The nutty thing about it is you just couldn’t find a real bagel in Kansas City.
Barbecue, absolutely. Great steaks, sure. But a genuine New York-style bagel? Nowhere in sight.
Not anymore, though. Janna and Pete Linde decided to bring a little New York City to Kansas City in the form of a revered, circular hunk of dough with a hole in the middle.
The Lindes opened a kosher bagel restaurant called Meshuggah Bagels last week at 1208 W. 39th St. in Kansas City, Missouri. The bagels, along with the fish and shmears, are certified kosher by the Vaad HaKashruth, courtesy of Rabbi Mendel Segal. The menu: plain, everything, poppy seed, sesame seed, garlic, onion and salt.
Meshuggah also will offer lox (the real thing, Janna said); smoked nova salmon; whitefish salad; whole-milk cream cheese schmears (plain, garlic herb and salmon) and a few varieties of yogurt, all from Green Dirt Farm in Weston, Missouri; milk from Shatto Milk Co. in Osborn, Missouri; coffee from Maps Coffee Roasters in Lenexa; a variety of fruit juices; and carbonated beverages. (Note that the milk and yogurt are not certified kosher.)
The restaurant occupies the first floor of a renovated three-story house and has a dining area that can seat 25 to 30 people. The Lindes had started looking for a storefront in Overland Park because of its sizable Jewish population, Janna said, but rents were high, so they started looking in the Midtown and Westport areas because of their more-affordable rents and central location in the Kansas City area.
“We found this building and thought it was charming and cute,” she said.
Meshuggah, by the way, means “crazy” in Yiddish. More on that in a minute.
The Lindes live in Kansas City, Missouri, just outside of Liberty. They started a wholesale bagel-making operation last November in a 2,500-square-foot commercial kitchen in Pleasant Valley, Missouri. They’d found a used, 10,000-pound Baxter oven for $10,000. It had done its duty in a bagel shop on Long Island. They also found a piece of equipment called a divider-former that can crank out as many as 4,000 bagels an hour.
“We intended to do this as a wholesale business only,” Pete said. “Things kinda flipped after we saw an article in The Pitch about the Bagel Bash (which is held every Dec. 24, this past year at the Westport Ale House). We donated 350 bagels for the event.”
Pete’s originally from Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, so real-deal bagels are in his blood. Janna’s from Independence; she started out in life with a bagel deficit. She and Pete took a trip to New York in 2011, though, and the bagel bug bit her.
“We went to 72nd Street Bagels in New York City,” Pete said. “She bit into it and said ‘Wow! This is crazy delicious.’ (Hence, Meshuggah Bagels.) After that, when we’d go back east we’d take an extra suitcase and pack it full of bagels to bring back home. We always talked about, when I retired from Ford, figuring out something else to do. Really abstract things. Dinner talk. ‘This town really needs a bagel place.’ We never thought it’d be a reality.”
Pete still works at Ford Motor Co.’s Kansas City assembly plant in Claycomo. He’s worked at Ford for 27 years and has three years left until he can take full retirement. Janna was a sales manager for Del Monte Foods Inc. and traveled extensively in her work. She injured her knee last year and had to take medical leave.
“I was burned out,” she said. “He kept saying ‘We need to do this.’ So I resigned.”
Now they’re both resigned to paying proper homage to the bagel. And just what exactly is it that makes for an authentic New York-style bagel?
“Number one is high-gluten flour,” Pete said. “It affects the texture and taste. Number two is it needs to be boiled before being baked. That loads the dough with moisture and creates a skin on the outside. When that skin makes it into the oven, it gives you that crusty outside.
“The first four to five minutes of the bake is done on wood boards, with burlap that’s been soaked in water laid on the wood,” he said. “You pull the bagels out of the boil, put the topping on and set them on the burlap, topping-side down. The water off the board further moisturizes the dough. It also allows the bagel’s crust to harden enough that it doesn’t stick to the oven’s baking stones, after removing them from the burlap.”
Ah. So that’s it. And the secret of the bagel’s power?
“In New York, it’s a part of life that’s taken for granted,” Pete said. “You wake up on a Saturday, run out and get a dozen bagels, some schmear and some lox.”
The Lindes plan to make 1,200 to 1,800 bagels for the restaurant on each weekend day. The restaurant will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. On Mondays, they’ll rest from their retail bagel toil. They also plan to continue their wholesale operation for their catering business.
“I’ll do all the marketing and run all the storefront’s daily operations. Pete will get up about 4 or 4:30 every morning, except Monday, to start making dough at the commercial kitchen. Then our staff of bakers will take over. After Pete gets off work at Ford, he’ll go back to the commercial kitchen and start on the next day’s dough,” Janna said.
The Lindes don’t belong to a congregation, but they do plan to stay open to other opportunities like Bagel Bash to support events in the Jewish community.
“We recognize that the Jewish Federation has been instrumental in setting us on the course that we’re on, and we’re loyal,” Pete said.
Pete easily hits the heart of why he loves the bagel business.
“It’s filling an unmet need in the Kansas City market,” he said. “And it’s fun. Every time somebody who’s a transplant from New York or New Jersey bites into one, they look at us with a sense of deliverance.”
