Bagelsmith planning to pop up soon

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This article was published 30/01/2020 (2256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The bagels are coming, and the schmeer is near.

A local entrepreneur is gearing up to open Bagelsmith, a shop doling out Montreal-style bagels to hungry downtown Winnipeg workers and denizens, this spring, with pop-ups being planned as early as next month.

The location is still being finalized, said owner Philip Klein, a former government employee who decided to ditch the office for a life of cream cheese and lox. But once the shop opens, he hopes it will help fill a bagel-sized hole in the city’s appetite at an outpost not far from TrueNorth Square.

“Time is of the essence for people downtown,” he said. Bagels just made sense.

Klein, 35, said he was sitting on his couch with his wife watching the Food Network last year when the crazy idea of opening an authentic bagel shop in Winnipeg came up. She said he should, and so he set out to do it.

Thus began Klein’s search for the best location and the best recipe. He’d worked in pizzerias growing up, but the bagel is a different beast entirely, he said. And the Montreal bagel — hallowed for its sweetness in comparison to its New York relative — is something Klein didn’t want to mess up.

So he embarked in a lot of trial and error, or making lots of bagels and tasting them, getting opinions from family and friends. Ultimately, Klein arrived at a recipe that he felt echoed the prototypical Montreal bagel — boiled in honey water and baked, but not in a wood-burning oven, avoiding emissions. It’s a bit of a departure from tradition, but one steeped in eco-consciousness.

“The plan to start is to do the classics — plain, poppyseed, sesame, and everything bagels,” he said, along with some adventurous cream cheeses.

“We’re going to have a large selection of schmeers,” he said.

Those will likely include smoked, caramelized onion, and pizza-flavoured, along with the more traditional spreads. The shop will also import smoked meat straight from Montreal.

As for the name, Klein said it was originally conceived when the shop might have found a spot near Smith Street. But the name still carried the artisanal heft that Montreal bagel-making demands, so it stayed.

While the lease is still being finalized for Bagelsmith’s retail space, Klein said he’s also in the process of getting approval for an upcoming pop-up shop, the details of which will be released soon.

He said updates will be posted on the shop’s social media accounts, @bagelsmith_wpg on Twitter and @bagelsmith_winnipeg on Instagram.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca