When it comes to bagels in this city, everyone and their mother-in-law has an opinion — prompted or not — on what constitutes a good nosh.

Some like the thin, sweet Montreal-style, others swear by the big, doughy hurt-your-jaw type. And then there are factions, like myself, who believe the only real “bagel” is a Gryfe’s.

“It’s a style” all on its own,” says Moishe Gryfe, 67, owner of the eponymous and legendary Gryfe’s Bagel Bakery at 3421 Bathurst St., between Lawrence and Wilson Aves.

“A very light, easy to eat bagel.”

And small enough to devour in about three bites.

Customers complain, Gryfe says, that they buy a dozen and only make it home with six. “Put them in the trunk,” he says he tells them.





Gryfe — and his parents — have been deflecting these kinds of “criticisms” ever since they created this bagel, they say, several decades after his grandparents opened their first bakery in Hamilton. Gryfe doesn’t know the exact date, but says it was about 100 years ago — around 1915.

You won’t be shocked to learn that such grievances haven’t hurt business. Quite the opposite.

Every day, staff mix, shape, boil and bake more than 1,000 dozen of these uniquely Toronto spheres, Gryfe says.

More than they did when I was little and woke up early every Sunday morning to queue, alongside my dad, outside the humble store, which still looks exactly as it did back then. Customers in the mid-1980s would line up around the block to get a few dozen “Gryfe’s” fresh out of the oven.

God forbid they should sell out before you made it to the front!

And to think — it all happened by accident, Gryfe says.

A customer to the family’s Augusta Ave. bakery in the 1960s asked the matriarch if Gryfe’s, then a general bakery, could make her a dozen bagels. She said yes, Gryfe says, and scurried to her husband shouting: just do it, throw some flour, make a bagel!

Protesting that he didn’t know how to, Gryfe says, his arguments were no match for his wife’s meddle as a salesperson (she could “sell ice to an Eskimo,” Gryfe says of his late mother). And so he did as he was told.

What turned out wasn’t so bad, he says.

Over the years, Gryfe’s father tweaked the recipe — and so did Gryfe, who learned the bagel trade alongside his dad. Once, the young boy, trying to make a batch from memory, altered it slightly by accident and again — it turned out pretty good. Even better than before, his father had told him.

That iteration was much like the nosh sold today, Gryfe says.

It’s a secret combination of flour, water, yeast, sugar and salt that commands several hulking, hot ovens, a small army of staff and lingering puffs of fragrant flour that hang in the air at this north-Toronto store. Ten varieties of it, including the original poppy seed, sesame seed, whole grain and flax, are shipped to 150 stores, Gryfe’s says — every day.

But, best to buy them hot and fresh and from one of the wire baskets at the front of the store, where they’re tossed straight from the oven.

That is when they are at their absolute best, in my opinion — a deliverance of moist, squishy dough cradled in a thin, shiny, crisp crust. Like a savoury Krispie Kreme doughnut but with a lot less sugar, of course, and infinitely more compatible with tuna salad or lox and cream cheese than a toothache and early onset diabetes.

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“Simple,” is how Gryfe’s describes them. For me, it’s the beautiful taste of nostalgia.

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Watch Gryfe’s staff make Toronto’s iconic light bagel at thestar.com/living