I love portraits like this, as the lifestyle is so far from anything I experience in my day to day.<p>Along these lines, although this seems very tame in comparison, I'm reminded of the "A Day in the Life" chapter from Anthony Bourdain's <i>Kitchen Confidential</i> (which I highly recommend):<p>"<i>Thanks to my Bigfoot training I wake up automatically at five minutes before six. It's still dark, and I lie in bed in the pitch-black for a while, smoking, the day's specials and prep lists already coming together in my head. It's Friday, so the weekend orders will be coming in: twenty-five cases of mesclun, eighteen cases of GPOD 70-count potatoes, four whole forequarters of lamb, two cases of beef tenderloins, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat, bones, produce, seafood, dry goods and dairy. I know what's coming, and the general order in which it will probably arrive, so I'm thinking triage -sorting out in my head what gets done first, and by whom, and what gets left until later.</i>"
He then worked 15-hour days, seven days a week for seven years.<p>"I've never worked less than 65 hours a week," he says.<p>He's barely gotten outside of Vermont and Montreal because of the schedule. Now, fortunately, he gets a day off on the weekend. He's recently been to both Connecticut and Boston.<p>NOOOOPE.
He makes/sells on average 250 to 300 dozen bagels per day. The bagels sell for $10 a dozen, so that's over $2500 revenue on the bagels alone. He's open 6 days a week, so that's $15,000 per week, or $780,000 per year.<p>His bakery is also a diner/deli, and I'm going to make the assumption that the revenue from that covers all his non-bagel costs. The ingredients in a bagel cost less than 10 cents each, or about 10% of the selling price. So he could net about $700,000 per year.<p>Not a bad gig, if he could cut back the hours a bit.
The Montreal spice bagels here are very good! It's the perfect weekend morning spot located in an old warehouse that has a vintage furniture store on one side and a used record/book store on the other. After I'm finished with my bagel and coffee, I love taking time to explore the other shops. They always have weird and interesting stuff.
I've been to this bagel shop multiple times and I can attest that it's good. It's in a pretty rundown building with an unpaved parking lot. It just goes to show that quality is not always about aesthetics.