‘We make 12,000 bagels, six days a week, to feed New York – but I only see my son when he sleeps’
Inside the air is chilled and slightly salty on the tongue. The first drift of jet-lagged tourists puzzle over exotic terminology (words like “lox” and “scallion”) and admire tubs of thickly whipped, candy-coloured cream cheese. A procession of phone-flicking office commuters and construction workers place their orders with the bored smoothness of long practice: plain tofu on poppy seed, lox on everything, cinnamon raisin with strawberry. It’s nearly eight o’clock on a chilly morning in Midtown Manhattan and the windows of the dozing skyscrapers are just beginning to blink into life. But at Broad Nosh on 42nd Street, a short walk from Times Square, the bagel ovens have been humming for hours. Scallion on sesame. Blueberry with butter. This is the poetry of a New York morning.
Once sliced, thickly spread and wrapped in waxy paper by the store’s fleet-fingered staff, the warm parcels are hurried up elevators or down into packed subway cars, to be snaffled between emails and slugs of iced coffee (for even in winter, New Yorkers love their ice). But how many harried commuters pause mid-chew to wonder whose hands formed their pillowy morning roll? Anyone curious need only slip behind the counter at Broad Nosh and into a cramped kitchen fuggy with flour and hot oven breath. There you’ll find Alex and Sofia Baka, the bagel rollers.
The Bakas stand side-by-side at a marble countertop, twisting dough into rings at mesmerising speeds. Before them rests a massive block of dough – the sort of thing you could imagine Michelangelo chiselling into angels – from which they periodically slice off thick strips. With his left hand, Alex rolls a strip into a slender rope, then with a swiftness that bamboozles the unpractised eye, loops it around his right hand and tugs. Out pops a perfect doughnut of dough: a bagel ready for the oven. I’ve watched this wiry, softly spoken 29-year-old who’s been rolling for over two decades whip out 34 bagels in a minute – though on a good day, he assures me, he can hit 42. At a normal pace, he makes about 1,000 bagels an hour. Together, over the course of a long day, the Bakas might sling 12,000. This brother-and-sister team, who were taught to roll by their Thai immigrant father, are highly skilled artisans at the top of their game. “They call us the duo,” says Sofia, a smiley but sardonic 26-year-old with a colourful collection of hijabs, who daydreams of vacations. Last year she took none.
New York’s bagel industry is booming. The last time he did a comprehensive count in 2022, Sam Silverman, whose company BagelUp runs New York bagel tours and an annual bagel festival, clocked 425 stores across the five boroughs, although he suspects today the number is closer to 500. “New York City’s appetite for bagels is insatiable,” he told me. Whole new chains, such as the popular Broad Nosh, PopUp and Apollo, have materialised since the pandemic, while the queues outside well-established spots such as H&H, Zucker’s and Tompkins continue to stretch like dough on a warm afternoon. Nationwide, according to Simmons National Consumer Survey, 205.34 million Americans ate a bagel in 2024, a figure that has risen steadily over the last decade. In recent years, new Insta-friendly varieties like the eye-gouging rainbow bagel (made by braiding strands of brightly dyed dough) have given the city’s bagel industry a post-pandemic surge. But a boom always comes at a cost. The more New Yorkers clamour for bagels, the more the rollers gotta roll.
Like most New York rollers, the Bakas work freelance, splitting 16-hour days across multiple stores. It’s lucrative work – they make six figures a year – but grinding too. They take just one day off a week, Tuesday. Hours of rolling can be tedious so they sometimes watch TV on their phones: baseball for Alex, K-dramas for Sofia. “Anything,” she says, “to get through the day.”
Thanksgiving and Christmas are their busiest times, thanks to a festive influx of tourists and locals too bored or busy to cook. “We hate the holidays,” says Sofia cheerfully. Alongside the extra demand, they like to experiment with seasonal flavours: this year, slightly alarmingly, they’re considering peppermint. Such specials are good PR in the internet age: Alex, who dreams of opening his own shop, is building his Instagram following with shots of technicolour trayfuls. Still, it’s a punishing way to live, especially when you have a young family. Sofia feels the ache of time not spent with her one-year-old son, Aiden: “I only see him when he sleeps. It makes me cry every day.” Alex is about to become a father for the first time – he plans to take at least a couple of days off. He’ll call up friends and family to cover him, mostly people he’s trained himself from the city’s Thai community. “We all kind of have each other’s backs,” he says.
Today, a significant slice of New York’s bagel rollers are Thai – roughly 25 per cent of the 200-odd total, Silverman estimates. (Official numbers in an industry that includes many undocumented workers are hard to pin down.) Plus, several shops, like the late lamented Absolute on the Upper West Side, which shut down last month, and David’s on First Avenue, are Thai-owned. Population-wise, this is dramatically disproportionate: according to a 2021 city health department report, less than one per cent of New Yorkers were Thai. It’s a curious twist of New York culinary history, both for a diaspora whose national cuisine barely features bread, and for a bread brought to America by Jewish immigrants more than a hundred years ago.
According to legend, the bagel was invented in 1683 for the Polish king Jan Sobieski, who had just crushed a Turkish invasion of Austria. In gratitude, an Austrian baker fashioned a loop-shaped bread roll and presented it to the king as an edible stirrup – or ‘beugel’. It’s a nice story, even if there are as many bagel origin myths as flavours of cream cheese. What we can be more confident of is that the bagel arrived in New York in the late 19th century, as thousands of Jews fled European pogroms for the rackety tenements of the Lower East Side. One 1891 guidebook reassured anxious immigrants that you could find a coffee and a bagel in the city for 10 cents (today, that combo will put you back closer to $10). According to Maria Balinska’s 2008 biography of the bagel, by 1900 there were around 70 Jewish bakeries in southern Manhattan. Conditions were terrible: topless bakers sweated in the fierce heat and slept “between the mounds of rising dough and the oven with cats, rats and cockroaches for company”. For rollers, maintaining a work-life balance has always been a challenge.
Some bagel-proud New Yorkers might be miffed to hear that their favourite breakfast food probably reached England first. The bagel arrived in a long wave of 19th-century Polish immigration that also included Michael Marks (founder of Marks & Spencer), the parents of Jack Cohen (the future Mr Tesco), and my great-grandfather Jack. On Brick Lane, in London’s East End, old-school joints such as Beigel Shop – which proudly trumpets its 1855 birth on its mustard-neon sign – still attract swarms of tourists and greedy locals.
English bagels, not wholly surprisingly, are humbler than their Yankee cousins: they’re smaller and lack the Manhattan’s malty tang and razzle-dazzle toppings. But like so many New York innovations, the bagel boom has begun to echo across the Atlantic: New York Bakery bagels, stacked five high in their distinctive royal blue plastic bags, are a stalwart of British supermarkets. Meanwhile It’s Bagels!, a buzzy New York-style chain whose expat founder visited the Bakas for inspiration, has just opened its third London branch, with queues out the door at all of them.
In the early 20th century, New York’s sweating, suffering bakers began to unionise. They went on strike in 1909 for better pay and conditions: “Strikers Storm East Side Shops – One Raider’s Skull Fractured with Sugar Bowl” read one slightly overheated New York Times headline. Then, as now, rollers had power. After seven weeks, the bakery bosses capitulated and 5,000 people marched through the Lower East Side in triumph, brandishing a 15-foot loaf of bread.
For a long time, the story of New York’s Jewish bagel rollers followed the classic immigrant food plot. New arrivals often make a living cooking fare from the old country for the homesick and the curious: consider Chinatowns and Little Italys across the globe. Since 2002, Thailand’s government has been trying to harness this process, funding Thai restaurants and Thai-trained chefs abroad in a cultural promotion strategy that has been labelled “gastrodiplomacy”. Curiously, though, when it comes to bagels, the plot twisted: instead of promoting Thai food to Americans, these Thai bakers are making American food for tourists (as well as locals). New York’s Jewish bagel industry has become so capacious – and its originators so assimilated and prosperous – that it has largely outsourced the work to new immigrant communities willing to take on the physical strain. Today, New York’s bagel stores are owned by Greeks, Italians and Colombians – and powered by Hispanic and Thai rollers.
Mike Baka, Sofia and Alex’s father, arrived in New York in 1986 from Narathiwat, in southern Thailand, aged 25. At first he drove cabs and sliced bagels in a factory, before learning to roll them from a fellow Thai immigrant. This seems to be a pattern: Chanvit Khanthong, who owns David’s, told me that when he arrived in New York in 1975 he was also taught to roll by a Thai friend, before starting his own business. “When you first come here looking for a job, you take whatever you’ve got,” says Mike, now a grizzled 65-year-old. “American people, I think they don’t want to work like this – they want an easy job, to sit down.” When he first started rolling, he didn’t enjoy bagels, which bore little resemblance to the rice-and-noodle carbohydrates of Thai cooking. But over the years, his tastes have morphed to match his adopted country. “Cream cheese and jelly, morning, afternoon,” he tells me, laughing.
Sofia, who prefers a classic lox (that’s smoked salmon), remembers the long hours her father worked when she was young. “I barely saw my dad. He left at six in the morning and came back at eight at night. He tried his best but I didn’t know how hard it was.” From the age of three, Alex would sometimes accompany Mike to the Brooklyn bagel store where he still works. “My mum was complaining that I was making a mess in the house, so he would take me to work and just put me under the table.” By six, he was starting to roll his own bagels. Today, Mike isn’t entirely at ease with having passed his trade on to his children. “They work too much... I feel bad.”
The Bakas usually start at five o’clock in the morning. The first dough of the day is made in a giant mixer – picture the one in your kitchen but about 20 times the size – from brown sugar, water, salt, yeast, whey (for smoothness), lashings of dark, sticky malt syrup (for that distinctive bagel tanginess) and two enormous bags of flour. Extra flavourings, like jalapeños or blueberries, are thrown in at the end. After about 15 minutes, the gloop has transformed into a bubbling, muscular dough. I pop a small clump in my mouth and don’t entirely regret it: it’s squishy and salty-sweet. Once rolled, the raw bagels are packed cheek-to-cheek on large wooden trays, then slotted into racks and stored for up to two days in a walk-in fridge. Ranks of plain-pale, pumpkin-orange and pumpernickel-dark patiently await their moment. When the time comes, most stores boil their bagels for about 45 seconds, to give them their distinctive sheen and lock in moisture. Next they’re scattered with any seeds or toppings (“everything” refers to a popular garlicky sprinkle), then baked for 15 to 20 minutes in a 275-degree oven, and whisked out on to the shop floor.
In the 1950s the New York bagel union, Local 338, was a small but swaggering outfit. Its bakers had nicknames like Iron Mike and Vulture. But a decade later it was haemorrhaging members, thanks to the development of new preservatives and bagel-making machines that meant store owners could ship cheaper stock from out of state. Yet more than half a century later, many New Yorkers will still pay a premium for hand-rolled bagels. In 2018, Jimmy Stathakis, a genial Greek-American raised in Queens, transformed his chain of New York delis into a speciality bagel business, Bagel Market. One of the first things he did was replace the machine-made bagels with rollers who worked on site. “Have you ever had a bagel hot out of the oven? It’s a totally different experience,” he told me. “I used to stop at a bagel shop to get a bagel and then go to my store. I was like, why am I doing that?” Machine bagels, which force dough around a metal tube to create the hole, have a “tough, tight” texture, according to Alex. “You know when you get soup from a can, you can tell? It’s like that.”
Right now, in New York, rollers have considerable power. They are specialised, scarce and hesitant to pass on their skills to outsiders. “You can’t blame them,” says Stathakis. “They have to protect their product. I would do the same thing if someone came and asked me for my recipe.” Still, eager to expand into new states or overseas, owners are beginning to apply delicate pressure to their teams to train up new talent. Jamil Uddin, Broad Nosh’s Bangladeshi owner, is preparing to open a fourth branch. “We definitely need more rollers,” he told me. “No rollers means no bagels.”
“If someone wants to learn, they’re struggling in life, I’ll teach them,” says Alex, who this year trained up a friend of his father-in-law and another friend-of-a-friend. But finding the right apprentice isn’t easy. The teaching process generally takes two to four months. Baby bagel rollers have to be prepared for the physical toughness of the work: for aching arms and sore backs and stiff knees. “If I teach you, you gotta be dedicated,” says Sofia. “Are you passionate enough to do this?”
But the need for more rollers is becoming as urgent for the Bakas as the bosses. A few weeks ago, Alex fainted in the middle of a shift, a case of mild flu and pre-baby nerves. “I worked too much,” he told me, adding calmly, “my body was shutting down.” He awarded himself an extra couple of hours in bed the next morning, then headed back to the kitchen. But how long can the pair keep muscling through their ever rising workload? I wonder if they worry about the future. “I think AI is going to take over,” says Sofia, not entirely displeased at the prospect. “Maybe I’ll teach more people next year,” murmurs Alex. Then he turns his attention back to the giant block of dough in front of him. It’s hard to plan for tomorrow when you have 12,000 bagels to roll today.
