Holey Rollers: A handmade bagel renaissance is underway in Philadelphia.

Everything, plain or togarashi-spiced, bagels have having their day in Philly.  

A baker's dozen from newly opened Knead Bagels.
Maria Pouchnikova

Shaped to celebrate a victorious king’s stirrup, a gift for women after birthing a child or a Polish Lenten bread, there are plenty of stories about the beginnings of everyone’s favorite cream-cheese companion, the bagel. But up until very recently, there weren’t all that many good bagels being rolled, boiled and baked in Philadelphia. 

Last week, husband and wife duo Adam and Cheri Willner opened the doors to their newly minted, new wave bagel shop, Knead Bagels (725 Walnut St.). 

They met while working at Rittenhouse BYO Matyson, where Adam became brunch czar.. Bagels were one of the first things he put on the menu. 

“The first thing I think about when planning a menu is what do I want to eat and I’ve always been a big bagel fan,” Adam says.

He had little baking experience, but he tackled bagel-making head-on. 

“A lot of my baking background is self-taught,” he says. “A lot of reading and trial and error and research, developing and understanding what makes good bagels and trying to recreate that.”

With a bagel-baking formula worked out, he soon had bagels — a plain, an everything and a rotating special — on Matyson’s brunch menu every weekend. 

The Willners began thinking about opening their own bagel shop about the same time they decided to have a baby. “We didn’t want to do late nights anymore,” Cheri explains. “With restaurants, you get home at 1 or 2 in the morning. We decided to switch so we can do early mornings, be home for dinner and spend time with our son. He just turned 1 in October.”

When Cheri was pregnant, she made regular visits to her obstetrician’s office at the Penn building at Sixth and Walnut, and she’d walk past a floundering coffee shop — where Knead is today.

 “We just kept seeing the space and this was it. This was the spot,” Cheri says. 

Their selection of serious bagels includes both the traditional and non. You can get an egg and cheese on a crisp-chewy poppyseed bagel (don’t ask for ketchup, though, there’s a strict no-Heinz policy) or a toasted garlic bagel with cream cheese.

But why stop there when you see their nontraditional offerings? The menu is ripe with nods to their tasting-menu days at Matyson, with a black sesame-studded bagel smeared with kimchi cream cheese and a fennel-and-sea-salt bagel finished with a bright, roasted tomato cream cheese. And classic Jewish deli gets its due, with a pastrami-spiced bagel topped with elegant, smoked chopped liver. And while Adam has never been a fan of the cinnamon-raisin bagel, he’s created a Moroccan-spiced apricot bagel with a tangy lemon-goat-cheese spread to placate those with a taste for sweeter bagels. 

Over at High Street on Market (308 Market St.), head baker Alex Bois is championing the most innovative bread program in the city. Along with lovely loaves using locally milled grains, he has a few bagels on the menu. (Bois also makes bialies but he says they’re really quite different. Bialies are the “bad boy of the bagel world. I love bialies. They’re basically like little pizzas.”) 

Coming from a bread-baking background, Bois was not familiar with bagel-making when he started out. “The process is kind of its own thing. They’re boiled before baking so that’s like no other bread … besides some variants of pretzels. The seams have to be nice and tightly sealed or else the water can get into the dough and waterlog it, which is the opposite of what you would do with a nice, wet bread dough,” he explains. 

And unlike the majority of loaves that Bois bakes, bagels don’t benefit from long fermentation. “I try to push the limits of fermentation a lot on all of the doughs,” he says. “That doesn’t really work with bagels. They get too holey and they suck up water.”

Bois’ bagel production at High Street is fairly limited, putting out just a few dozen a day, but he prefers it that way. “I think that bagels are only really good when they are relatively fresh. They lack the keeping properties of other breads. That high surface area. It’s the same thing with baguettes. It’s not a bread that’s meant to last,” he says. 

The bagels that don’t get toasted for the morning crowds are sent next door to Fork, where they’re sliced into bagel chips and served with smoked trout caviar and dilled cucumbers. 

Smoked fish and bagels are a classic matchup, so it’s not all that surprising that Philly Style Bagels, a Sunday morning pop up, came about over a side of cured salmon. Collin Shapiro and Jonathon Zilber were beer-stocking colleagues at The Foodery who began getting together on weekends  to experiment with process-based food projects, like brewing beer and making beef jerky. 

“We cured fish one day and we didn’t have any vehicle to eat the fish with. It was a Sunday and we had the ingredients to make bagels just out of our pantries so we did it, and they were great,” Shapiro remembers. “But looking back at it now, they were awful.”

That was two years ago and since then Shapiro and Zilber have perfected their Philly-style bagel recipe.

“It basically follows all of the traditional handmade processes of bagel-making, but the thing that specifically makes it Philly style is that instead of using honey like you would with Montreal bagels or barley syrup as with New York bagels, we use beer in the water that you boil the bagels in. It’s Yards IPA,” Zilber says.

“When we first pour the beer in in the morning, it starts to smell like a brewery … really malty and a little bit hoppy. I would say after they’re baked, it’s more of a subtle flavor — but it has the function of sugaring the outside of the bagels so that the crust is shiny. It’s basically the same function as malt powder or barley syrup or honey — it’s just more Philly because this is such a great beer-drinking town,” Zilber says.

It’s also a collaborative town. Along their path to bagel-recipe perfection, Shapiro and Zilber landed jobs as baristas at the Queen Village coffee shop Shot Tower. It was there that they met Joe Beddia, proprietor of Pizzeria Beddia (115 E. Girard Ave.), a one-man pie operation. The Philly Style guys worked out a deal to use Beddia’s pizzeria, complete with Earth Bake oven, for their periodic Sunday morning bagel pop ups.

About three Sundays a month, Philly Style makes 360 bagels — plain, scallion, veggie and smoked salmon cream cheese plus gravlax, coffee from local roasters like Reanimator and Elixr and mini babka buns baked by Shapiro’s girlfriend, Ashley Horowitz. 

Since kicking off Philly Style Bagels in the spring, Shaprio and Zilber have been consistently selling out. All of the buzz is generated via word of mouth, Instagram and Twitter. 

Zilber and Shapiro are still working full-time at Shot Tower, but plans for opening a brick-and-mortar Philly Style Bagel outlet are well underway. The pair is looking at storefronts in Fishtown. 

Shapiro and Zilber hope to keep it simple, expanding the menu to include egg sandwiches and perhaps some Jewish deli staples like pastrami and whitefish salad.

One of the biggest questions weighing on their minds is whether or not to stick with the kitchen setup they have now.

“Do we want a pizza oven?” asks Zilber. “Most bagel shops don’t bake their bagels in a pizza oven, but that’s what we’ve been doing.”

With fine dining vets, seasoned bakers and weekend-food experimenters getting in on the bagel game, Zilber says, “It’s a good time to be a bagel eater in Philadelphia. It’s probably the best it’s ever been.”