Yeastie Boys Bagels is full of personality, just like its owner and founder Evan Fox. With eight locations around Los Angeles, the vibrant truck is full of delicious New-York style LA bagels and creative combinations … with fun names – mainly pop culture and music references – to go with them.
When Fox started Yeastie Boys Bagels in 2014, there were not a lot of bagel options in Los Angeles. What started as a side project with a friend – experimenting with bagels in an LA apartment, and delivering them to tastemakers, mostly in the music scene, and posting funny bagel memes on Instagram – is now a thriving LA business.
“It’s been pretty wild,” Fox told the Journal. “I’m grateful and blessed to be here, but also, thinking back, it’s been a journey.”
Fox grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his mom would always have fresh bagels from their local spot, Chompie’s, in the house – egg bagels, sesame, plain – along with tubs of cream cheese.
“It was my favorite thing to eat after school,” Fox said. “Growing up on Jewish cuisine, deli cuisine, I didn’t realize it at the time … how deep [that] food … impacted me and how important it was to me until I moved away.”
A musician, Fox was on tour with a band when he had his first New York bagel. This was around 2006.
“That was it for me,” he said. “Every time I went to New York after that, when I moved there, every day, that was what I was eating.”
When he moved to LA, he realized that – with a few exceptions like Western Bagel, Diamond Bakery and Cantor’s – the city was lacking in the bagel department.
Fox had been working in the food industry – front of the house – through high school and college and while working as a musician, so he understood restaurant culture and hospitality. He wondered how he could make an impact in a place like Los Angeles.
A “hype man” by nature, Fox loves promoting things he is passionate about. He is definitely passionate about bagels. Fox said he has hired some amazing, talented bakers and chefs over the years, who have helped him refine the product.
“For the most part, the menu is pretty much what I think people like,” he said. “My whole thing for Yeastie Boys is, ‘How can I make something that people want to eat daily, that’s a quick bagel, that’s a classic that you’d get in a bodega in New York. … How can I take the old classics and make them more refined [and] more current?’”
Fox’s top three favorite bagels are sesame, egg and an egg everything bagel.
“I used to eat bagels every day, multiple times a day, when I was first starting,” he said. “Our first account was Swingers Diner, and I remember delivering [piping hot cheddar] bagels to them every morning … I gained a lot of weight those first few years for sure.”
He is now a once-a-week bagel eater.
“Thankfully I have a really solid crew who can taste them and test them out,” Fox said.
What makes a good bagel?
“I like a New York style bagel – they are very plump, they have got a nice chew, they have a nice sweetness to it, usually from barley malt,” he said. “They have a nice crust when you bite into it, but it’s soft and chewy in the middle; I would say that is like my favorite style of bagel.”
While Yeastie Boys is known for the New York style bagel, there are newer-style bagels, Fox explained, that are like a sourdough; they’re very crunchy.
“It’s closer to like a Montreal-style bagel, which I really like too, but it’s a totally different experience,” he said.
Remember, making a great bagel takes time.
“A lot of that flavor develops in the dough and leaving it in the walk-in cooler overnight [or] a couple days and boiling the bagel properly [makes a difference] … and you gotta really massage the dough,” Fox said. “It’s a multiple-day process, so when you get a bagel that tastes off or just okay, you’re probably getting a bagel that was mixed and boiled and baked all in one day; you’re missing flavor, you’re missing texture, and so on.”
If you really want to up your bagel eating experience, plan a trip to Los Angeles – and Yeastie Boys – or check out the bagels in New York and Montreal. However, Fox explained, there are plenty of hidden bagel shop gems around the country. For instance, there’s Flower Moon Bagel in New Orleans – where Fox did a Yeastie Boys pop-up for the Super Bowl. Plus, Nashville, Seattle and Dallas have vibrant bagel scenes. Oren Salomon, owner of Starship Bagel in Dallas, was just nominated for a James Beard Award, the first bagel ever to be nominated.
If you think of all the types of bagels out there, and options of what you can put on them, it’s never-ending.
“We have our set menu, but it’s really like a secret menu; it’s like a thousand plus item menu,” Fox said.
This is true whether you like spicy, cheesy, sweet, savory or mix and match. Yeastie Boys does a lot of pop-up activations, as well.
It’s latest, in partnership with Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This,” introduced bagel lovers to “The Hot Rabbi:” soft-scrambled eggs, melty American cheese, fresh avocado with a kick of hot sauce on a toasted everything bagel, “The Meet Cute:” a plain bagel with creamy whipped ricotta, fresh fruit and honey on a toasted plain and “The Mitzvah:” a twist on the classic bagel and lox with dill and lemon schmear, watermelon radish, caper vinaigrette and pickled onion on a sesame bagel.
“There’s endless combinations and I feel like we haven’t unlocked even half of them yet,” Fox said.
Learn more at YeastieBoysBagels.com and follow @YeastieBoysBagels on Instagram.
For the full conversation, listen to the podcast:
Debra Eckerling is a writer for the Jewish Journal and the host of “Taste Buds with Deb.” Subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Email Debra: [email protected].
