Building a BETTER BAGEL
The newish owners of Gryfe’s are determined to hold true to the 110-yearold bakery’s tradition — save for a few tweaks
After being closed throughout Passover, when eating leavened bread is forbidden, Gryfe’s Bagels and Baked Goods has reignited its ovens.
And, here, at one of the city’s bestknown purveyors of the breakfast staple, bagel-making is a science.
First, the bakers and kitchen managers arrive at 3 a.m. every day to heat the ovens and prepare the dough, using a precise amount of flour, water, yeast, sugar and salt. After being shaped into rings, the bagels are dunked in a vat of hot water “to give (them) some crust and a bit of shine,” co-owner David Fisher said, before they’re slid into one of three ovens for no longer than 20 minutes.
“It’s a delicate process,” he added, as the toasty smell of baked bread filled the kitchen, “and it’s a juggling act, too, because our staff need to move the pans around to ensure we always keep having bagels in there, but not too long.”
Eyeing a plain bagel cooling on a rack, he said, “Oh yeah, this will be a great one. It hasn’t flattened too much. It’s got some structure.” Gryfe’s bagels, he added, top out at three-and-a-half ounces each compared to, say, New York versions that may be denser and larger at seven ounces. It’s a far cry from how the New York Times described a bagel in 1960: “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”
Fisher and another David, Granovsky, who have known each other for more than two decades, bought the shop from the Gryfe family in 2022, and they are determined to hold true to the tradition — save for a few tweaks.
In 2023 they renovated the space, a move they credit for a moderate bump in sales. “Word got around that we redid the floors, walls, the counters — something that hadn’t been done in ages,” Fisher said, “and we saw more walk-in customers in the past year.”
Gryfe’s Bagels and Baked Goods has been in business, under one name or another, for nearly 110 years. And yet it might surprise even the shop’s most zealous fans that its signature product came to be as a result of a simple question lobbed at the shop’s owners in the 1960s.
Art Gryfe — the son of founder Sam — and his wife Ruth were in the then-named S. Gryfe & Sons Bakery when a customer asked if they could drum up a dozen bagels. Though they had no experience making them, they tried and succeeded.
Today, Gryfe’s bagels, lighter and fluffier than the Montreal version so popular in Toronto, can be found on dining tables, on grocery shelves, in kids’ lunch boxes, and even on an Adam Sandler movie set.
Sam Gryfe had moved his bakery from Hamilton to Kensington Market in1925. The Gryfes then relocated to Bathurst, south of Wilson Avenue, in 1957. They, like the nearby United Bakers Dairy Restaurant, at Bathurst and Lawrence, which also got its start in Kensington Market, were part of a shift in Toronto’s Jewish communities migrating to the area.
In 1980, Gryfe’s relocated a few blocks south to its current shop at 3421 Bathurst, and Moishe, Sam’s grandson, took over the baking from his father Art in the mid-’90s, while his wife Michele managed the bookkeeping.
At the back of the store, on a stretch of Bathurst best known for Filipino bakeries and kosher restaurants, Fisher elaborated on building the perfect bagel.
Gryfe’s bakes up to 18,000 bagels, in numerous varieties, daily at the
Bathurst shop and at its Concord facility, a factory dedicated to wholesale and kosher bagels. Since the mid-’90s, the Concord location has supplied bagels to such retailers as Summerhill Market and Pusateri’s, and its kosher varieties are sold to Jewish day schools like the Toronto Heschel School on Sheppard Avenue West.
The bakery is also known for its sweet blueberry buns (more than 400 made daily), cheese buns and specialty pastries, such as triangular hamantaschen, cookies often filled with fruit jam or chocolate spread, which are popular during the Jewish holiday of Purim.
Gryfe’s has even fed cast and crew on the set of the recent Adam Sandler comedy “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” thanks to complimentary bagels sent by Granovsky, whose daughter appeared as a background actor in the Toronto-shot Netflix film.
Even though Gryfe’s quaint store, whose queue often extends out the door on a busy Sunday, offers cream cheese, chopped egg and other spreads, Fisher said that a defining feature of the bagels is that people eat them unadorned. “I’ve heard so many customers say, ‘Oh I ate three or four on the car ride home, thanks to how light and tasty and small they are.’”
While in its early days, Gryfe’s attracted a heavily Jewish clientele, over the years, as Bathurst’s demographics have changed, its customers have come to reflect the multicultural city. Fisher says the bakery is even considering adding to its menu a Filipino dessert made from ube.
Fisher and his wife Kim, a pastry chef, ran the wholesale bakery Queen B Kitchen, near Queen and Carlaw, before shutting it down to focus on Gryfe’s. “To be part of a retail business where we could serve customers directly, that’s something we both wanted,” Fisher said, “and there’s something special about being part of the Gryfe’s legacy.”
Granovsky had been shopping at Gryfe’s for 25 years and was thrilled to have the opportunity to help introduce the store to new customers and maintain its relationship with decades-long fans.
“Buying Gryfe’s,” he said, “was a business decision based on passion.”