Spielman Bagels

Spielman Bagels started in 2011 on Southeast Division Street in Portland, in a space later occupied by Scottie's Pizza Parlor, founded by Rick Spielman and his son Raf. Rick's original focus was shade-grown coffee, roasted in-house at a small café; bagels were a side project at first, made in batches of no more than a dozen a day, until the pair's "Portland style" recipe took over as the business's main draw. That bagel combines New York technique with a tart natural sourdough starter, milk, and honey, kettle-boiled before baking to produce what the company describes as a soft, doughy center against a crisp exterior. The business has since grown to four Portland-area locations, more than 60 wholesale accounts, and a catering operation. The father-son founding and the specific technical detail of the sourdough-starter, kettle-boiled process — arrived at through experimentation rather than importing a New York recipe wholesale — are the distinguishing facts here: this is a bagel built and refined locally in Portland rather than a transplanted East Coast formula, with an origin story rooted in a coffee shop rather than a bakery.