A NEW YORK BAGEL SHOP IN THE MIDDLE OF BUENOS AIRES
August 13, 2020
I always get lost on my way to Sheikob’s Bagels. No matter how many times I have walked the 20 blocks from my house, once I reach the intersection of Uriarte, I forget whether I need to walk two blocks to the left or the right. I crane my neck outwards and strain my eyes tightly searching for a circular sign that hangs over the awning. On it is a black-and-white illustration of the smiling face of Jake Eichenbaum-Pikser, which under normal conditions, is the first thing you see once you walk through the front door. Of all the restaurants I have visited so far, an empty Sheikob’s Bagels, with its karaoke nights and pop-ups and busy weekend afternoons, is the strangest to see in full pandemia mode. it’s strange to see him in a mask, it’s strange to see the bagel bike in the corner, it’s strange not to hear someone playing the piano.
I follow him and cook Thania Monasterios around the kitchen as they prep giant vats of homemade cream cheese, roll out dozens of bagels and run back and forth between the kitchen and front-of-house where Johnny Ortiz reads off orders from three different apps and mans a one man assembly line of white fish, lox, corned beef and cream cheeses. The team feels completely in sync.
“The human aspect is always the trickiest. It is always changing. People are people. People are complicated. There are frictions. Add to that the psychic stress of the quarantine, we definitely hit a very low point as a team. We got through it and everyone is feeling good again,” Eichenbaum-Pikser explains, “It’s weird because quarantine is kind of nice sometimes not having customers. The energy is so different. Energy in a restaurant is frenetic. Everyone feels everything. Right now the team is in a pretty good place which is the most important thing to me right now.”
The native New Yorker started selling bagels from his bicycle outside of cafés six years ago. Today, he manages a brick-and-mortar operation and the only bagel shop in town. I came to talk about his consistent efforts to bring more sustainable practices to a casual dining experience. The more I sit down with people like Eichenbaum-Pikser, the more I realize that these restaurants don’t belong to a monolith. Yedra, Donnet and Americano may have incredibly similar goals to Sheikob’s Bagels but all of their realities are wildly disparate. Each and every restaurant is its own universe and when interacting with emerging sustainable foodways, they react from different gravitational pulls.
I sat down with Eichenbaum-Pikser to talk about the limitations of ‘cheap food’, the problems of buying ecological ingredients, an emerging market compounded by an economy in perpetual crisis, and the need for more bottom-up community models to bring sustainable practices closer to all small restaurants.
Jake Eichenbaum-Pisker rolling out bagels; a bacon egg and cheese on an onion bagel.
Sheikob’s Bagels has consistently worked towards being more ecologically conscious in terms of sourcing organic vegetables, trying to move away from mass-production meat or fish and has faced a lot of difficulties as a small business and as a bagel shop that has a different business model and diner expectations from other restaurants that we tend to think of within the sustainable restaurant framework. Tell me where you are at right now.
We have always been really dedicated to working almost exclusively from scratch. Pretty much nothing is bought pre-made. We buy American cheese but that’s really it. We make everything in-house and we do things the slow, hard way. There isn’t very much corner cutting. So take cream cheese, on the one hand it doesn’t make sense to buy it because all the decent cream cheese here is really expensive. But also, we know exactly what goes into our cream cheese. It’s milk, cream, culture, rennet and salt. That’s it. We want to do what we can to bring the consumer just a little bit closer [sic] a little further up the supply chain. Most people don’t even have a concept of where their food comes from, how it is produced or sometimes even what it is. But at the same time, we sell a shit load of salmon and bacon. We are contributing to a consumer culture that is not good for the world.
Tell me more about that balancing act.
We face a real problem with what we can and cannot purchase. With vegetables, it is more or less doable because our margins are a little higher on vegetables. We order organic when we can but the problem is that the quality is often inconsistent. The way we work as a restaurant, our volume of produce is really small because we are making sandwiches. We aren’t making big plates of anything. So for a company that sells to big restaurants that do way more covers than us but also each cover involves half a kilo of fresh produce, we just aren’t important clients to them. They’ll tell us that they are out of something before they tell someone else. We sort of get the runts of the litter. And with other stuff, the price becomes completely inaccessible or the product is simply not available.
Fish I would imagine is the most difficult thing.
There is no sustainable fish market here. You can choose to use local, ocean fish which for certain things might work for us. For our white fish we use anchovy which is plentiful and it comes from closeby in Mar del Plata. But the crux of a bagel shop is what do you do with lox. There is a very narrow range of fish that you can use that creates an eating experience which is like eating lox. Salmon, you know, there is just no sustainable salmon that is accessible in Argentina. And the trout fishery industry in the south of Argentina is as deplorable as the salmon fisheries in Chile. If it isn’t exported so there are less controls. My idea was always to find a sustainable fish source like surubí [a native river fish from the catfish family] and introduce it to the menu alongside our salmon lox but charge the salmon at an exorbitant price. Which is honestly how it should be charged. But the idea is to discourage people from buying it and encourage this better alternative. I found a fish hook up for artisanally caught river fish in Entre Rios and it took roughly a year to get through this whole process of setting up the logistics of figuring out a feasible volume, ordering consistently, getting the fish here, getting it to the guy that smokes fish for us, we were working with a restaurant called Anchoita to bring fish down to us because they had a truck that was bringing them fish. We were really just getting ready to start implementing that and then the pandemic hit and obviously we had to jump ship.
What are the invisible complexities of you having to source all this directly? I mean, why did that take a year to build out?
For everything, not just the fish, there is an added issue that these are emerging markets and so a lot of purveyors, even if their price is reasonable, they are new small businesses that are totally off the books. The food industry historically in this country is precarious from all sides. People pay their employees under the table, they don’t account half of what is sold and purveyors equally avoid giving you receipts. So it is a mixture of all these things. Before the pandemic, the challenges of sourcing were already complicated. In the pandemic it has become harder. Selling everything online, we have zero margin for purchasing anything without a receipt. We need a legal receipt for absolutely everything. Our pool of purveyors has been really cut. A lot are just going to tell you buy from someone else.
That’s a good point and something that Donnet pointed out too. She has had to change her entire menu and some of that is because a lot of purveyors don’t want to work with her now. A lot of organic produce shifted from restaurants to selling mixed bags to the public and actually, now that I think about it, at home everything I have bought from co-op bags has been strictly cash only. In addition to the barriers around volume, does the public perception of what a bagel can cost considering what it is, the size of it, it being a daytime place, I’m eating with my hands, it’s a sandwich, that must limit you too.
It is all that. Our price point to me is to some extent fixed by what we sell. It's a bagel, it's a sandwich, it shouldn’t be expensive and I agree with that too. I’ve never thought, man, I really wish I could sell my bagels at twice the price. It also comes from a place that has been ever evolving and this intense struggle in the Argentine economy, what has happened with inflation and the major expansion of the wealth gap, what one person considers a reasonable price for lunch and what another person considers reasonable, they are miles apart. I can’t compete with a sandwich de milanesa the size of your head for 200 pesos, in terms of quantity of food and price, I just can’t compete and I have had to accept that. Which is a bummer because the bagel is such an everyman food, it shouldn't be an elitist food. But yeah, of course that limits certain things we can buy and there is the other thing which is that purveyors sort of run on their own schedule. They change their prices everyday. They aren’t on our retail schedule. So that creates a lot of challenges for us with this labor intensive product that is limited by a certain price point when trying to incorporate ingredients that are more expensive.
Sheikob’s Bagels started out of your bicycle selling outside of cafes 6 years ago and then has been in this location for about two and a half. Were you always thinking about the ecological aspect of food or did that come later?
It came later. I was always conscious of using seasonal produce but that was more from a culinary standpoint than a philosophical or political standpoint. It’s better. It tastes better. But from a political standpoint for me at least initially it was too small. I didn’t think about it because I wasn’t even a drop in the bucket. I didn’t feel a responsibility because I didn’t feel like I had enough reach to influence the way people were thinking about food or enough volume to affect the industrial flow of food. The responsibility came later when I felt like I was influencing to some small extent the way people eat, and also, now if I'm going through 20 kilos a week of smoked salmon that is real. That is me contributing to a food system that I don't agree with and know it is bad for the people eating it, the people fishing it, for the planet, it’s just bad. So that is where it became really important to me to figure out an alternative which I say to you now as I currently sell salmon without an alternative because my alternative came and went. Everything about ecological sustainability, it's something I am very interested in but it is very new for me. Social justice is something that is more familiar to me.
Tell me how this move towards a more sustainable business manifests itself in the social aspect.
Social justice is something that has been central to my life, my upbringing, my primary school education. It was always clear to me that regardless of what we were doing here, this being a shitty or exploitative work environment, I had no interest in being a part of that. That to me is not a moveable piece for me, like Oh well maybe if we exploit our staff a little bit, we could buy more organic vegetables. To me the human effect, that immediacy of how this project affects the lives of the people who are working here, that’s most important to me. It’s much more controllable too. If I buy organic vegetables, it’s cynical, yeah, it would be a drop in the bucket. It’s not going to change the global food crisis. Whereas if I treat my employees well, and they can earn a decent living, and they aren’t abused, those are eight people who are living better lives. I think that at its most basic, it's not nice to work in a place where people aren’t happy. It also affects a business, especially in the service industry, you can immediately tell when people are being mistreated, they are working somewhere they don’t like and those people will take something else the second they get the opportunity to. But more important than that, beyond it being just sound business, the way this grew the thing that helped me maintain a perspective that was focused on the worker experience is that I was the only worker at the beginning, then it was me and one other guy who was my friend Laucha, who still works with me, and then three of us and so on. And all along the process I was just another co-worker. That’s not fair to say because I was making decisions. It was my project. But in terms of the way that hours were worked out and salaries and vacations and all of that it was always a two way communication because it was the only thing that made sense at that point. I didn’t have a shop where I could say ‘hey this is your pay these are your hours’ that would have been a ridiculous attitude so as it grew organically from that perspective. And also because I enjoy working in the shop, it's not something that I am looking to move away from. I'm a boss but I'm also a coworker and therefore I understand the experience, I understand when things aren't working or a policy doesn't make sense or is inconvenient. I experience that too while I'm working here.
And you mentioned the trouble of inflation, I’m sure that must really affect what you can pay people too.
It’s impossible. And we don't pay great salaries. The truth is, I don't know currently what people are paying. The last time I had some concept of where other restaurant salaries were at I knew we were above that and that is the goal because it is ridiculous what most people make at restaurants. Working at an independent restaurant is just not the way to get paid. We have no tips. This isn’t a sit down restaurant. People use that excuse, like you make shit but you have tips. We haven't given our employees a raise in quarantine, obviously, look at our books we have no money. But if you look at what the peso has done, everyone needs a raise. We don’t have it. The issue of inflation is really difficult. The reality is that profit does not scale with inflation and the only way you could keep up with inflation is if profits scale alongside it, but everytime there is a peak in inflation you lose margin, you raise salaries and lose a little more margin. Up until now I have felt good with the frequency that we have given raises. You can maybe make more money somewhere else but I don't know if they’d enjoy their job as much but that also sounds so lame. We do everything we can to make sure we are taking care of everyone with the tools we have.
Yah, I think about that a lot about how pay works here and how you change that system to create a better economic ecosystem. It’s more complex here, because, at least in my opinion, a lot of bad policy that doesn’t really reflect the economic realities of the country or the nuances of different restaurant or small business models. And it’s a bit what you say, the system presents different limitations and a lot of this boils down to choice and choosing to be as humane as you can within the current structure. Obviously, you are in the middle of this, but where do you see potential solutions to a lot of these problems?
That’s a hard question. It’s been such a funny adjustment that I've had as a small business owner because I grew up thinking the higher the taxes the better to funnel into social welfare programs. Now I'm starting to realize that there should be brackets. It doesn't make sense to tax everyone the same thing. Income taxed at 30% is the difference between this being a job I can live off of and not. That really encourages this informal economy in a lot of sectors. I would love to have some faith in people from my experience, if it were more reasonable, I don't have a problem paying taxes. If I can make a living working hard but earning enough to live doing 100% formally, I'm going to choose to do that. People don’t do that when it is economically infeasible, when you can’t stay afloat. But then a lot of things, they need to come from the bottom up and not the top down. With the farming, in the States I have a very close friend who is a farmer and she is a member of the Young Farmers Network that is basically that, it is a group of young farmers that help each other give workshops about farming and accounting and all the different aspects of running a small business and I think those are the models that those sort of networks can work both for farming and restaurants. Government subsidies or changes to legislation help but when you are talking about structural changes to the way people consume and produce food, I don’t think that top down is the way. I think that happens when we are all more connected to one another. And I see that as a business owner, the only way to really achieve a positive work environment is through constant communication. You always have to be talking and you always have to be willing to listen. You have to sit down and talk: what are we doing? What are we doing wrong? How is everyone feeling? What can we do to make this better? It’s easier to kind of look the other way but this has to come from the base.
