Bagel consultant helping entrepreneurs all over the world
FAIR LAWN, N. J. » Beth George was sitting in her kitchen when her cellphone chimed with an email.
“I have visited New York a couple of times, and every time I return I end up dearly missing the bagels there,” the message said. “The taste is extraordinary. I would really like to open a shop in the Netherlands.”
There was just one problem, the writer continued: “I really don’t know where to start. I am not a professional cook.” In fact, he said, “I work in the IT business.”
It was George’s second such email that day, and the fifth she would receive in August. There were queries from two men hoping to open a bagel shop in Pittsburgh, a five- person team outside Dallas, a woman in Sweden and another in India.
“This business started off as a hobby,” George said as she tapped a reply. “Now it’s nonstop.”
Officially, George is a lawyer. But since 2013 she has worked day and night as one of the world’s few, and most sought- after, bagel consultants.
From the Bahamas to Saudi Arabia, from India to the Horn of Africa, dozens of aspiring bagel bakers — novices and professionals — have hired her to provide and adapt recipes, guide their business plans, help lay out their kitchens and be their on- call troubleshooter for issues from kneading and rolling to boiling ( or steaming) and baking.
“It’s only five ingredients: water, flour, sugar, salt, yeast,” said George, 57. “But the thing people don’t know about bagels is, it’s a process — and people have to realize that they’re buying into that process. What surprises me is how many people want to do this. Every day. It’s just crazy.”
Working from a commercial kitchen in Fair Lawn, under the name BYOB Bagels — for both Be Your Own Boss and Build Your Own Business — George has helped open about 50 bagel shops on every continent except South America and Antarctica. She has improved what she calls “the bagel game” at another 20. ( About 38 miles west of her, in Hamburg, N. J., is another consulting firm, How to Open a Bagel Store, run by
Rob Goldberg, whose family owns about two dozen Goldberg’s Famous Bagels shops across the New York metropolitan area. Goldberg says he has consulted for about 20 independent shops.)
This wellspring of bagel know- how, recipes and innovation isn’t, as New Yorkers might imagine, some wizened man working in a basement kitchen in Brooklyn. It’s a largely selftaught Lebanese American woman across the George Washington Bridge in North Jersey.
“I have just this natural understanding of math. I can look at something and start building math formulas — rudimentary formulas, but formulas,” George said. “I wrote my first bagel recipe in the back of a Lebanese cookbook.”
Many of her clients are first- timers: architects, engineers, accountants, teachers, graphic designers and business people, all nursing a shared dream of everythingseasoned entrepreneurship, one fueled by the bagel’s simplicity and adaptability.
That approachability, though, can lead them to the mistaken assumption that bagels are easy to make.
“I just thought, ‘ How hard can it be?’ It’s bread and it’s schmears, cream cheese,” said Elizabeth Rubin, 55, an expatriate from Manhattan who opened Jimmy & Joan’s New York, a chic chandelierlit shop, two years ago in Gothenburg, Sweden. “It was so much harder than I thought.”
There’s the baking itself: days or weeks of trial and error, with different flours and enzymes, to replicate a New York bagel’s distinctive chewiness and crust; adapting the recipe to the local humidity and temperature; and adjusting the amount of time bagels need to “nap,” or proof.
But there’s also the marketing — how to shape expectations and build interest in a New York staple that, overseas, may be entirely unfamiliar.
“People didn’t understand why they had to pay the same price for bagels as compared to their sandwiches, because of the hole in the middle,” said Jonathan Jablonski, the founder and chief executive of Factory & Co., a Paris- based chain of 33 bagel shops, with another 10 set to open in the months ahead. “We had to explain the whole idea.”
While most of George’s clients seek to conjure what she calls “the authentic New York experience,” many aim to — or need to — incorporate local influences: a labneh yogurt spread instead of cream cheese in the Middle East, bagels with Emmental cheese in France. In Paris and Brisbane, Australia, where crowds lean more toward lunch than breakfast, bagel sandwiches feature pastrami or grilled halloumi.
“I can’t open a very neat bland place here — people would throw it in my face,” said Spurthy Akshar, 25, a corporate contracts lawyer in Bangalore, India. “Even McDonald’s here is so spicy because that’s what we eat here. It needs to be a burst of flavor. Give me that, and people will eat it every day.”
Akshar, enchanted by an everything bagel with cream cheese during a visit to New York City last fall hopes to open a shop this year, offering spreads made from paneer and local vegetables. Since the start of the pandemic she has been practicing in her home kitchen, sending photos of her progress to George via WhatsApp.
George stumbled into bagel consulting through her business partner, Frank Mauro, 81, a cheerfully truculent New Yorker who is a veteran salesman of bagelmaking equipment.
Their work together started with a challenge: In 2007, George, while working full time as a child- advocacy lawyer in Maine, started experimenting with spelt- based breads after discovering that her son was sensitive to gluten. What began as an at- home baking project swiftly gained a following among friends and family, and soon elbowed its way onto store shelves from Hannaford to Whole Foods Market. George called the business Spelt Right.
She contacted Mauro, the head of sales at Excalibur Bagel & Bakery Equipment then in Paramus, N. J., because she needed a device to help keep up with demand: the “bagel machine.” Mauro was skeptical.
“I said: ‘ Lady, trust me, it’s not going to work,’ ” Mauro recalled. “‘ But if you come down here with your recipe and if it works, I’ll help you with whatever you want.’ ” George drove home that evening with an Excalibur Bagel Divider & Former in her pickup truck.
Spelt Right largely fel apart in 2016, hit by a sudden spike in the price of spelt grain. But George and Mauro stayed connected and as he sold more bage machines around the world he began connecting customers to the woman who could teach them how to use them.
Among the first were a retired police officer and a social worker in Marathon Fla., who were mystified as to why their bagels kept puffing into blimps. ( Answer: Too much yeast in the air from the bakery that had previously occupied their space.) Soon after that, she flew to Factory & Co. in Paris, a city skilled at producing delicate croissants and light- as- air brioche but flummoxed by the bagel.
“People tried to do bagels with French style — it’s disgusting, it doesn’t work, it’s not the same,” said Jablonski, 40, the owner. “We needed her knowledge to improve on the bagel.”