Hand-Rolled, Kettle-Boiled & Baked Fresh.
Lehi, Utah's traditionally crafted NY style bagel drop.
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“Hard to get. Harder to forget.”
🥯 New bagels “Drop” every week. Preorder online, pick up Saturday in Lehi. See how it works
My name is Wuta “Boris” Beta, and after a little over two years of working on recipes while studying for my nursing degree online from home, I launched City Boy Bagels, a small batch bakery serving Lehi, Utah.
None of this was the plan. I just really like to cook, and began making sourdough bread to expand my cooking repertoire. I hated tossing out my starter discard, so I went looking for something, anything, to do with it. I found a recipe for sourdough discard bagels, and between my love of bagels and my curiosity about boiling dough before baking it, I had to try it.
My first batch was nothing to look at. But they tasted good, so I kept digging for ways to make them look as good as they tasted. That’s when I actually learned what a real New York style bagel is. Turns out, like most people, I’d always preferred a bagel shop bagel over a grocery store one. I just never knew why, or what actually went into making one properly.
So I set out to learn the craft for real. I practiced whenever I had free time, in between working toward my nursing degree and full-time employment, and batch by batch, it turned into City Boy Bagels.
My vision and goal is a full bagel shop, with bagel sandwiches and an assortment of schmears!
I’m the first-born American in a family that comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Growing up, our house was where people came. My parents opened our home to other Congolese immigrant families, and we’d host barbecues that lasted for hours. Food, laughter, real conversation. Nobody rushed out the door.
My parents taught me generosity by living it. Respect wasn’t just spoken, it was shown, in how much you gave, how you served, how you made someone feel welcome the second they walked in.
They also taught me to find joy in the journey, even through real hardship. I watched them build a life in a new country with genuine perseverance, and somehow never lose the joy in it.
This is the foundation of City Boy Bagels.
Bagels trace back to medieval Poland. Jewish communities there faced real antisemitic laws, and one of them banned Jews from baking bread in an oven. So they boiled the dough instead of baking it outright. Boiled dough wasn’t technically “baked bread,” so it got around the ban. That’s the real reason bagels are boiled at all. What started as a way around the law turned into a real craft: boiled first, baked second. It also held up longer and traveled well, which mattered a lot for families building a life with very little. Their round shape stood for life going on, and they were often given to new mothers to celebrate a birth.
When Jewish immigrants came to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they brought the bagel with them. Many settled in New York, and a lot of them got their start selling bagels off pushcarts on the street. That’s the real beginning of the “New York style” bagel. A craft passed down, carried by people building a life from nothing in a new country.
A “drop” is a scheduled ordering window where I post bagel packs for you to order online. What you pick up Saturday was mixed, boiled, and baked for you, specifically, that week.
Every drop is limited. Hard to get, harder to forget. That’s not just a tagline, it’s how we run things. Stay subscribed so you don’t miss the window.
Our Baker’s Half Dozen is 7 bagels, not 6. Our Baker’s Dozen is 13, not 12. Old-school bakers threw in an extra to make sure nobody walked away short. We kept the tradition.