![]() I look out for my employees.ĭo you think your location, being far from Manhattan, is a hindrance to business? Some customers are racist and I don’t stand for that. Here, we have Mexican workers, Dominican, Venezuelan. I was here every single day during the pandemic and we fed 50 local families. We were one of the only places that stayed open. The other day, a woman told me I gave her son cookies whenever he would come into the shop, and that made him feel special and he doesn’t always feel special. ![]() I give kids cookies because when I was little, my dad took me to get penny candy and they used to give me a bag with a free piece of candy and I never forgot that. To me, my whole life, the bagel means feeding people and I love feeding people, I love leading them on a food journey, especially kids. Someone can have same experience his great-grandfather felt. Here at Utopia, our bagel stands out more than other places because we serve four generations. NYC makes two things better than any state: pizza and bagels, because we’ve been doing it longer. One of them is the Michael Jordan of rolling. We don’t cut corners! And my hand rollers have been here 22-27 years. We also use an ingredient a lot of places don’t, and that is liquid malt in place for sugar. My bagels are also made in a 1947 Middleby Marshall oven, whereas a lot of bagels tend to be doughy, made in steam ovens, a whole rack at a time, and most places bake early and shut their ovens off by 11. We do it the old-fashioned way: hand-rolled, kettle boiled. My friend owned this shop since 1981 and I became a partner in 2015.Ī few things: crispiness of the outside and that softness on the inside. I was managing a restaurant at time in Astoria but did Fresh Direct, making nine different frozen bagel flavors, which sold millions of dollars in frozen bagels a year. Eventually Fresh Direct asked his partner to make frozen bagels. My friend whose father owned a shop worked here. This was back when you had one kind of bagel with butter, before everything bagels were a thing! I ended up here in Queens because my wife grew up in this neighborhood. My best friend’s father owned a bagel store in Howard Beach where I started working at 14 years old. ![]() Always give respect and never expect it back. At times, I put on tefillin and I’ve been in a minyan, but what’s important is. Sometimes growing up, you’d know you’re Jewish and you’re around Italians and don’t want it to be known you’re Jewish, but as I got older, I felt cheated because we didn’t we do more things. I have friends that are rabbis and it’s important for me to show respect for religion. I didn’t go to Hebrew school - my bar mitzvah portion was in English - but I respect religion. I grew up Jewish but wasn’t brought up religious, but every summer, we’d visit a bungalow colony in the Catskills in Monticello. I grew up in Brooklyn, in Canarsie, across from the Glenwood projects in an era where the whole block played together.
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