How things have changed. In the last year or so, bagels have been the word when it comes to St. Louis restaurant openings. First there was Union Loafers’ sophomore effort Bagel Union in Webster Groves. Then C & B Boiled Bagels opened in Wood River, Illinois. We got Lefty’s Bagels in Chesterfield, and direct-to-consumer efforts such as Benny’s Bagels.
The latest opening to join this bagel revolution is Baked & Boiled Bagels (1801 South 9th Street). It had its soft opening on Saturday, September 23, in Soulard.
It seems like we can officially call this a movement.
“I had no idea when we started anything was happening at all,” says Baked & Boiled Bagels’ owner Alex Pifer. “I guess it was just a weird little freak accident or everyone just realized at once we need more bread.”
Baked & Boiled takes over the storefront formerly home to the Sweet Divine. It’s a corner location with large windows and a few tables inside and out. Visitors will be met by a bakery case full of the goods and a large chalkboard menu of bagels, cream cheese flavors and drip coffees. There’s a clear view into the shop's production space, where Pifer and a small crew can be spotted rolling bagels throughout the morning.
Those bagels have mostly classic flavors such as everything, plain, poppy seed, honey wheat, and pumpernickel rye as well as cream cheeses such as plain, scallion and smoked salmon.
“As a chef, I don’t want to get bored,” Pifer says. “We're trying to get into some other stuff that’s a little bit more exciting. So we have our seasonal stuff like the jalapeño cheddar, and there was a sea salt, and we're moving into the white chocolate pumpkin right now, which tastes like a doughnut. It's absolutely fantastic.”
Pifer’s favorite is the pumpernickel rye (“it’s a little denser, and it is 75 percent whole grain”) or the chocolate chip (“really nostalgic”).
Right now Baked & Boiled is open 6:30 a.m. until it sells out (usually about 1:30 p.m.) Thursday through Saturday, with hours starting at 7 a.m. on Sundays. Pifer says she is trying to add a day every week with the goal of being open every day except Wednesday.
“We're kind of also trying to add a new cream cheese every week,” she says, teasing a “nice veggie” to be added soon. She’d also like to add some meats, possibly in collaboration with area restaurants.
Though this shop has been open less than a month and in the works only since landing on the space in April, Baked & Boiled has been around for a bit longer than that.
Pifer, who is from Clearwater, Florida, is a trained chef who has been working in the industry in one capacity or another since she was 14. She moved to St. Louis in 2020 after the restaurant she was working at, Iron Hen Cafe, in Greensboro, North Carolina, shuttered during the pandemic.
She noticed that while restaurants were suffering, bakeries that normally provided wholesale goods were opening their doors to customers and doing well.
“I've always loved bagels,” Pifer says, noting that she worked at the bagel shop next to her high school. “My senior superlative in high school was ‘most likely to show up with bagels.’ Then we moved to St. Louis, and I realized that there were no good bagels at the time. So I started baking them, and people started buying them, just making them for friends and baking for myself, and we just haven't stopped rolling bagels since then.”
In May last year, Pifer made her casual bagel thing a real business and started providing bagels to Wild Olive Provisions in Shaw and then added a stall at the Tower Grove Farmers' Market. She began thinking that it was time to move to a physical location as she outgrew the limitations of working in her home kitchen and then in a shared commissary space.
When her realtor suggested the Soulard space, Pifer knew she had her spot, the perfect place to add more real bagels to the St. Louis scene. That devotion to the form also explains the name Pifer picked for her business.
“Real bagels are boiled first,” she says. “I want to make it very clear.”
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