When Pete and Janna Linde opened their first Meshuggah Bagels shop on West 39th Street in 2016, selling authentic New York-style bagels in Kansas City required more than just baking — it required an education campaign.
“For the first two years, we were truly educating people,” Pete Linde told The Chronicle. “It was literally ‘Bagel 101’ on what this strange round creature is.”
“We had a spiel for every customer” to school them about New York-style bagels,” added Janna Linde.
Meshuggah bagels, the Lindes told newcomers, are made without preservatives and with dough that is boiled before it is baked — a process that loads them with moisture and creates the skin that becomes the bagel’s crusty, chewy exterior.
Ten years later, as Meshuggah Bagels celebrates its 10th anniversary, no explanations are necessary for bagel-loving Kansas Citians. They have embraced Meshuggah Bagels and the touch of Yiddishkeit it brings to the metro.
“We’re really grateful that Kansas City has been so receptive and supportive,” Janna Linde said.
Meshuggah Bagels has dominated The Pitch’s annual “Best of KC” readers’ poll, securing the top spot for “best bagels” every year from 2017 through 2026. The local staple now operates four locations across the metro.
Their original Westport shop is still a hit with customers, as is Meshuggah’s downtown location in the Power & Light District, its full bakery and storefront in Overland Park, and its Liberty-area shop in northern Kansas City. The Westport and Overland Park locations are kosher.
The business has also helped create a local bagel culture built around fresh bagels, lox, whitefish salad, schmears and the familiar ritual of picking up a dozen for home.
Like many Jewish-American success stories, Meshuggah Bagels’ origins can be traced back to a long-vanished Jewish world. Pete Linde’s lineage includes Jewish bakers from Eastern and Central Europe, with family roots tracing to Russia, Lithuania and Austria-Hungary. He suspects his passion for bagel-making is woven into his DNA — but it was a talent that lay dormant for decades.
Born in New York City and raised in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, a love of bagels was part of Pete Linde’s upbringing. But the thought of making his own had never crossed his mind.
“I never baked anything until we got motivated to do bagels,” Pete Linde said.
Linde earned an engineering degree from Columbia University in Manhattan and a graduate degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He joined Ford Motor Co. around 1989 in Dearborn, Michigan, before transferring to the assembly plant in Claycomo, Missouri, in 1997 and moving to the Kansas City metro. He spent 28 years with Ford and worked as a vehicle engineering supervisor before retiring as Meshuggah Bagels grew.
Meshuggah Bagels founders Pete and Janna Linde.
Janna Linde grew up in Independence and spent about a decade in the food industry, including work as a national director for Del Monte Foods.
The couple met in Kansas City in 2011 and married in 2014. On a 2011 trip to New York, the Lindes stopped at 72nd Street Bagel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, bought an everything bagel with whitefish salad and carried it into Central Park. It was Janna Linde’s first authentic New York bagel.
“I took a bite and I said, ‘This is crazy delicious,’” she recalled.
On later trips to New York, the Lindes carried an empty 27-inch suitcase and returned with it packed with bagels to freeze at home.
Pete Linde at the time complained Kansas City was a “bagel desert” and talked about opening a shop after retirement. While recovering from a knee injury that required a leave from her job, Janna Linde told her husband they should “just do the bagel thing now.”
Their initial plan was a modest wholesale operation that could draw on her grocery-industry experience while he continued working at Ford, provided he could first make a bagel worth selling.
His first effort was not reassuring.
“They were miserable, bumpy, ugly, doughy, gooey, tasteless things,” Pete Linde said. “They were terrible.”
Consumed by his mission to find the ideal bagel recipe, Pete researched traditional methods and filled a notebook with adjustments. His KitchenAid hand mixer came out late at night, and Janna Linde stopped eating dessert to save room for the next round of bagel taste-tests.
Pete Linde also sought guidance from a family friend who had operated a bagel shop in the Washington, D.C., area. Whenever he ran into a problem, he called or emailed for advice. He spent about a year refining the recipe, recording every adjustment in a notebook while Janna Linde sampled each test batch.
It took 73 versions before they knew they had found the right one.
“One night, I took it out of the oven, and it was just great,” Pete Linde said. “We realized we had it.”
By November 2015, they had opened a 2,500-square-foot commercial kitchen in Pleasant Valley. They bought a used 10,000-pound Baxter revolving oven that had served a bagel shop on Long Island, along with equipment capable of shaping thousands of bagels an hour.
Their breakthrough came through the Jewish community. After learning about the Jewish Federation of Kansas City’s annual Bagel Bash on Christmas Eve, the Lindes invited organizers to tour the bakery and sample their product.
With help from local kosher supervisors, the Pleasant Valley kitchen was made kosher in time for the event. Meshuggah donated hundreds of bagels.
The first batch of fully kashered Meshuggah Bagels.
For many Bagel Bash guests, it was love at first bite. Jewish community members posted about the bagels online and called the Lindes to ask where they could buy them. Some bagel lovers showed up at the Lindes’ unmarked production kitchen hoping to make a purchase. The company also began filling orders for Jewish community events and made weekly sales to Ram’s Cafe kosher eatery on the Jewish Community Campus.
Three months later, the Lindes opened their first storefront inside a renovated house at 1208 W. 39th St. A line ran down the block, and sales exceeded their projections by 300% during the first week. The second weekend was just as busy.
New York-style bagels, the Lindes soon realized, were a hit in Kansas City.
Meshuggah’s production operation still provides for the Liberty, 39th Street and Power & Light stores, with a full bakery inside the Overland Park location.
Their dough is formed and allowed to rise overnight before being boiled, dipped in toppings and placed topping-side down on wet burlap-covered boards. After several minutes in the oven, the bagels are flipped onto baking stones to finish, producing the glossy, firm crust and dense chew Pete Linde remembered from home.
Pete said Meshuggah bakes an average of more than 1,600 bagels per weekday, with production at around 3,600 on weekends.
Meshuggah’s salmon, lox and whitefish come fresh from a fish house in New York, where each order is cut and packed the day the Lindes call. The fish travels through LaGuardia Airport in Queens and is picked up at Kansas City’s airport, then served to customers fresh, never frozen.
“I think that is one of our biggest secret weapons. Our fresh seafood is delicious,” Janna Linde said.
Meshuggah’s Jewish cultural ties extend to its distinctive logo and name. While brainstorming design ideas for their first shop’s logo, Janna Linde found a pen-and-ink drawing of three Hasidic men that caught her eye.
The Lindes showed it to an artist neighbor and asked him to use it as a starting point. He photographed Pete Linde, placed his face on one of the figures, made the image more cartoonlike and added a bagel.
“He showed it to us, and we were like, ‘OK, no changes required,’” Pete Linde said.
As for the business’s name, Janna Linde said she and her husband were driving and “kicking a bunch of names around” when “Meshuggah” came up. The Yiddish word, meaning “crazy,” was familiar to many of their friends, and the couple believed it was a name that worked for their business.
Meshuggah expanded with its Overland Park shop in 2017, followed by the downtown location. Its original Liberty location developed a strong weekend following but closed in 2021. The business returned to the Northland in 2024 in a better-positioned location with a drive-thru. Its performance upended one of the Lindes’ early assumptions about where a traditional bagel shop could succeed.
“We realized we can have a location in Liberty, Missouri, in the right spot, that does as well as the middle of Kansas City,” Pete Linde said.
The company’s longevity is also due to the passion of its longtime employees, the Lindes said. Its head baker in Pleasant Valley joined Meshuggah a week after the first retail shop opened, while its head baker in Overland Park joined before the first retail location was finished. One manager has been at the 39th Street store for over six years, while another longtime manager has worked with the Overland Park operation for nearly half a decade.
“They’re part of our family,” Janna Linde said.
The couple wanted a profitable business that also allowed employees to build stable lives, a goal they contrast with the indifference of many large companies.
“The big corporations today, there’s so little of that,” Janna Linde said. “They just don’t care, and we do.
“We want it to be a business that’s profitable, but we want it also to be a place where people can make a life for themselves and make enough that they can live by it and stay with it,” she said. “We’ve managed to succeed with it.”
Kansas City’s bagel market now looks very different from the one Meshuggah entered in 2016. New bagel shops and bakeries mean the Lindes have direct competition after years in which they had little or none, confirming the demand for good bagels has grown well beyond customers who once needed “Bagel 101.”
The Lindes have responded to growing competition with seasonal products, including red, white and blue bagels for Independence Day; Kansas City Chiefs-colored bagels; and World Cup-themed offerings, while protecting the process that built their reputation.
“You have to keep things new and exciting,” Janna Linde said. “Mix it up and still stay true to our quality and roots.”
