When Lanty Hou met her husband Will Sacks in 2018, one of the first things she texted her sister was, “He makes really good bagels.”
Soon after, they went on a first date at Miss Ada, a popular Israeli restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Sacks, a Jewish New Yorker, tried octopus for the very first time, and Hou, who grew up in Taiwan, tried hummus.
It was a formative experience for the couple. “Food can taste like this? This is something I’ve never tried or experienced before,” Hou, 34, remembers thinking. “Something definitely clicked in our brain of what it means to discover the world together through food.”
Six years later, the couple — who also had their wedding reception at Miss Ada in 2022 — merged their culinary worlds: Last year, the pair launched a bagel-baking business, Bagel Joint, serving up homemade Asian-Jewish bagel creations like gochujang and miso bagels as well as hybrid baked goods like garlic bialys and saffron rose jam rugelach.
“She’s Taiwanese, I am a Jewish New Yorker,” Sacks, 31, told the New York Jewish Week. “This fusion is something that we’ve been playing with in our kitchen for a long time.”
Sacks, center, and Hou, front, pose with their Bagel Joint team at a recent farmer’s market, where they celebrated their first anniversary selling bagels. (Courtesy)
For now, Bagel Joint’s goods are available every Sunday at the Park Slope and McGolrick Park farmer’s markets. But soon, their creations will be available on a more regular basis: The couple are opening a brick-and-mortar store at 230 Calyer St. in Greenpoint this fall.
What makes Bagel Joint stand out, Sacks said, is their embrace of other ethnic flavors alongside traditional Jewish classics. Their elaborate creations include “The Transmitter,” a take on a tuna salad sandwich, made with a miso seaweed and salt bagel, confit spicy tuna salad, cucumbers, lettuce and yuzu kosho mayo. They’ve also made Thai green curry bagels, fig and olive bagels and Piri-Piri bagels, and bake up other fusions of baked goods like matcha yuzu black and white cookies, and savory babkas like a salted duck egg and taro babka.
Their August menu includes a classic plain bagel, a duck egg bagel, miso scallion bialys and cream cheese in flavors like Kalamata olive, harissa and scallion pancake.
“It’s amazing that in a world full of rainbow bagels and chocolate chip bagels, someone has not tried to approach flavors inspired by what makes New York amazing, which is this mosaic of communities,” Sacks said, noting that a high proportion of bagel rollers in New York are Thai or Latino. “It’s really a beautiful story of immigrant food in America and has been passed down over time through the past 150 years and we’re paying tribute back to that history.”
A gochujang everything bagel from Bagel Joint. (Courtesy)
According to Sacks, the store will continue in the tradition of Jewish appetizing stores in New York City and will be kosher-style, meaning it will serve only dairy and pareve (neither meat nor dairy) options like fish.
“We’re not going to have bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, which I know will hurt some feelings,” Sacks said. “But it shouldn’t be counterculture to not serve bacon with all the amazing things you can do with fish, like our lox sandwiches or our miso nori and salt bagel with wasabi cream cheese, smoked tuna and cucumber salad.”
“By using honest ingredients in an authentic way with a new spin,” he added, “we’re saying ‘This is what being Jewish in 2024 looks like.’”
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The couple met in graduate school studying music business at NYU, and bonded over baked goods and on outings with friends. “Lanty was always bringing matcha loaves or banana breads to class, and I was always making baguettes,” Sacks said. “We were always hosting things at NYU to just entertain and make food for people. It’s one thing that always really brought us together.”
Hou, who moved to New York in 2016, learned to bake from her mom, and has early childhood memories in Taiwan making sugar cookies and apple pies. “My mom was the biggest inspiration for my baking and cooking journey. I loved to stay in the kitchen with her when I was little and she just started to teach me everything she was making,” she said.
Sacks, meanwhile, who grew up in Weston, Connecticut, learned to make challah and hamantaschen from his Aunt Elise. As an adult, he constantly experimented with sourdough and other baked goods and concocted his own bagel recipe through trial and error.
During the pandemic, the couple — like many others — decided to take their baking to the next level. Sacks began posting videos of their bagel creations on the internet in January of 2023, gaining a small legion of fans who made requests each week for different and unique bagel creations using flavors like tahini, matcha and rosewater.
By the time summer rolled around, Sacks left his full-time job to be able to bring the bagel business to farmer’s markets.
“For the first month, we were baking out of our apartment, and it was absolutely brutal — we had to buy a second fridge to load specifically full of bagels,” Sacks said. “We didn’t have any other groceries in our fridge, and we were boiling the bagels on our tiny half size stove and baking them six at a time, starting at 10:30 the Saturday night before and ending at 5:30, 6 a.m. before bringing them to the farmer’s market to sell through the afternoon.”
Just over a year later, Hou has also left her full-time job in music marketing. The couple now has a staff of three and they’ve been baking in a commercial kitchen ahead of their forthcoming move to a permanent storefront. They’ve raised over $19,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to help turn their “multicultural bagel stand,” as they call it, into a retail store — though they’ll continue to sell their bagels at both farmer’s markets after opening.
They hope to open the store by Rosh Hashanah, on Oct. 2. “We’re a bagel shop, but we are embracing all forms of Jewish bakery and I really like the idea of Rosh Hashanah, with the honey cakes and round challahs,” Sacks said. “It would also be a really sweet time to open.”
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