Building a Better Bagel With Boichik Bagels Founder Emily Winston

In 2015, The New York Times Magazine ran a story entitled “Why Is It So Hard to Get a Great Bagel in California?” Just five years later, the paper created shock waves with this news: “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York).” A large color photo showed Emily Winston removing bagels from the oven at the original Boichik Bagels. That little shop on College Avenue, which she opened in 2019, had quickly become the epicenter of a culinary coup d’etat.

At Arts & Culture on Wednesday, April 8, at 7 p.m., Winston will share how she built her business, from five years of trial-and-error experimenting in her own kitchen to creating what she calls “a benevolent bagel empire.” It now includes 12 retail stores — including two in Los Angeles — and an 18,000-square-foot factory in West Berkeley. In addition, bags of frozen Boichik bagels are available at stores from Ft. Bragg to San Diego.

Tickets for Winston’s talk, available on Eventbrite, are $5 for club members and students and $10 for non-members. Seating will be limited, so please register early .

Winston likes to tell how she long craved the bagels she loved growing up in New Jersey, the ones from H&H Bagel on Manhattan’s Upper Westside. (H&H went bankrupt in 2011.) To her, those crusty bagels represented the Platonic ideal of this traditional Jewish staple. Nothing less would do. She never expected her personal obsession would change the course of bagel history.

“I didn’t have a business plan for many years,” Winston recalled. “It was an intellectual pursuit of finding that lost bagel for myself.”

Winston majored in mechanical engineering at Cornell University in 2000 and then earned a master’s degree in transportation technology and policy at UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies (ITS) in 2004. She also was the on-call mechanic when the finicky Italian-made coffee robot acted up. For nearly three years, she stayed at Davis to run the Toyota Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Program.

She briefly moved back to New Jersey to work in an aunt’s company that provided energy-billing services for commercial real estate firms. In 2010, she returned to the Bay Area and worked in a variety of jobs, including serving drinks at St. George Spirits in Alameda and fashioning light fixtures made from recycled bottles. Soon she began her quest to recreate the bagels of her youth. But perfecting the recipe was just the first of many challenges she would face, including regulatory red tape, the Covid pandemic, and anti-Semitic graffiti painted on her store.

“The miracle was that I developed the bagel in the first place,” Winston told The Jewish News of Northern California. “I didn’t have any baking background or culinary experience, so the craziest part of the whole thing is how was I the one who discovered this magical bagel recipe?”

Chances are good that you’ll easily answer that question yourself once you hear this resourceful, energetic entrepreneur tell her own story. Register early to reserve your seat.

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