“You brought me back to my childhood. I’m from Brooklyn, and I haven’t had a real bagel in over thirty years.” For Robb Abrams, founder of The Bagel Project, those words changed everything. He had spent months teaching himself to make bagels, but when an older woman returned to his very first farmers market booth with tears in her eyes, he suddenly understood that a personal quest might become something much more. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘This is what I need to do right now in this stage of my life.’”