rite of passage here the way they are in Montreal or New York or L.A. So, I think part of it was just we didn't know if it was something that people even wanted. And clearly, we've been set straight on that.”

The duo found a vacant Porter’s Paint store at the corner of Elm Avenue and Big Bend in Webster Groves. “We signed the lease in fall of 2019, right before COVID,” Sean says. “And then we were hoping to do the build out be open in late 2020.” The pandemic derailed that schedule.

“In 2022, we hit the ground running, ordering everything that we needed, getting the contractors in there, doing the build out and just trying to get our ducks in a row,” he continues. Opening day was February 8, 2023 and lines snaked down Big Bend waiting to get into the shop. “It's great to see the support,” Sean says. “It's been amazing.”

Selling out is not an uncommon occurrence at Bagel Union but Sean wants customers to remember that the shop is baking bagels all day long. “Even if we're out of the particular bagel that you want and this usually only happens on the busiest of days, we'll take your phone number down and just call you when they’re ready.”

Baking a bagel is a three-day process. At Bagel Union, Sean said there is a special emphasis on the hand-rolled aspect of the job. “We bought a bagel shaper and we don't use it because we didn't like the texture that it was putting out of the bagels,” he says. “There's always room for improvement. But as far as what we're going for, we want something crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, but not so dense as the bagels that are kind of everywhere. So, we want a little bit more open and airiness and a little bit more fun to eat and to fill with cream cheese.”

During the week, Sean estimates they bake 1,000 bagels daily but 3,000 on the weekends. The shop opens at 8 a.m. and closes at 2 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.

Looking ahead, Netzer said Bagel Union is planning on going into catering “and just keep growing, make it sustainable, keep it local, and keep it fun and interesting for our staff.”

The bonanza in bagels roars on. Ben Poremba sells New York-made bagels at his new restaurant Deli Divine. If you’re longing for a Jerusalem bagel (which is lighter and longer than the regular and isn’t boiled), you can find them at Poremba’s restaurant, Olio. Across the river in Wood River, C&B Boiled Bagels has opened and word on the street has it that the Bagel Factory will be reopening on Olive Street Road.

At last, there’s a bagel boom in St. Louis.