The unlikely queen of the bagel business

She’s taught dozens of entrepreneurs around the world how to make bagels — and money. In a back kitchen of a bagel shop on the outskirts of Toronto, Beth George is standing over a long wooden table assessing her materials with surgical precision. She’s as attuned to the movement of the staffers scurrying behind her as she is to the feeling of soft dough beneath her fingers. “Did we take the temperature of this? It feels cold,” she says as she kneads a long log of dough within an inch of its life, bagel earrings swinging wildly from her ears. Her student for the day insists he did, but she’s not convinced. George has flown from upstate New York to the back kitchen of Bagel Barn, a New-York-style bagel shop, to help proprietor Terry Perusini perfect the art of bagel-making. Today, Perusini’s Bagel Barn is in trouble. His oven conked out yesterday, he tells me. He had to close one of his two shops. Finding someone to repair it has been a nightmare. When he hears it’ll cost him $1.5k, he holds his head in his hands. “Do it,” she tells him. It’s a $40k machine — replacing it would cost far more, and take way longer. Beth George likens early mornings alone working with dough to a spiritual experience. (Photo by Jiatong Lu) George has been called the bagel whisperer, the bagel therapist, the world’s most sought-after bagel consultant. At 63 years old, George has trained her exacting touch and eye on nearly 100 shops in the last decade, she says, teaching sole proprietors across the globe how to bake the perfect bagel and, by extension, run a wildly successful business. She has clients in India, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. She has Palestinian clients and Swedish clients, a client who had been afraid to leave her husband until she found bagels and set up a shop, a client who moonlights as a kink scene DJ. Later, she’ll show the bakers how to handle the bagels more gently to encourage more fluffiness from the dough. She’ll demonstrate her secret sponge mixture (a pre-ferment that gets mixed into the final dough to boost flavor), and suggest tweaking the kitchen design to improve the flow. In this world, perfecting the details is what counts. How tough can it be to run a bagel shop? Pretty darn tough, it turns out, especially when everything is going wrong. That’s when you call Beth George. The world’s best bagel For more than 20 years, George has been on a quest for bagel perfection. “We can’t get perfection in this modern world. We cannot,” she says. But it doesn’t stop her trying. Her process, after 20 years of R&D, is as dialed in as it gets, she says. (Photo by Jiatong Lu) In 2005, George was working as a child advocate attorney in Maine. Her young son was struggling with digestive problems, and she began to experiment with gluten-free ingredients. She asked him what he missed most. “A bagel,” he told her. So she set out to make the world’s best gut-friendly bagel. Two years in, she’d set up a company, Spelt Right, which was soon supplying product to nationwide chains including Hannaford and Whole Foods. One day she called Frank Mauro, then head of sales at Excalibur Bagel & Bakery Equipment in New Jersey, one of the country’s leading suppliers, looking to buy a bagel-forming machine — the machine that shapes raw dough into rings. He wasn’t enthused. He’d seen dozens of attempts at creating healthier bagels end in misery. If her recipe worked, he told her, he’d help her with whatever she liked. She drove home that day with the machine and a business partner. For years, the duo drove around Jersey, Mauro offering tidbits of wisdom from his lifetime as the elder statesman of the New York bagel industry. George taught customers how to finetune their recipes and use the machines they sold. In 2023, Mauro passed away. The following year, George opened something new: a bagel shop that would also act as an academy for her visiting entrepreneurs. To become one of her clients is to enter into a 15-month contract for: Three days of bootcamp training just after they sign on, so they can source, design and build their own kitchen. Two two-day refresher courses (ideally during their build, and just before they open). Access to her fiercely guarded recipes (NDAs need to be signed). Budget spreadsheets. Plans for kitchen designs. A guarantee that she will be their bagel cheerleader, guide, and therapist, available all hours for SOS texts and calls. In return, George takes a five-figure consulting fee and 2% of the proceeds if proprietors sell their business within ten years. Unlike in a franchise model (“exploitative,” she says), she encourages bakers to build on her ideas. Perusini has added flavors like French Toast and Barn Spice to George’s original recipe. Smooth, carby, topping-laden works of art. (Photo by Jiatong Lu) Most people are too impatient to make bagels that are truly great, she explains. She scrolls quickly through her phone with flour-caked fingers, trying to find me a photo of an “impatient” bagel. Recently, one of the bakers at her Beacon, NY, shop, Bagel-ish, made a batch too quickly, rendering them unusable. When she found out, she was apoplectic. “Pull the bagels. We’re closing the store,” she said. By way of contrast, she pulls up a photo of a pile of golden orbs, a plain dozen she baked herself. They’re round. They’re light. They’re wrinkle-free. “These bagels are works of art,” she says. “They glow. My bagels glow.” For some clients, Perusini among them, she remains on call for years after, flown to second or third store locations to help staff recreate her version of the perfect bagel. Perusini started out in the music industry, earning a living licensing songs and making and selling mix CDs in the early aughts. As CDs faded into obscurity, he pivoted to another kind of disc with a hole in it: bagels. He knew the bagel shop in his hometown of Burlington was always busy because he was one of the customers standing in line. In 2020, he’d never made a bagel in his life. But the pandemic seemed as good a time to start. A quick Google search turned up a CBS morning show segment on a woman in Jersey teaching people how to make millions of both bagels and dollars. This was George. George in front of her own shop, Bagel-ish, in Beacon, New York. (Photo by Jiatong Lu) At Bagel Barn, which he opened in 2022, George pauses her kneading only to point out her arms, biceps the envy of her yoga instructor and pocked with burn marks from long days spent before an industrial oven. Right now, she’s guiding Chad Minicuci, a retiree who’s returned to the workforce as the baker at Perusini’s new location. George pounds, folds, and squeezes the dough as Minicuci watches. “It gets massaged?” he exclaims in disbelief. She smiles and begins to carefully patch a ring of dough; the bagel had come in a little light. “I have to make 330 bagels,” he objects. “You know how long it would take me if I did that?” “You know how many bagels I do, dude? Eight hundred,” she says. “In a week?” “No,” George replies, rolling her eyes. “In a day.” Bagel renaissance People have been arguing about bagels since at least the 1610s, when the Jewish community in Poland would gift rings of boiled dough to women in labor. By the late 1800s, bagels had traveled across Europe and crossed the Atlantic with Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Outposts in centers like Montreal, New York, and London began developing their own styles. (New York? Chewy on the inside, crusty on the outside.

Montreal?