We were lucky to catch up with Audrey Gebhardt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Audrey, appreciate you joining us today. Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

Originally, we were a large scale catering company making enormous charcuterie boards for corporate events and weddings. Pretty much overnight it seemed like that disappeared, we had dozen of emails in our inbox cancelling events. We sat tight for a few weeks and then decided to turn our home into a micro wedding venue, realizing how many displaced couples there were that still wanted a special wedding experience. We ran that for two years (@treehauscolorado) and will be either closing that down this year to focus on the catering business that has come back to life via our new restaurant, or moving it to a different location that’s larger!

Audrey, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Audrey Gebhardt and I work in the food and hospitality industry. I started a catering company at 15 years old and now 12 years later I own a restaurant and a wedding venue. After choosing not to go to college to pursue a career in food, I fell into the restaurant industry and LOVED it. A few years of bartending and serving at all different kinds of restaurants led to a desire to open my own. When I met my now fiance, I asked him (who at the time had experience as a chef in similar scale restaurants to the ones I had worked in) if he’d want to get back into the restaurant industry one day and he was like ‘absolutely not’. Four years later we own a NY style bagel shop that moonlights as a multi-concept dinner space. On Thursday nights we serve ramen, Fridays we serve pasta, and over the weekend we’re a tapas and cocktail bar. We live in Nederland, a small mountain community outside of Boulder, and we saw a ton of gaps in the restaurant industry up here. Mainly, a place to go out on a date night. Since the local community is fairly small we didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves into just one concept. Switching it up so most menus are only available one time a week keeps it feeling fresh for both our customers and our staff, we frequently have guests that will eat three meals in a row with us!

We really saw a need for a classic NY style bagel in Colorado, coming from Long Island I’ve met so many east coasters here that have that as their one complaint about Colorado. There’s plenty of east cost style pizza out here but not enough bagels. We are so proud to be filling that gap and have loyal customers drive from as far as Denver for our bagels.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We are proud to make all of our bagels (and almost all of our other products) from scratch. We started out at the Nederland Farmer’s Market, making about 500 bagels/week boiled in stock pots in our home kitchen. Shortly after we joined the market we had a bit of a following and were selling out of bagels within the hour every week. We quickly found a commissary kitchen- the old Johnson & Wales campus in Aurora. There, we were able to increase production significantly but the 1.5hr commute made it tricky to keep staff morale up. Overnight, we decided to pivot and start making all 1500 bagels we were making each week in our 110sq ft kitchen in our restaurant in Nederland. Juggling multiple concepts, production shifts and a catering company out of that kitchen has been ~an adventure~ and we’re currently looking for a larger production kitchen to grow into but we make it work!

What you’ll hear from most New Yorkers is that it must be the NY water that makes the bagels so good and we promise you it’s not. We think it’s in hand rolling each bagel instead of having a machine do it, and putting care into each one we create.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

A few months ago, we were headed into our first ‘Frozen Dead Guy Days’, a local festival celebrating a cryogenically frozen man who’s packed on dry ice in a tuff shed. It had been a few years since the event because of COVID so we didn’t know what to expect, but all of the locals were preparing us to sell out by 11am, be busier than we’ve ever been and prepare for anything. We WAY over prepared and lost a solid $5k on food that week and significantly overstaffed. I remember sending out payroll that week and realizing we had less than a few grand in the bank account- yiiiiikes. Thankfully our payment processor Toast had a loan program that funded us just enough to get through the next couple of rough weeks of snow/mud season and we’re in the busy summertime now!

Contact Info:

• Website: decentbagel.com
• Instagram: decent.bagel

Image Credits
First image (of me) Leah Black Photography