Hand-Rolled Artisan Bagels in Salt Lake City: How Three Boston Friends Built Baby's Bagels From Ski Dreams and YouTube Tutorials

There's this moment that happens at Baby's Bagels around 7:45 on a Saturday morning. The pink neon sign glows through the window at 204 East 500 South, and inside, brothers Koby and Cyrus Elias and their friend Eric Valchuis are pulling the first batch of bagels from the oven. The crust crackles. The steam rises. And you can smell that distinct, almost sweet scent of properly kettle-boiled dough meeting high heat—something you just don't get from the grocery store bag stuff or the chain places.

"These bagels are real deal, chewy and flavorful," one customer wrote recently, and honestly? That's the whole point. Because what started as three friends messing around with YouTube videos in early 2022 has become Salt Lake City's answer to the question nobody knew they were asking: can you get legitimate artisan bagels in Utah that actually taste like they came from somewhere that knows what a bagel is supposed to be?

From Corporate Life to Ski Bum to Bagel Baker: The Unlikely Journey to Utah's Best Hand-Rolled Bagels

Here's how Baby's Bagels actually happened. Koby Elias left his corporate job in Boston—just walked away from the whole thing—to become a ski bum in Jackson Hole. His brother Cyrus followed not long after, because apparently the mountains and his older brother were both too hard to resist. Eric Valchuis came last, relocating with his partner after grad school in California during the pandemic, when everyone was making sourdough and questioning their life choices anyway.

"We all somehow ended up here, and once we got together, Baby's Bagels was born," Eric explains, and there's this self-awareness in how they talk about it. They're not pretending they went to culinary school or trained under some bagel master in Brooklyn. They just knew what good bagels tasted like from growing up outside Boston, and they were homesick for them.

So they taught themselves. YouTube tutorials. Trial and error. A lot of error, probably. "We had no idea what we were doing, but we knew what a good bagel should taste like," Koby says. For three or four months, they just experimented—mixing, proofing, boiling, baking, tasting, starting over. Their first sales were through Instagram, people ordering and picking up at a commissary kitchen in South Salt Lake. No storefront. No overhead. Just bagels and hope.

The name? "We're babies, you know. It reflects our sort of immaturity," Koby grins. Though the other story is that all his friends were having actual babies while he started a bagel business, which feels about right for your late twenties in Salt Lake City.

The Three-Day Process Behind Salt Lake City's Most Authentic Bagels

What actually makes Baby's Bagels different from every other bagel option in Utah comes down to time and technique. These aren't machine-extruded circles of bread-like substance. Each bagel at Baby's is hand-rolled—actually shaped by human hands—then goes through a three-day fermentation process that involves mixing, multiple rest periods at room temperature, up to two days in the refrigerator, kettle boiling, and finally baking on burlap-wrapped boards.

"It's not rocket science," Eric says with typical understatement, "but if you make enough bagels, you figure out what works—and what doesn't." The process starts Thursday with dough mixing and shaping. Friday brings the boiling and baking. And here's the thing about boiling bagels that most people don't realize—it's what creates that distinctive chewy interior and crispy, golden-brown exterior. It's the difference between a bagel and a round piece of bread with a hole in it.

They use organic flour milled right here in Utah by Central Milling up in Logan. The water's from Salt Lake City itself. "We don't call them NY Style, though they are clearly heavily influenced by traditional east coast bagels, these are Utah bagels made with Utah wheat and Utah water," Koby smartly explains, sidestepping the whole geographic gatekeeping thing that makes bagel discourse so exhausting.

The menu stays intentionally tight: plain, everything, poppy seed, sesame, and salt bagels. That's it. No blueberry. No cinnamon raisin. No "everything but the everything." "I actually liked the fact that they didn't have any sweet bagels," one reviewer noted. "If I wanted that, I would have gone to a doughnut shop, thank you very much."

What Actually Makes These the Best Bagels in Salt Lake City (According to People Who Eat Them)

The lox bagel might be the thing that converted the skeptics. Open-faced, stacked high with smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers, dill, and red onion on an everything bagel. "This was incredibly well-balanced," Salt Lake City Weekly's reviewer wrote after trying it. "The schmear is tart and creamy, the smoked salmon is fresh and bright, the capers add just the right snap of vinegary acid, the crunchy onions were understated enough to let the other flavors shine."

But honestly, people seem equally obsessed with the simpler stuff. The salt bagel with honey and butter has developed its own cult following. "The salt bagel with honey and butter is delicious," one regular notes. "I also love going with a classic egg n cheese on everything." There's something about that sweet-salty combination on a properly made bagel—the granules of salt catching the light, the honey soaking into those first warm bites—that just works.

The egg and cheese sandwich ($8, add bacon or sausage for $3) is what one reviewer called "a solid entry in our local breakfast sando hall of fame." And the fact that the bagel itself doesn't get lost under all those breakfast sandwich toppings? That tells you something about the structure and flavor Baby's has dialed in.

Then there's the cream cheese situation. Plain and scallion are year-round staples, but the rotating seasonal flavors are where things get interesting. Dill pickle has become a permanent favorite—"whipped cream cheese mixed with finely diced pickles and fresh dill. A Baby's classic." They've done elote during corn season, giardiniera with pickled vegetables, strawberry rhubarb, even a confit fennel and lemon zest that apparently blew minds.

"They also mix fresh ingredients into the cream cheese," one customer explains. "I'm a baby4life." Which is either the highest compliment or proof that the branding really worked.

The vegan muhammara sandwich deserves mention too—house-made red pepper and walnut spread with herbs, olive oil, and pomegranate molasses on a fresh bagel. "A Middle Eastern spread made with smoky red pepper and chopped nuts," as it was described, and apparently even non-vegans are all over it.

How Baby's Bagels Became Part of Salt Lake City's Local Food Movement

What's striking about the Baby's Bagels story isn't just that they make good bagels. It's how they've integrated themselves into Salt Lake City's actual food community rather than operating as some isolated bagel cult. They source from Kessimakis Produce for most of their fresh ingredients. They rotate their menu with the seasons—no hothouse tomatoes in winter, actual Utah peaches in summer.

"I think it's really important to have good sourcing," Koby explains, and you can tell this isn't just marketing speak. When they experimented with a BLT recently, they waited for local tomato season. The cream cheese flavors change based on what's actually available and fresh. This is small-batch craft baking meeting genuine farm-to-table principles, which in Salt Lake City's growing artisan food scene, actually matters.

"People have been incredible," Koby says about other food businesses in the city. "Other food businesses in Salt Lake are so open to helping, offering advice, and just wanting to see you succeed." Eric adds: "It's a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats kind of place." And you can see evidence of that in how Baby's has grown—from Instagram orders at a commissary kitchen, to farmers market pop-ups, to their permanent storefront that opened in November 2023.

The space itself fits the vibe perfectly. Funky artwork. Pastel colors. Subway tile spelling out "BAGELS" across the front counter. One spot on the floor where a brick should be is instead filled with little plastic babies encased in resin, because of course it is. "I guess we are the babies," Koby says. "It is Baby's Bagels, you know, sort of juvenile and immature."

There's outdoor seating on the sidewalk. The atmosphere is casual enough that you feel comfortable grabbing a bagel and eating it standing up, but thoughtful enough that you could absolutely sit down and make it an actual breakfast experience. And now they've even added Pie Boy Pizza in the same space Wednesday through Friday evenings (5:00-8:30 PM), which is either the most brilliant or the most chaotic use of a bagel shop you've ever heard.

Planning Your Visit to Baby's Bagels in Downtown Salt Lake City

Baby's Bagels is located at 204 East 500 South in downtown Salt Lake City, right in the Central City neighborhood. They're open every day from 7:30 AM to 2:00 PM, which means morning people get the warm-from-the-oven experience and everyone else needs to adjust their schedule accordingly.

The half dozen runs $15, individual bagels with cream cheese around $5-6. Sandwiches range from $8 for the egg and cheese up to $14 for the lox. It's not Costco pricing, but considering these are legitimately hand-rolled artisan bagels made with organic Utah-milled flour and actual technique, it's reasonable for what you're getting.

Pro tips from regulars: get there before 10 AM on weekends if you want the full flavor selection. The dill pickle cream cheese will sell out. The salt bagel with honey butter is worth trying even if it sounds weird. And if you're torn between the lox and the egg and cheese, the correct answer is to go back tomorrow and get the other one.

"The exterior of each bagel is crisp and golden brown, and the inside dense and chewy," as one thorough reviewer documented. "I'm happy to say that Baby's Bagels absolutely nails this." That texture—the slight crunch giving way to that dense, chewy interior—is the result of proper kettle-boiling and that three-day fermentation process. It's what separates real bagels from bread products pretending to be bagels.

You can order online for pickup at babysbagels.square.site, which is useful if you're trying to guarantee your favorites don't sell out. They also do wholesale and catering, in case you need to be the hero who brings legitimate bagels to your next office meeting.

Why Baby's Bagels Matters to Utah's Food Scene

Look, Salt Lake City isn't New York. It's not trying to be. But what Baby's Bagels represents is something that's been happening across Utah's food landscape over the past few years—people who actually know food, who've eaten well in other places, deciding they'd rather create what they're missing than keep complaining about it.

Three guys from Boston who love skiing and bagels taught themselves how to make professional-quality artisan bagels using YouTube and determination. They started small, grew organically, opened a storefront, and now they're the place where locals bring visitors when they want to prove Salt Lake City has real food culture.

"We always imagined creating something we wanted to see in the city, and I think we've done that," the trio says. And the thing is, they really have. Because now when someone's homesick for East Coast bagels or when a New Yorker's wife says these are her favorite bagels, that's not just marketing—it's three friends who refused to accept that good bagels couldn't exist in Utah and decided to prove themselves right.

The bagels are hand-rolled. The ingredients are sourced locally when possible. The process takes three days. And the result is legitimately the best bagels in Salt Lake City, which is exactly what they set out to make in the first place.

Follow Baby's Bagels on Instagram at @babys.bagels for daily flavor updates and that inevitable moment when they announce they're temporarily sold out for the day.