Hot on the high street: Funny business

Canadian former comedian Larah Bross tells Henry Norman how she founded her Bross Bagels business, which is based, appropriately enough, in Edinburgh...

As well as being Scotland’s most visited tourist destination and a truly stunning city in its own right, Edinburgh also has a very decent claim to being the comedy capital of the world. While New York and London are home to arguably the two largest and most important comedy circuits, the Scottish capital has been host to the Fringe Festival since 1947, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the globe annually for the month of August.

Bross Bagels owner Larah Bross has, however, been lured into the stunning city on a more permanent basis – and initially by her love of food as much as for comedy. “My main background is in performing – and some would say it still is!” she laughs. Canadian-born, Larah graduated from theatre school in Montreal and was immediately hired by Disney straight away. She was employed to help launch its cruise lines and travelled the world as an entertainer for four years before moving to America. “During my time in New York, I performed in numerous comedy shows, including Caroline’s on Broadway and made it big as a bartender!” she recalls.

The move to the Scottish capital came in 2006 when she got a job working for Tom Kitchin, though she also kept her hand in on the arts side, founding a youth theatre group in the Portobello area. “I ran that for 10 years,” she remembers, “while continuing with my passion for performing and stand-up comedy. I was part of a sketch comedy group at the Stand Comedy Club and I went back to University in Edinburgh to study film.”

Larah certainly made a success of this too, working with the Documentary Institute, STV and the BBC while she studied, and even winning an award from The Royal Television Society for a documentary she made. However, when she started a family, she was reminded of just how much she longed for the food of her childhood –specifically “the tasty, traditional hand-crafted Montreal bagel with combinations of the best fillings”. 

This ultimately led to her opening her own bagel shop in 2017. “It wasn’t because I had any experience in business or baking, but because I needed a side hustle and Scotland didn't have any bagels,” she says. “On day one, the Portobello shop had a queue of people along the street waiting to sample our bagels, and I haven’t really stopped to look back since”

The fact was that Larah had become frustrated with the direction of her performing career, and this coincided with her having her favourite comfort food – bagels, naturally – sent over from home. “The business was an act of spite initially,” she laughs. “In an act of bagel-fuelled defiance, I decided on a whim that I was going to start a highly successful bagel shop and I would show them! To my astonishment it actually took off, and I then had to run to catch up.”

This it certainly did, and Bross Bagels soon boasted shops in Stockbridge and Bruntsfield, as well as Portobello, which is home to the business’s in-house bakery, which is also the first in Edinburgh’s that is specifically dedicated to bagels. Then last year, the business opened its biggest venue to date – the first Bross Deli at St James Quarter, the city’s first ever Jew-ish deli of its kind.

Embracing a holistic approach, further afield, the company also runs a national deli delivery service, delivering its bagels to cafes, restaurants and homes across the UK. And if all that weren’t enough, last summer it launched its first pop-up outside of Edinburgh, in Brighton’s Shelter Hall Market.

So, as someone who clearly been a huge fan all of her life, what is the secret of a good bagel? “The process and the care,” says Larah. “Getting your hole is all about the journey – it requires careful preparation.  We hand craft all of our bagels in our own dedicated bakery in Edinburgh.  They are hand rolled and boiled in sweet water before they’re baked, which gives them that extra chew and unique flavour. 

“Our Portobello Bakery boasts the UK’s only bagel baking Morretti-Forni stone fired oven and an open plan space that gives our customers the chance to see the passion, craft and care that goes into individually hand rolling and boiling the traditional Montreal bagels that we’ve become known for.”

As we all know, bagels are absolutely delicious – indeed, this piece of knowledge alone seems to have been enough to fire up Larah’s business initially – but are they in any danger of being cancelled in these carb-conscious times? “Scotland is a country that eats deep fried pizza,” laughs Larah. “In the healthy eating hierarchy, they are one up from salad.

“We do have healthy options and use fresh ingredients, but bottom line is, they’re tasty. Tasty wins every time. I feel like I’m an exercise enabler. Nobody’s going for a run after some watercress, whereas after a bagel, you’ll be bounding up Arthur’s Seat like a stag in the spring rutting season.”

As to who this clientele is mainly made up, Larah insists that bagels are a broad church, saying: “We attract a very mixed customer base. The two things they tend to have in common is good taste and a high tolerance for a hyperactive Canadian woman shouting double-entendres at them over lunch.”

As to what they are most likely to be enjoying, the best-sellers are The Big Apple, which is made from pastrami, jack cheese, dill pickles, mayo and mustard; The Chicken Parm (which can be made chicken or vegan) – chicken schnitzel, mozzarella, marinara sauce and jalapenos; and The Montreal – cream cheese, lox, pickled red onion, dill and a squeeze of lemon. “The Alan Cumming Burns Bagel was very popular last month,” says Larah. “I’m sure if Burns was around today, we’d have poems like To a Pretzel - A Holes a Hole for Aw That… the options are endless.”

To this end, Larah’s one piece of advice to anyone looking to replicate her success is: “If you do decide to use a suggestive pun such as ‘Have you had your hole?’ in your advertising, be prepared to have it shouted back at you in the street… at weddings… at bar mitzvahs…. on an hourly basis. Also, try to avoid expanding just before a two-year pandemic!”

Happily, though, business is now booming again at Bross Bagels, and Larah intends to continue using it to satisfy her joint loves: food and personal expression. “Creativity is at the heart of Bross Bagels – we’ve always got plans – the challenge is in choosing the ones least likely to get me in trouble,” says Larah. “So stay tuned.

“We will only stop trying to enchant and surprise you when I’ve either hung up my hole-sters or I’ve finally gained my mother’s approval.” The good news for the happy customers of Edinbugh and beyond is that she quickly adds: “Neither’s happening anytime soon.”

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