You Should know…Jacob Cohen

Jacob Cohen is a Jew and a bagel lover — two qualities that many would say are correlated. Cohen is also in the bagel business: He and his wife own Philadelphia’s Kismet Bagels. However, Cohen doesn’t run a traditionally Jewish bagel shop. In fact, Cohen and the Kismet team do bagels their own way, exemplified by the restaurant’s lox.

“I remember when we first opened our shop and I called our fish purveyor to talk shop,” Cohen said. “I told him how much lox we wanted to order and he said, ‘So you’re going to get Nova [lox],’ and I said, ‘No — pastrami.’”

The fish purveyor asked Cohen if this was just a one-time order for a special or another reason. Cohen said no. The purveyor told Cohen in no uncertain terms that the Kismet Bagels owner would call him back and change his decision within a week.

That was 2022.

“It will be three years in April since that call, and we still only have pastrami lox on our menu in our city shops,” Cohen said proudly.

Jacob and Alexandra Cohen now operate bagel shops in Fishtown, Rittenhouse Square, Reading Terminal Market and Lower Merion. They have a catering program and ship nationwide. Not bad for two bakers who learned the trade over the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This really just happened by accident,” Jacob said.

Growing up in Bala Cynwyd, Cohen’s first love was music. He was good at it, too: Cohen attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, a prestigious conservatory. Then, he worked as a full-time musician, even playing in Broadway shows. After he decided it was time for a change, he worked in real estate, becoming successful in that, too.

But, for some reason, he felt lost.

“By the time the pandemic hit, I just really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, and I was thinking about other jobs,” Cohen said.

The pandemic gave Cohen a chance to reassess, even though he admits that plan didn’t originally include bagels.

“When the quarantine started, I was like, ‘Oh, this is my chance to actually put the time into making my solo album that I always dreamed of doing,’ and I was hellbent on doing that,” he said. “Then, my wife started making bagels once for fun.”

At first, the bagels were just for them and frontline workers. Then they put up a post in a Facebook group and people asked if they could donate money to a cause in exchange for bagels. Quickly, what started as a hobby became a way for the Cohens to show support for the community at a crucial time. Before he knew it, Jacob Cohen was baking, too.

“I’m a natural early riser and my wife is not, and one morning she just turned to me and asked me to [start the baking process],” he said. “I fell in love with it.”

Even though Cohen said that prior to the pandemic his appreciation for food started and ended with eating it, he quickly found his groove with baking. He thinks that his lineage is largely to credit for this, as his mother and grandmother were “incredible bakers,” he said.

But creating the right bagel — one that would make waves across the Delaware Valley — took a lot more than a few practice sessions and good genes.

He experimented with ratios, knowing that he wanted to create a familiar but different product. The result is a Kismet bagel, which is unlike any other.

“We put whole wheat in every single bagel,” Cohen said as an example of what makes their bagels stand out. “That adds nutrition, but it also adds a little nuttiness and a little sweetness that I think is our signature.”

That being said, the current iteration of the Cohens’ bagels is not the final one.

“It sounds corny, but we are still working on our [recipe],” Cohen said. “I am incredibly proud of what we serve right now, but bread is a journey, and you’re dealing with all sorts of elements.”

He cited the recent cold snap as an example of what he meant. Because of the weather, the dough was not proofing like it should and the recipe had to be altered “on the fly,” he said. Other times, circumstances are less dire: One of the Cohens might just walk through the shop, bite into a bagel and think of a needed change.

“Something that is really important to both Alex and I is that, despite how large of a company we wish to become, we never want to sacrifice on quality and being hands-on with the product,” Cohen said.

The best feedback on these changes comes from customers.

“We will have customers say, ‘I’m from New York and I moved to Philly and you’re the only bagel I will eat,’” he said. “Listen, we’re Philly born and bred. We bleed green, but at the end of the day, everybody looks to New York as the lead for bagels, so that’s a high compliment.”

But Cohen made sure to note something else: New Yorkers may flock to Kismet, which means “fate” or “destiny,” but that’s because it offers something different.

“We don’t make New York bagels,” Cohen said. “We make Kismet bagels.”

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