Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Stephen Brown, Eltana Bagels

The Canadian cities of Montreal and Toronto have an old-fashioned rivalry unlike anything we see in the US, more intense than Noo Yawk vs. Beantown, more nuanced than Tinseltown vs. Frisco. Stephen Brown grew up in Toronto but attended McGill in Montreal, which introduced him to Montreal's surpassing gift to North American cuisine: the bagel. Hand-rolled, dense, chewy. An entrepreneur at heart, Brown does nothing by accident. By the time he graduated, he had decided that one day, when the time was right, he would open a bagel bakery and deli.

What most startups lack, Brown posits, isn't customers but a mechanism for customer engagement. So he gave his bakery an offbeat name, Eltana. It sounds vaguely Hebrew (not a bad thing, given the product's ethnic background), but it's not a real Hebrew word. The point of the name, the only point, is that customers will ask what it means. And what the question creates is an opportunity for the staff to engage with the customers. (There's no sign pointing to the restrooms, either.) Brown and his managers hire new employees based on their candor and generosity of spirit in addition to standard abilities to deal efficiently with a diversity of job duties. Answering the same question a dozen times a day? Shouldn't be a problem. "If it were a real word, it would mean something like 'God's Bread Basket.'"

Lots of stores offer what Brown calls BSOs, bagel-shaped objects, but they're not bagels. "A hole and a soul" is Eltana's bagel. Seven varieties, from plain to salted to "everything." In Montreal, you used to buy a bagel for 50 cents; in Seattle, it'll set you back a buck and change.

Eltana opened on Capitol Hill, and is on track to build five more stores (Seattle Center, South Lake Union, West Seattle, the east side). The existing wood-fired oven at 12^th & Pine cranks out 900 dozen bagels a day, with plans for a commissary near Seattle Center. There's technology in place to flash-freeze par-baked bagels with liquid nitrogen when they're 75 percent baked, then finished onsite in convection ovens, a new batch every 15 minutes.

Ironically, customers want to buy hot, fresh bagels even though they really need to cool for an hour to set the crust. Waiting! Now, that's a hard sell. But-more opportunity for engagement-you can do a crossword puzzle while you wait. A new one every week. "What many of us wish we could say we'd done more of this year? GOTSOMEEXERCISE."

Bagels are one of those products that seem unnecessarily complicated. First you mix the dough, which you roll into thickish ribbons. Then you pinch a length of dough, form it into a circle, and boil it in water with a bit of honey. Only then do you roll the bagels in a generous amount of "toppings" (salt, garlic, sesame seeds, etc.) and send them into the low-ceiling wood-fired oven. And they're not giant bagels, either, not truck tires. Vegetarians love the spreads: red pepper & walnut, eggplant & pomegranate, and a spicy garlic cream called za'atar. A terrific mashup of Mediterranean street food and Jewish comfort fare.

Grant Jones, KuKuRuZa Popcorn

KuKuRuZa, the gourmet popcorn outfit that got its start in downtown Seattle, is doing gangbusters. New stores are, ahem, popping up literally all over the world: Japan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ballard, Bellevue (technically, the kiosk in Bellevue Square called Popcorn Pavilion was owned by a couple who bought KuKuRuZa from its founders four years ago.) Still, a terrific success story. Two dozen flavors, half sweet, half salty, from an espresso-dusted "Seattle" to a chocolate-drizzled "Tuxedo" to a "Maple Bacon" and a "Buffalo Bleu Cheese." The "Hawaiian" is flavored with pink rock salt; the "Brown Butter & Sea Salt" tastes like old-fashioned "movie theater" popcorn.

Photo courtesy of LinkedIn

The word kukuruza is Russian for "maize." Kukuruznik is a nickname for crop-dusting airplanes, or a jibe at Nikita Kruschchev, who was wont to order random plantings of corn in the former Soviet Union. KuKuRuZa's corn comes from Nebraska, a "mushroom" variety that looks like kernel corn candies; it puffs up beautifully when air-popped at the company commissary in the International District. Except for that movie-theater version, which requires an all-white "butterfly" strain that breaks open when it pops to better absorb the brown butter.

A philosophy major at UW, Grant Jones (and his wife, Ashley) had run Popcorn Pavillion for three years when Robert Hicks approached him with the offer to sell KuKuRuZa, which back then had just the one location in downtown Seattle. (Hicks's wife, Laura, had come up with the name.) With the enthusiasm of a puppy, Jones began expanding and franchising the concept. Just this month, the company opened its second store in Japan, in a Tokyo suburb. "The demand for our product is so high," Jones notes, "that the average wait at our new store is just over two hours."

And it ain't cheap. KuKuRuZa is sold by volume, not weight, and a one-gallon bag runs $16. A four-flavor variety pack will set you back $39. At the corner of Third and Pike, tourists wander in for samples and walk out with a "flight pack" of seven flavors for $19 or a $48, two-gallon gift tin. You may scoff, but in Japan, let me remind you, they stand in line for two hours just to get in the door.

The small team at headquarters tries to develop a new flavor every month. Right now, it's lavender lemonade, but the backlist (to use a publishing term) has some 75 titles. Pumpkin Spice Pecan turns up, as you might expect, once a year.

October 2014

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle; his blog is www.Cornichon.org, and he has just published a new book " Home Grown Seattle: 101 True Tales of Local Food & Drink"