Serenity Bagel Rebranding to Radical Dough

I had no intention of starting any sort of business when this all began, I just wanted to eat bagels, to be honest.

Having spent the last decade or so of my life living in NYC and Philadelphia, I got in the habit of getting a bunch of bagels from great bagel places, putting them in the freezer, and having one for breakfast every day. When our family moved to Serenbe, I started trying to find good local bagels, came up short, and decided to try to bake a big batch in my oven to see if that would be close enough, and surprisingly, it was.

After a conversation and some shared bagels with Angie Yip, word started to spread and before I knew it there was enough demand for the bagels that I wouldn’t have any left for myself. As a big advocate of taking the craziest and most foolishly ambitious possible path in life, one thing led to another and we found ourselves converting our guest room into a commercial kitchen, putting a job posting online, and producing hundreds of bagels each week. Initially, they weren’t that great honestly, but every batch I made small changes and adjustments to the recipe until one week, they came out as good as any bagels I had ever had in NYC, and I knew we had something special.

From the start, my lofty dream was for Serenbe to have a real brick-and-mortar bagel shop, but it always felt so far out of reach. I have two preschool age daughters, a full time job I truly enjoy, and plenty of other hobbies - it just wasn’t viable to also open a restaurant in the middle of all that. But week after week, month after month, we kept going, and eventually assembled a small group of remarkable people who started to make the lofty dream look more like a real possibility.

I will never forget the way that I met Charlene Reis. After a comment on one of my many bagel-related facebook posts, I found out she had owned and operated a successful restaurant for over a decade before retiring to Serenbe. Somehow, I was lucky enough to have her and her husband Paul move in just a minute away from us. The day after they moved in, I showed up at their door, sat down at a folding table surrounded by moving boxes, and delivered my best effort pitch to get them involved. Somehow, it worked, and Charlene joined Serenity Bagel, hand rolling and baking hundreds of bagels to feed hungry Serenbe residents for months. When the opportunity arose to open a brick-and-mortar, she was the first one I reached out to as a partner, and she is now general manager.

Another important piece of the puzzle is Andy Blechman. We became friends after initially meeting at a Mado playground, and I invited him to the Serenbe Jewish events group despite not technically being Jewish myself (long story). Many months later, I remember him reaching out with the gentlest pitch for his startup, Bottle. He mentioned that it was an online platform for small food businesses, and might be a great fit for Serenity Bagel. I tried it out one week and never looked back - Bottle saved me untold numbers of hours building out and managing online order flows, and made it easy to build a list of 100+ residents who get texts whenever bagels are available. I will always be grateful for the value Bottle provided and for Andy’s friendship and patronage.

Once we started really mass producing bagels, there’s simply no way that this could have existed without the many employees that came on weekends to help with bagels through the year or so that we were producing at scale out of my guest room kitchen. I want to give my huge thanks to Shiann, Kaleb, Shayna, Stephanie, Susan O, Susan C, Susan L, Leo, Julian, Jonathan, Katura, Kayla, Kelley, Morgan, and Lynnette for love, care, and hours they put into making bagels for the community.

And finally, the biggest reason this all was able to happen is Joel Crovella. After an intro from Andy (thank you again), I sat down outside Halsa one warm afternoon to meet Joel and talk to him about the possibility of opening a real bagel shop in one of the commercial spaces he owned. I told him the whole story of how this started, was very upfront about the fact that I wasn’t sure there was much, or any money in this at all (there certainly had not been during my year of operation), and it was largely a community service.

He was entirely unbothered by this, loved the idea of a bagel shop in the community, and took it several steps further by not only becoming a partner in the business, but also funding the start-up costs, bringing in the fantastic idea of hiring neurodiverse employees, which he had seen in a bakery chain he loved in France. And on top of all that, he also brought in the incredible Rhonda Graves to also be a partner, handling HR and hiring. Rhonda and Joel had worked together before and she was looking for a product to sell in the inclusive retail project they had in common. Rhonda is very knowledgeable both in the Human Resources and the adaptation of the workplace to a neurodiverse population.

I remain astonished to this day that we are really opening an actual bagel shop in Serenbe. There is no chance that this could have happened without community. It started with community, it grew up through the support of the community, and community is what has taken it across the line from distant dream to reality. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to bake bagels for you all, and am looking forward to many more in the future. All that being said, I’m excited to announce that Serenity Bagel will now be Radical Dough. In our shop we won’t only be serving bagels, we’ll have lots of other options as well, and it felt like an appropriate time for a re-brand as we transition from guest room to real commercial kitchen.

It will still be the same wonderful people, and the same bagel recipe and process, the dream is just expanding to be a little bigger. Community will always remain our founding principle, and we all hope to continue being part of this community in a real way 💖

Cheers to a more bagel-y Serenbe,