When we first profiled Emily Winston, it was 2017 and the Cornell- and Davis-educated engineer had just sold eight dozen bagels in 13 minutes out of her home in Alameda.
A series of pop-ups followed. Then Winston opened her first, highly anticipated bagel shop in Berkeley in 2019, on the site of the original Noah’s Bagels. Six years later, there are 12 Boichik Bagel outlets, including shops in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Larkspur, Walnut Creek and even two in Los Angeles, while the frozen bagels are available in stores or sold fresh in coffeehouses around the Bay Area. In 2023 she opened a factory in Berkeley, complete with robots that sling trays of bagels onto racks.
The origin story of the Boichik bagel has been told many times. In short, Winston missed the bagels she remembered from her New Jersey childhood, from the classic (if financially troubled) New York City chain H&H. So she decided to re-create them.
“This was done for my own personal benefit,” she told J. in 2017. “I’m a picky Jew who just wants an H&H bagel. No one here is trying to do that. All the chefs here want to make it their own, or make some kind of hybrid.”
The New York Times food critic Tejal Rao called Boichik “some of the finest New York-style bagels I’ve ever tasted” in a 2021 article, and Winston is no longer an independent home baker with bagel-rolling carpal tunnel syndrome. Now she’s a bagel kingpin. But she’s not resting on her laurels.
J. sat down with her to talk about how she got here, what she sees for the future and what it’s like to own a publicly Jewish business in the post-Oct. 7 world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So how does it feel to be a bagel macher and the big player on the California bagel scene?
It’s definitely snuck up on me. I still feel like the scrappy underdog, internally, but I’m not seen that way anymore. Now I’m a big dog.
How did you do it? The skills needed to make a bagel are vastly different from the skills needed to scale and run a business.
I think the miracle was that I developed the bagel in the first place. I didn’t have any baking background or culinary experience, so I think the craziest part of the whole thing is like, how come I’m the one that discovered this magical bagel recipe?
My training is as an engineer, so the factory piece is just: What can we do to make this, keep the product where I want it but make it easier and allow us to scale and allow us to make more bagels, and get more bagels to more people, and grow this whole thing?
I like to call it a benevolent bagel empire that I’m building. I grew up playing all these really nerdy computer games like Sim City and Civilization, so my natural state is thinking about stuff like this.
After the New York Times piece, I really did a lot of soul searching. I could sit here in my wildly successful bagel shop, or I could grow it. I’m like, “I’m going to get bored with one.”
Boichik is a very identifiably Jewish business. It’s clear when you walk in a store that it’s a real Jewish bagel shop. Was that intentional, or did it just happen naturally because bagels, and you, are Jewish?
That was by design. Just coming up with the name, I wanted it to be Jewish. I had that great moment with my grandmother where she looked at my hair and said I looked like a boychik [Yiddish for a young man]. I came to bagels because of my Jewish upbringing. My dad would be in the city and go to Zabar’s and H&H and Russ & Daughters. A big piece of my Jewish identity is the food.
How’s it been being a Jewish business over the last two years?
It has been very rough. We had the graffiti incident here, a lot of hate messages, a lot of really nasty stuff on Instagram, people trying to suss out if I’m a Zionist or not, demanding statements. The statement is: “We’re a bagel shop and we’re not involved, our business is making bagels.” People were livid about that.
I am absolutely one of the many who have been living in a happy bubble, thinking antisemitism was ancient history. I had never experienced it personally myself. I thought we’re all just happy multicultural people now, and we just celebrate everything. It’s been a very unpleasant learning experience the last two years.
What’s next for the expansion of the benevolent bagel empire? Are you going to take over the East Coast?
That could happen eventually. The crazy thing is my parents in central Jersey complain that they don’t have any good bagel shops around them anymore.
I think international is a possibility. I’m learning about franchising, and thinking that could be a possibility, but not just yet.
So many promising pop-ups go under. How have you been able to grow?
We used a lot of debt to grow. We reinvested all the profits. I sold my house. We did a crowdfunding campaign for over a million dollars; that’s also debt. [Backers were able to buy “bagel bonds” that pay returns.] I just recently did a friends and family equity round.
My parents were like, “How much do we own?” And I’m like, “Nothing, remember when you said this is a terrible idea, and you tried to talk me out of it?” Which they did. They said don’t put all of your money into this. This is not what we sent you to engineering school for, so you could open a bagel shop. They tried, really. They thought this was a terrible idea.
Once the New York Times thing happened, they completely obliterated from their minds that they ever thought this was a bad idea. Now they’re very proud. I think my mom has the article in her purse at all times. Just in case someone hasn’t seen it, she can whip it out.
Do you think of yourself as a leader in some way in the Bay Area Jewish community?
In a way, it does feel like I’ve created kind of a JCC, because everyone comes for bagels, there’s no actual religious practice needed. You can just come and enjoy a bagel. Before I started this, I had not met that many Jewish people in the Bay Area. Like, I wasn’t active, I didn’t belong to a synagogue. But as soon as I opened this, all the Jews came running. It’s cool.
I feel like I am part of the Jewish community. It feels meaningful to me. Especially after the last two years it feels good to have this. It wasn’t what I was thinking about at all when I decided to start this. It was just, “I’ve got a great bagel and I think this could fly.”